It’s been 20 months exactly since I first heard about Home Assistant and installed it. It has a very steep learning curve, and I’m a guy who’s been a computer geek all my life, a Linux user, a hardware guy and yet still, it was really really hard. But boy is it addictive and powerful.
Having said that, it’s a spectacular open source project and I’m starting to feel comfortable with it. So here are a few things that are not strictly technical in nature but just things that new users might want to consider. There were things I wish I had known:
It’s not easy, it’s going to take you a while and try not to get frustrated. The experts on this site have been a great help, but only if you are willing to help yourself, answer their questions and do your own research.
Get the right hardware. I wouldn’t even get a Pi4 although with external SSD storage and decent memory I suppose it’s okay. But you can get an NUC, an N100 or i5 or something equivalent with M2 or SSD storage and it’s pretty cheap.
If you’re new, go with the HAOS install. Forget what people tell you about Proxmox, virtual machines, Docker containers etc. It will just cause you more trouble if you’re a newcomer. I am perfectly happy with my HAOS install. Updates are simple and there are lots of add-ins which extend the capability of Homeassistant and they are easier to install with HAOS.
Pick your coordinator hardware carefully. Coordinators are those USB sticks (or now network dongles) that talk to all your devices although certainly some of your devices may also connect through Wi-Fi But most things interface pretty well with ZHA (ZigBee Home Automation), Z-Wave or Zigbee2mqtt. Thread/Matter is the way home automation is going, but perhaps it’s not ready yet. I actually use Zigbee, Z2M and Z-Wave and I’m a big fan of Z-Wave for distance, configuration, reliability.
When you purchase your computer whether it’s an RPi or an NUC, do not plug your Zigbee coordinator stick directly into that machine’s USB ports. Get a powered USB 2 hub. Yes that’s right, a USB 2 hub. And when you plug in those coordinators, the USB sticks into the USB ports, don’t plug right into the hub, use long USB high quality extension cables for each and keep them as far away from the computer and wifi router and from each other as possible to avoid interference. You also want to make sure that the coordinators are located somewhere as central as possible so that it can reach all the devices in your house. This is easier if you get one of the new ethernet coordinators like the SLZB-06x models as it can be separate from your computer. If I was starting today, I’d go that way.
Despite what I just said, the coordinators will probably not reach everything on their own but that’s okay. ZHA Zwave and Zigbee2MQTT create their own mesh networks, each protocol creates its own network. That network can be extended by buying network extenders, and I have a couple, but almost any device like a switch or plug etc that is mains-powered full-time, not battery operated, acts as an extender and builds out your network. So visualize your home, use extenders were necessary and use powered devices when possible.
Always make sure you’re coordinator is updated to the newest well-tested and reviewed firmware, and that goes for your end devices as well. It’s nice when a device can upgrade over the air, they can’t all and that becomes a problem because you have to take them out and flash them sometimes it’s taking them apart.
Speaking of upgrades, the Homeassistant software is constantly being developed. I don’t know the numbers but it has to be one of the most active Open Source projects on the internet with a huge number of contributors. You are notified when updates are available. Read the release notes before installing. If they are major updates, wait a day or two or even for the .1 version and then check here to see if people are experiencing problems. Always make a backup before doing any sort of major upgrade.
Understand the difference between addons, integrations, devices and entities, and understand the importance of entities. It took me a while. A device is a piece of hardware, something you can touch. An entity is an ability that a piece of hardware has (that’s a generalization because things like a weather service, weather station can have a dozen or more entities, things like temperature, humidity etc. But the weather station is not in your home, you are connected to it through an integration).
