This is a sad thread to write but I’m thinking of dropping home assistant. Ultimately it doesn’t work consistently enough which means it’s not wife or guest friendly. I run my tiny setup on a pi5 with 8g. Only 1 gig memory is in use. I have the official hardware for thread which works very well when it works. Specifically:
Devices inexplicably drop after a power outage (Goldair / Arlec Tuya devices mainly).
Some of these devices are unable to be deleted or re-added and are technically correct and intermittently start working or stop working.
All these devices work fine in their official apps.
After today’s update my heater no longer works.
Nanoleaf thread has been pretty awesome but a reboot of the pi ALWAYS requires me to reload the thread firmware which is not annoying.
I can see these issues are not a lot given the grand amount of work to get to here, but they are core to the value of the product when you can’t use your lights they do become bigger than just a few technical issues.
Something I haven’t worked out is maybe I can submit logs somewhere and get these issues resolved but I suspect unofficial integrations like Goldie are never going to be guaranteed right?
So probably I need to use an Apple TV as a thread border router, and standardise on thread or z-wave, use home kit and wait a few years i guess.
I have only been using HA for about 3 weeks so I’m not particularly invested in it anyway but it seemed like the perfect solution.
You have been using HA for 3 weeks and are telling others, who have been using it for years, that HA is a problem ?
I understand your frustrations but give it more time. HA works fine for me
@marshalleq, I’ve been using Home Assistant for a while now and I absolutely love it. I run into problems now and then and I’ve gotten very frustrated at times, but I’ve always been able to find solutions online. This community and others are very supportive. I’ve got over 100 devices on my system and have created over 100 automations to do all sorts of cool things. When I’ve had issues with devices, it’s sometimes a problem with the company that made the device or the integration but it’s usually my lack of experience and knowledge. There are often several ways to connect devices. For example, for Zigbee devices, you can use the Zigbee Home Automation integration or the open-source project Zigbee2MQTT. The open-source project is more complicated to get set up, but it supports more devices and has a bit more flexibility. When purchasing devices, be sure to that you read comments online to look for people who have made it work successfully with Home Assistant. Often people will comment on how they got it to work.
You do have to be a bit of a tinkerer to use Home Assistant. It’s a platform that allows you to do lots of things but you have to enjoy playing around a bit to get things to work. Sometimes this gets fairly technical, but if you have patience and an interest in learning new things, it can be a very rewarding experience.
For me, this has become a hobby. I don’t mind a little challenge and enjoy learning new things to do something new with my home.
Give it a chance, post your problems here and you’ll be surprised that you are probably not the first person to run into the issue you are having.
Good Luck!
I see HA as customizing off the shelf home automation products + custom devices, which is your choice to use it or not. I generally went with most often praised devices to minimize my frustrations given I have small amount time.
I had the same reaction. Didn’t understand how it worked. Days of frustration and almost there to revert back to Domoticz…
But tried and tried and suddenly i understand the way how it worked. Step by step created automations and now Moy house is full automated. 100% boyfriend friendly and even guest friendly.
Give it time. Ask the community for help.
Here is my HA config… Read it, see the many things you can do. And you gonna live it!!
As mentioned earlier in the thread praised devices are an advantage.
Some vendors just sell the product and give no support. Tuya devices are often in this category.
Support is a good documentation and after-sale updates of firmware and apps and an updated FAQ.
I got carried away and installed lots of HACS, wrote YAML that would crash my system, I had no experience on a RPi, Linux, YAML, Jinja
I’m so glad I stuck with it, I had been looking at Home assistant for over a year before plucking up the courage, and it took a lot of weekends of working on it, and twice as many weekends reading this forum before I started too gain confidence.
I now have an awesome system (horrible UI, but great automated house)
A warm tip, even HA supports many thousand integrations/devices, they are not the same. Beside a quality scale you also find Information if things do actually work locally or if the manufacture actually has total control of the devices you payed for because they force communication with their cloud (that’s other people computers!)
So if you do your due diligence, you avoid devices/integrations that are not local and if you prefer top notch HA experience you will stick to local push with Platinum Quality
(that’s other people computers!) 
