Hi everyone! What are the pros and cons of installing Home Assistant OS, or container on a laptop? Share your experience.
I think a quick search of the forum will give you a pretty good overview of general pros/cons. That being said, I think using an old laptop for HA is a great use for antiquated hardware and is exactly what I’m currently using (a decade old budget laptop that was sitting on a shelf). The battery doubles as a built-in UPS which I’ve found pretty handy and having a screen and keyboard built-in for when things inevitably go sideways and you have to jump into the cli is convenient. Only real con in my case is just that it’s an old CPU, so for instance ESPHome compiles are slow (but that’s also not THAT frequent, so not really an issue except when I’m debugging a project).
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The only problem I’ve heard is the battery dying / exploding because it’s always turned on and charging, bringing down the house in a year…
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Laptop VS PC. No difference
Issues come when you get to storage peripherals. Adding storage, memory or cards may be an issue but really depends on PC and laptop.
Battery thing can be a concern but no different than many business use case where laptop sits on dock or plugged into charger most of day
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I can’t imagine the battery will be in good shape. If either the battery has been charged multiple times or left a long time and over discharged the cell will likely provide poor performance or at higher risk of that fire. I suggest removing the battery.
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The motherboard handles the battery, so it’s only charging when needed which is basically never. As @tmjpugh mentioned, it’s no different than most use-cases where a laptop is always plugged in.
Of course the original battery was completely shot; I replaced it for a few bucks for the UPS benefit.
Only laptops in the last 10 years or so… Pre LI batteries and crap tech chargers were a big problem, probably less now.
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Good that you replaced the battery. For a few bucks doesn’t sound as reassuring. Lithium cells do have a higher self discharge rate if kept close to max charge. It will have a small charge / discharge cycle. You may be able to use a smart plug to keep it charged at lower level if the battery can be setup as a sensor.
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Ummm, nope.
That is not the motherboard ‘handling’ the battery. That is the motherboard keeping the battery full. That ain’t good. It will bloat/expand. You need battery management. Of course, that just increases the life. It does not fix the issue.
It’ll probably last a long while. But it will fail!
What are your plans for that?
As I said, the motherboard is handling this (at least in my case). I can look at the history for the battery status and see this clearly (it’s charged twice in the last week for ~30 minutes each time):
How did you deal with the problem of power out long enough for battery to discharge and device turns off. Then when power comes back on HA doesn’t turn back on.
Well, there you have it. All good.
Personally, I’d be concerned for the future. Will that laptop run on power without a battery? If so, pull it and get a UPS.
That’s actually a good point I kind of forgot about because we really never have power outages (and the time or two a year is usually a few seconds while something automatically resets with the utility). I could definitely see that being an issue if someone had frequent outages.
In my case, I have an automation to gracefully shutdown HA if the battery gets low enough. Obviously requires manual intervention to get it back on. I’ve never actually had a chance to test that out, since the battery lasts a few hours and we’ve never had an outage longer than that since I set it up.
One thing I have seen occasionally on these forums is requests for help in getting the screen to go to sleep.
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Can you send a Wake on lan to the device remotely? That might do it.
I used my vpn to ssh in to my PIhole and sent the wol packet from there.
Is it worth it?!?!
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Long term. PC + UPS is better
Short term. If you’re just starting with HA it is fine. I wouldn’t recommend buying a new unit but if you have an unused laptop it is perfect to start.
Most laptops, just like desktops, do have the option in the BIOS to set power behavior after power-out.
So check it and set to ‘always on’ 
(From a laptop user with battery removed and using an external UPS instead; it also powers my NAS and POE switch 
)
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It is also good to take a look at noise levels (depending on where it stands) and the power usage of your laptop. HA runs 24/7 and likely for years on end. A NUC or RPi might run significantly lower power and noise. That my make up for a nice chunk of the investment in a couple of years of use.
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