These abilities (entities) can be hidden or exposed when you first add a new device like motion sensors, switches, plugs, LED controllers, car charging stations, TVs, phone, cameras etc. Until today, I thought a lot of my devices were broken as while the motion sensor might properly expose the motion entity or room presence entity or temperature entity, none of them showed me the battery percentage. Well it turns out when you add devices there are disabled entities but you can enable them and then use them to do other things. For instance I have a Reolink camera (that’s an actual device) added through the Reolink HA Integration, and there are about 25 different entities for the camera such as zoom and pan and focus and exposure and of course the streams is themselves. So make sure you check all those entities that are hidden by default, you may need to enable them.
Speaking of gotchas for newbies, the actual ZHA network information is not stored in Homeassistant but it’s stored on the actual ZigBee stick. While Z-Wave backs up the contents of the stick to disk with every shutdown, ZHA does not. So to the best of my knowledge, you can’t just go swapping out a new stick even if the same manufacturer, model and protocol and expecting to work. In my mind, that’s a real issue that needs fixing.
Homeassistant excels at allowing you to control things without going through the cloud… In other words if the internet was down, you could still have Homeassistant and all your devices up and running as long as your home network is up and running. So be careful of devices, especially no name Chinese devices because often information goes through the cloud which will slow things down, cause outages and of course has security implications. I have found everything can be done locally within my network. You may need the manufacturer’s app to do the initial setup of a new device, but after that, you want things to be local. Local means safe. Local means you have control.
At some point you will hear about devices connected through Wi-Fi, in other words the device does not natively support ZHA, Zigbee2mqtt or Z-Wave. That’s okay, but keep them to a minimum unless you want to end up with a lot of interference with your regular home 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi network. One of the most popular of the Wi-Fi devices are a brand called Shelly. They make high quality devices, relays and switches, and these allow you to use these inexpensive devices instead of buying smart switches, bypassing the dumb switch. It’s much cheaper and at times that’s all you need, but I’m a fan of smart switches. My philosophy is that if the network goes down, the switches still work.
Make sure you back up data to somewhere outside the machine running Home Assistant, Google drive, network attached storage etc. It’s so easy to do, there’s an automated backup routine coming in the 2025.1 update. Trust me, you will mess up, and resetting everything, repairing devices will be a nightmare. Having a backup, you can be back up and running in 5 minutes. And test your backups.
Where you are connecting to your home network, for instance assuming your HAOS machine is part of your home network, or you have Wi-Fi or wired devices being controlled, it’s much easier to have them use static IPs. Of course for your actual HAOS computer, It should absolutely be wired by ethernet to your network on its own static IP.
Understand the difference between automations, scenes, scripts and blueprints. It took me a long time, but that’s where HA gets useful. I would strongly suggest you find a guy named Blacky (Blackshome) who is very active in the community forums and has some complex configurable automations that will make you look like a pro. And donate to him.
Scripts don’t run on their own, they get called. Scripts are something you can call from automations quite easily. Scripts are just reusable code.
Homeassistant wouldn’t be complete without having an app for Android or iOS. It’s called the Companion app. Go to the app’s settings, there’s an extra settings sub-menu when using the Companion app which contains settings for the Companion app itself. Understand what they are and particularly understand what the entities are that you can expose so that you can do cool things like geolocating, triggering automations based on who is home or away etc.
17… Voice integration is an emerging, ever-changing crazy world. Leave it alone for 6 months. You have enough to learn, and it’s evolving.
Strange as it seems, part of the success of your project will depend on the spouse factor. Test things before you implement them. Buy pretty devices, do integrations and automations that are helpful for your spouse. Don’t create lighting automation without buying proper smart switches that allow lights to turn on and off even if Homeassistant has crashed.
Wall tablets are great. I have one by my front door with the alarm panel (Alarmo) on the main screen but cameras, weather, etc. as well. But don’t buy Amazon tablets. Just don’t. I love the experience I’ve had with the Lenovo line. I have an M9. It does battery cycling to keep the battery healthy and prevent over-heating.
I’m also a big fan of a paid product called fully kiosk browser. It runs as an Android app on your dedicated tablet (replaces the Companion app) giving you all sorts of capabilities to customize and lock it up so that it’s running in what many call kiosk mode. I think it’s about $12 for a lifetime purchase and I highly recommend it. What’s very cool is you can access all the settings sitting at your computer through home assistant, remotely administering it.
