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
Thanks all, I’ve been busy planning a wedding and overseas for many months so did not see all the replies until now. Just by way of an update, HA lost 14 of my 16 integrated lights while I was away. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about. 4 of them are Tuya, the rest are Nanoleaf essentials. Tuya bulbs are now solved in that there was an integration change that made tuya devices native to HA - annoying but they work a lot better now - this was a big part of the issue. The Nanoleaf ones I am repairing but one of them won’t re-pair. And some of the Nanoleaf are still working (all on same firmware).
The Mrs is not happy cause I can’t even set our lounge up until I get this one bulb fixed (info here). So we shall see. But this is the kind of thing I don’t expect. Thanks.
I don’t mean this in a bad way: you just went about it the wrong way and/or got devices that are not reliable when you integrate them.
You can blame HA for that, which might seem the obvious and if you would dig a little deeper into it you might find out that HA can be very useful, versatile and reliable.
HA is not perfect, but it is pretty good. As far as light bulbs are concerned my experience is that Zigbee bulbs perform better than Wifi bulbs. It may be because Zigbee is a mesh network while wifi is always directly between the device and the router.
That’s why I used “and/or” in my sentence and I should have added “probably might” as well.
Every now and then, there are threads about users that share that they will stop using HA because they are fed up for various reasons and most of the times blame the software for it.
As you can see from my profile, my knowledge in home automation was 0 (zero) but my stubbornness and perseverance were the cause to stick with it.
Also, I went very slow with adding new things so I would learn the basics and not get overwhelmed by various issues.
My goal was not to have a dashboard to control stuff but to make the place smart as much as possible.
Instead of threatening/announcing/… to step away, and not just do it without sharing this to the community, asking for help by sharing where things go wrong and as much info as possible would be more satisfying.
Many long time users who help out regularly even don’t read those threads anymore with those “threats” because they know too that it’s not HA.
Yes, obviously the manufacturer app will currently work better than the HA integration, although this is not always the case. There’s plenty of posts here and on the general internet where manufacturers slapped on the matter certification, only for their direct customers to be let down.
I get it - you’re disappointed and I don’t blame you. HA should be (and is) better than your current experience, but some things just take time to get working “just right”.
This goes double for Matter which, despite the hype, has not honestly lived up to its promise. Don’t get me wrong - it’s getting better, but is absolutely not at the level of the older protocols like Z-Wave, Zigbee or Wifi.
Being told you spent good money on something that isn’t fully developed can be hard (yeesh - those Nanoleaf bulbs are at 20 a pop? Seriously?). For now I would suggest to keep them on the manufacturer app if you think it’s more stable. Either that or relegate them to the drawer of shame we all won’t admit to owning.
Just know that your experience (personal as it may seem) is an outlier. You can get decent supported replacements using Zigbee or Wifi at half the price, then switch back when the time is right. Do your homework and look for feedback in these forums first, and your experience with HA should improve greatly.
I would not put WiFi in that category.
WiFi is just a transport protocol. It says nothing about how the communication should actually happen, so you end up with proprietary closed protocols and cloud server locked ones.
I have a number of friends that know HA very well. I also have rather a lot of IT experience. My commentary is open and honest and I’m getting the responses I wanted. Don’t think I need to justify it but I understand some people have typed this before without having maybe the right effort or similar. Since you raise it, my goal was simply to have some lights that helped with my concussion symptoms which were causing severe sensititvity to light which was worse than the broken bones or severe muscle tissue issues I got from the accident. Anyway, despite being in IT for a long time now, I never actually wanted home automation because I felt it would be clunky and things would go wrong all the time resulting in a reduced experience than everyday lighting. But it’s done now, we shall see where it lands. Thanks for trying to help.
Anyway, to fault find the light that wouldn’t add any more (or would half add then drop out) I installed another instance of home assistant on the same hardware. It now adds again, which seems to prove it is HA software related, be it buggy drivers or otherwise (though remember this happened across different protocols and brands) so I tend to think it’s something more fundamental about HA rather than e.g. Thread / Matter. I have found so far Thread / Matter to be quite excellent actually. There is also a chance it’s the relationship between the two. So I’m just going to use this second instance now, if it happens again, I’ll need to turn debug logging on I suppose as there did not seem to be any logs this time round.
Thanks, yes I’m aware it’s early days for that. It’s been quite excellent, though it isn’t lost on me the somewhat conflicting opinions on what is good and not even in this one topic. So it’s all a bit individual, hopefully the technology can get the HA community past that at some point.
(that’s other people computers!) 
