I am helping a friend in Orange County, CA whose husband passed away last month. He was quite the tinkerer and their home has quite a few automations, some with no manual way to override the automations. I’m hopping there’s another HASS enthusiast in the area who would be willing to walk me through the important stuff. I’m able to read man pages and search forums, and eventually I’ll get there. But, right now, I don’t know what I don’t know and I’m just trying to get things stabilized and working before I have to leave in a week. After that, we’ll be looking at whether this will be something I could maintain for her remotely, or we just need to decommission HASS and simplify. We’re willing to pay for this person’s time. Thanks in advance.
Sorry to hear about your friend’s husband passing away. The situation of the home automation Tinkerer not being there anymore is something that makes us all uneasy. Those left behind will have a hard enough time without the worry of the homeassistant(HA). It may take time to find someone to teach you in the way you suggest.
I suspect most people have a setup with a mix of true automations and alot of things that are just remote ways of doing things. The automations should mostly take care of themselves for a while.
Here we mostly all like to tinker with our HA. Most problems come when we add new things and update stuff. Left alone the system should run for months just fine.
HA can be run for the large part from a distance. Occasionly might need to do a physical restart at power outlet or replace burnt out parts. Home automation tends to be a bit addictive and we all tend to spend many hours a week tweaking things and again breaking things, but again this is not necessary in a stable system. For us it’s a hobby.
Having said all that it will be a big undertaking by you in the longer term keeping it all running. A lot of frustration, time and money. Unless you think you can take it on I would say get rid of it all.
I would dread to leave this all for my wife. If things are wired in I suggest an electrician is by far the safest way.
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True. Before you start on HA, check your friend’s husband’s phone/tablet/computer (if you can) for smart home apps. A lot of lights and other devices can be scheduled without reference to HA and for someone simply living in the house there’s no way to tell the difference.
In the longer term, if you do decide to take it on, you might try pushing the installation in the direction of manual control. There’s a good blog post by the founder of HA here:
Among other things, he says: “Honestly, there are hardly any valid use cases for being able to control lights from your phone except for showing off.”
If the automations are becoming annoying you could disable all automations in home assistant by using Lovelace.
You should be able to get to Loveace by using the URL homeasistant.local:8123
Here is where you would find the automations
selecting automations brings you to this screen.
His naming may help you find which automation to turn off (by clicking on the blue button next to the automation.) or if you need to, click them all off and the home should behave manually.
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