Support Nabu Casa. They are integral to the support and success of the project. For remote access, the Nabu Casa cloud is extremely reliable, easy to use, and the annual fee is very inexpensive. The annual fee supports salaries for their full-time staff.
Nice write-up, I agree with everything 100% except this statement above (50%). It is absolutely correct for someone who has not much computer knowledge and an all-in-one router, however If anyone goes the HA route I would suggest instead they get a WIRED (non-wireless) router (they are inexpensive) and then utilize wireless access points throughout your location, hard-wired to that router and placed in strategic spots. Although it is a hassle it will most definately allow you both much better WiFi coverage - much faster speeds - and opens you up to being able to utilize an almost unlimited number of devices - and you won’t then have to bother with the extra hops and hassle of ZigBoo or ZWave dongles. If you shoose to leave your networkas it is, then fine and ZiGBoo or Z-Wave may be a good option. To each his/her own.
As a huge proponent of Shelly, I do have to mention they also have a line of Bluetooth devices (their BLU line) which have a battery life of 5 YEARS that still connect to HA with instantly - through any Gen 2 Shelly relay you may have installed which can also act as a bluetooth gateway. As someone who has bought into the Shelly paradigm, old fashioned switches still look and act as they did before but can seamlessly also be controlled remotely from HA - and with numerous Shelly devices in my home, I have enabled them to acting as gateways for the various BLU devices - so any BLU device message to HA is almost 100% guaranteed to get through as the BLU device is paired with several powered Shelly devices that are already listening. As an example of how good the Shelly BLU line of devices are - how crazy is this - I ordered some and as soon as they were dropped at my front door I found out about them by HA telling me it found a new device - before I even knew about the delivery or could check my mail…!
Thank you for your reply. I did notice a couple of months ago that Shelly now has some zigbee devices. So far I only have their relays for things like exhaust fans and a dimmer for one of those 1 to 10 volt lights. I agree with you about the networking stuff. Actually this year I scrapped my conventional router and went to an Omada switch, wired router and three of their wireless access points. What a game changer. It’s another learning curve as I struggle with vlans and the like but it’s also a lot of fun.
Agreed. I went the “Omada” route so I could manage it all under one UI. I had also turned on online (cloud) network access to my omada controller, but when I realized they (meaning their servers) were in China I quickly disabled that. Then about a year later supposedly they moved their HQ out of China just for that reason. Now however, there is talk about TP-Link being banned in the US but if they have 65% of the home networking equipment as I have read, then I think that is going probably not going to happen. It could be that sales of new equipment in the US is very restricted or some other such arrangement…
“old fashioned switches still look and act as they did before”
Does that mean that Up is ALWAYS ON and Down is ALWAYS OFF, or does that differ depending upon the last state of the shelly device?
I have been thinking about installing a few of these to try out, but if the original switch position doesn’t hold, my spouse approval factor will be less than zero!
Yes. Instead of asking beforehand, maybe try it on one switch and see what the feedback really is? Because if you think about it, someone who is not into home automation may complain about the concept if told - because they think it may require some thought, but if you think about it, a person only reaches for a switch when they want to change the state - so it doesn’t matter the position, they just change it without even having to think about it because they are reaching for it.
My spouse was 100% against any home automation. I changed things very slowly and tried very hard to not change another thing until everything was working as flawlessly as possible… so My WAF as soon as there was one issue went to zero but it did still move upward. Also bring up the fact that your power bills will go down etc.
The only other option you have in your situation is to just give up most of the home automation - or go aganst the grain briefly to see what is and what is not really acceptable… ?
Not exactly…
Toggle Switch - Set Shelly device to be “Toggle” switch. Act as a flip switch with one state for “ON” and one state for “OFF”.
