Questions about switching from a Desktop-PC with VirtualBox to HA Green

Installation
1

I am currently running Home Assistant on a desktop PC (an old 5K iMac with Ubuntu) inside VirtualBox. However, I am considering switching to Home Assistant Green.

Reasons for Switching:

  • The PC is big, HA Green is small.
  • The PC consumes 25–28W, even in power-saving mode, with most of its 8 cores sitting idle (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, etc., are disabled). This results in an annual power cost of around €80.
  • HA Green only uses up to 3W, meaning I would save at least €70 per year on electricity. While the cost savings aren’t my main concern, it’s still nice to avoid unnecessary expenses.

My Current HA Setup:

Would it be possible to just import my HA configuration into the Green or would I have to install everything again?

Would there be any negatives in switching? I dedicated 2 Cores and 8GB of RAM for HA in VirtualBox. I think the CPU-Power and RAM of the green should be sufficient. HA system shows around 4% CPU usage and 1.274,3 MiB RAM usage.

Could Home Assistant’s response times be slower or could there be other performance issues after switching?

2

A backup of HA on iMac and a restore on the he HA green should do the trick with moving.
The only thing you might notice a difference on is the voice boxes, if you run it locally, sinc a HA green is slower.
If it is NabuCasa run, then you should not notice anything.

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If you run your voice assistans locally (stt) yes! In case you use (nabu casa) cloud it shouldn’t make any noticable difference :arrows_clockwise:

The rest looks easy to migrate with the ha backup function… But I’m not certain how the 52 sky connected devices migrate, they might need to be onboarded again :person_shrugging:

4

My first suggestion would be to switch to a more efficient (modern-ish) small form-factor PC, even if it’s from the used market.
I’m running my install on a used Dell gaming laptop with pretty beefy specs & a dedicated GPU and “only” averaging 20W with power save options. You should easily be able to go below that with something more modest.

My second suggestion is - if you’re going smaller, might as well plan for future expansion. The Pi5 will beat the snot out of a Green, obviously at a greater expense and an increased average wattage. On a positive note, even if you outgrow the Pi5 eventually, you will still be able to repurpose it for other duties - the Green is a bit more limited in that regard.

5

Thanks for the tips. Encouraged me to buy the Green.

Even if it turns out the Green doesn’t fully meet my needs, it could still serve as a backup HA Server in case my PC fails.

I’ve also decided to switch from ZHA to Z2M with the Green, as ZHA doesn’t fully support all my devices, such as HUE Gradient lightstrips and some Green Power devices. Since I’ll have to re-pair all my Zigbee devices anyway, this seems like the right time to make the change.

That opens another question since Z2M runs independently from HA, but Green should be able to handle that anyway?

6

There is a Z2M add-on, so yes.

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Result:

I bought the HA Green, and the setup was seamless using a backup from my old HA server. After restoring the backup, all my automations and devices from various integrations worked instantly on Green.

All but the zigbee devices, because I wanted to switch from zha to z2m I did not connected the skyconnect stick to the Green. In hindsight, it would have been interesting to test whether ZHA and the Zigbee devices would have worked just as instantly on the new HA Green setup.

Since I wanted to transition gradually from the old to the new server, I purchased a new Zigbee controller (SLZB-06). Initially, I planned to switch from ZHA (old server) to Z2M (HA Green) step by step. However, connecting all my Zigbee devices with z2m was so easy that I ended up migrating everything within a few hours. Pairing worked significantly better with Z2M, most devices paired on the first attempt, whereas in ZHA, it often took multiple tries. I’m not sure if Z2M has a better pairing mechanism or if the SLZB-06 is simply superior to the SkyConnect.

The only challenge was connecting the SLZB-06. I initially wanted to use it via USB, but after two hours of troubleshooting, it became clear that the SLZB-06 does not work in USB mode with HA Green due to requiring special USB drivers. In the end, I set it up via Ethernet, which works perfectly, though it required an additional Ethernet cable and a USB power adapter.

According to my smart plug, HA Green consumes an average of 1.1W. Thats around 25-27W less than my old HA server and there seems to be no difference in speed or reaction times. CPU-Usage of the Green is around 3%, RAM usage 40%.

ZHA vs. Z2M:

I am very pleased with Z2M. It seems more stable than ZHA and supports additional features on some devices. For example, I can now use two Green Power devices (old Hue Tap) without issues, whereas ZHA does not support them. Additionally, I can set gradient colors on my Hue Gradient Lightstrip, whereas ZHA only allowed a single color and z2m provides some other effects like candle or fireplace (at least for some hue devices) that I knew from the hue app but vanished after dumping hue and connecting the devices via zigbee.

Even though I installed ZHA-tools on my old HA server, ZHA never discovered updates for any of my Zigbee devices. In contrast, Z2M immediately found updates for all my devices, including some critical updates for my window covers that supposedly improve battery efficiency. Some updates took hours to install, but now all my devices are running the latest firmware, and some seem to perform better as a result.

The only thing that slightly bothers me is that HA still displays the SkyConnect stick on the hardware page, even though it’s not connected and it cannot be removed. It seems to be a leftover from the restored backup.

Conclusion:
Switching to HA Green was quick and straightforward. The most time-consuming challenges were dealing with the unexpected USB issues of the new device (SLZB-06, that is working good otherwise) and pairing over 50 Zigbee devices.

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