For the toggle switch option, up is on and down is off, but if the switch is down (and off), and you turn it on with an automation, it will be powered on, but the physical switch remains in the down position. To turn it off again locally you need to first flip the switch up and then back down. Same thing in reverse - if the switch is up (on) and an automation turns it off, the switch is still up and to turn it back on locally you need to first flip it down and then back up.
Using it as a toggle is actually much more confusing than using it Edge Mode (all of mine are using Edge Mode):
Edge Switch - Set Shelly device to be “Edge” switch. Changes state on every hit.
The spouse approval is not an issue at all. If you walk into a room and the light/fan is off and you want to turn it on, you just flip the switch - it doesn’t matter whether it’s up or down, at least with standard switches that have a toggle sticking out of the outlet. If an automation changes the state, on or off can be either up or down. It only takes a few times before it’s second nature to just change the position regardless of up or down.
I don’t have any, but I believe Decora rocker switches are another matter because you can’t ‘feel’ or see the position of the switch, so out of habit you want to press on the top to turn it on, but if the actual switch was already on (up) and turned off by an automation, pressing it up won’t do anything and you’ll need to press a second time (down). Maybe someone using a Shelly with a rocker Decora switch and confirm this. I think the solution here would be to switch out the Decora rocker to a Decora momentary switch and set the Shelly to Momentary.
I don’t have any of those either that I can think of, and I do have Leviton Decora switches - one is a toggle on/off, the model D215S and the other is one of their dimmer switches, the D26HD. In both cases if the switch shows the light is turned off, and the light is turned on remotely, then the switch automatically shows the light as being on - and visa versa, if the switch shows the light is turned on, and the light is turned off remotely, then the switch automativally shows the light as being off. One thing I LOVE about Decora also, is both of them support not only the Leviton Decora integration but also matter, and I have switched both of them to using Matter instead. There was a slight delay with the Leviton Decora integration because it was cloud based, but when I switched over to Matter the response is instant. (Also even if you are using matter, the Decora app (which still goes through the cloud) will still show the state correctly as well as allow control of the switch with no issue.) Look in these forums where I discuss the D26HD in great detail (how to set it up and possibly installation hiccups (of which there are few), etc.).
Since I dug so deeply into this with Decora, I discovered also that (and this is true I believe of all matter devices), if your HA instance is on a different vlan (subnet) than the device, you need to turn on mDNS repeating across vlans to allow discovey of the device from HA. This is not true of any of my other devices so I THINK this is specific to Matter. I discuss this elsewhere in these forums as well. Look under my name and/or D26HD and D215S to find those conversations -
I already have dozens and dozens of home automations, and by using physical smart switches, WAF is fine.
The ones I want to automate are for induction heaters where it is NOT inherently obvious whether the device is on or off. I am using “decora” type manual switches now and there is CLEARLY an on/off to them.
So, my conclusion (as it was before I got a small ray of hope from this original post) is that Shelly devices aren’t the answer for my situation.
Harry I agree with you on all the points that I have experienced myself. I am however surprised that you relegated wi-fi devices to #12.
Wi-Fi devices are easily available in main street retailers, and I believe that is where most non-techie users are likely to start … well before they ever hear of zigbee or z-wave - and so I would place it a lot higher up.
I believe the same basic problem applies to wi-fi and zigbee (i haven’t tried z-wave); which is that we cannot see it, and so people (and all salespeople) treat it like magic … install the latest expensive router and it will all “just work”.
But once you get the hang of it, use wired connections for everything that is convenient to do so, deploy enough WAPs or routers, consider the radio channels and interference sources (including neighbours using the same channel) … it becomes quite manageable.
I disagree with this, both because WAPs are no longer common (they have been replaced with “mesh” systems so manufacturers sell 3 at a time, instead of single add-on WAPs) and because you will probably end up with a WAP next to your router anyway. The important thing is to do some planning beforehand and not to assume that one wi-fi router at your internet entry point will magically cover your whole house.
Interesting, I did not realize - if you are talking about a generic one that may well be the case, but I ended up going the TO-Link Omada route which allows me to control all the networking devices under one UI and they are built to interface semlessly together (so of course I only pay attention to that brand - similar to the Unifi paradigm but less expensive).
It was a long learning curve but it was well worth it and I would never look back. Not sure about Unifi but I had an old all-in-one router, changed it to WAP mode only and plugged it into a wired (not wireless) Omada router, then later bought a couple of their WAP’s, grew it that way. So the expense was not bad at all - especially as I did it over time…
Maybe I’m just getting cynical in my old age, but my real issue is with marketing. The emphasis seems to have changed from product features to “marketing” and locking customers into their brand. “Mesh” is essentially just a wi-fi router plus additional Wi-fi access points … but the phrasing used by marketing departments make subtle implications and gives the impression that you can’t mix and match to get the same result. In the same way that I have yet to see any Wi-Fi AP spec sheet which even suggests that there is any physical limit to the number of concurrent wi-fi connections.
Update: OMG, I just read TP-Link’s “What is Mesh WiFi?” page, It continually compares mesh with a single all-in-one router (which is favourable) - but fails to mention the alternative to mesh which is multiple conventional WAPs linked by wired ethernet (which would be much faster and with double the wi-fi coverage). Their section on Range Extenders is based on the lie that each extender is a different network (you should use different channels but the same SSID so your devices see it as the same network). TP-Link have been supplying business wi-fi systems for years, and they know this. Notable for its cherry-picked “facts” and all the things they failed to mention.
Reading the promotional pages for Wi-fi 6 I was struck by the impression that it is magic with no actual engineering to back up the claims and pretty pictures. How, for instance, does Wi-fi 6 get super-fast communication … with your existing devices ? And how useful will it actually be until you have upgraded all to new wi-fi 6 devices … which weren’t on the market then ? Marketing people should be first against the wall when the revolution comes … as suggested by Douglas Adams somewhere in HHGTTG.
Personally, I prefer to be able to mix and match. Like you, I changed my old all-in-one router to AP mode when I bought a new wi-fi router (an ASUS because of 3rd party open source firmware, which I may change to after the warranty period). It does the job well for myself and my partner in our small apartment. As a matter of principle, and after hearing horror stories, I try to avoid
getting locked in to one brand
cloud based
corporate scale solution
KruseLuds, I am curious about your insistence on a wired (not wireless) router. What is the difference, apart from extra cost to buy separate router and WAP boxes ? Is it just because in your individual situation you have the router located next to your internet entry point, and that isn’t a good place for a Wi-Fi Access Point ?
My thinking may be wrong but any all in one device tends to not do each of the things really really well and they make compromises… I prefer a device dedicated to each function - in my case there are a large number of devices and I prefer the router to do the routing instead of having to also handle all of the work going into supporting the wireless connections. I actually have gone through a few different wired router models before settling upon the current one due to the heavy duty vpn processing needed to keep my 10 client vpn tunnels open and pooled together for internet access for a large number of the devices.
I agree that there is no real limit to the number of Wireless devices as they can be routed to additional VLANS which make it so that you don’t even run out of IP addresses - but the wireless routers that can handle alot of the wireless traffic - the ones that are very good - cost buckets of money - and for the same price you can probably get a great wired router and several WAPs - which if you need further range can be separated far away from each otrher connected by ethernet. If there is no need to a wider physical footprint for a network then I agree maybe an expensive all in one would do the trick.
Also I find it is much more fun - and easier - to manage everything under one UI and that also allows the WAPS to work intelligently together
Ah, KruseLuds, I see now you are thinking from a business perspective, and yes at that scale, especially when supporting multiple sites, separate specialist devices are definitely worthwhile, and the cost justified. VPNs in particular require a lot of computations for encryption which will benefit from a co-processor with specialised firmware.
