as others have stated I never update on the first release of the month.
I read the breaking changes and watch the forum release thread to see what issues others are having to know if they might affect me.
If there doesn’t seem to be anything like that then I might wait a week or two and then update. If there are issues that might affect me then I watch to see if those issues are resolved before I update.
I don’t remember the last time I’ve been affected negatively by a monthly update.
The time of the update is not that important.
What is important is to read the breaking changes and look at the logs after the first restart to see if there are some warnings or errors.
Most instability comes from ignored breaking changes.
Remember this goes for core, addons and integrations.
Excellent feedback by everyone. For new users best time to put effort for updates is around release xxxx.3 (the 3rd update of every month) or the 3rd week of every month (i.e. usually any time between releases xxxx.3 and xxxx.6). It is the time when you absolutely read breaking changes then update. If none of the breaking changes affect you it is safe to update.
On the first Wednesday of the month, you’ll get a new release of HA, year.month.0.
Next one, on the 6th of September will be 2023.9.0
Even if it was tested by volunteers like me in beta for a week, it may contain some bugs.
Fortunately, HA is a very active community, devs are most of the time very responsive to correct the bugs and you can find help here for your issues.
Tipically, in a month, there are 3 or 4 releases (sometimes up to 8 like December 2022)
So, unless you’re very interrested in a new feature of the 2023.9.0, you can wait for the end of the month to upgrade to a more stable version, like 2023.8.3 now but maybe 2023.8.4 in a week.
If you want to see what a release is changing, fixing, look at
You’ll also see there that a new monthly release comes with a beautiful release note, like this one for August
It is always good to read it, especially the “Breaking changes” section
So honest opinion. How often do people find their systems broken within the year?
Zero for me.
On year 3 on my current install with zero major issues.
And how about maintenance? Able to walk way from it for 6 months without issue?
I was away from one of my installs for ~3 years due to travel limitations over last few years, and that one had issues only because 2 things:
(a) extended power outages knocked down the laptop as server running HAOS… and I could not bring the laptop back via Wake on LAN - had to ask a friend to power up the laptop
(b) one cloud-dependent smart device changed its api and I couldn’t get the token updated without physical presence at the smart device to press some buttons.
So I learned my lesson… and avoid could-dependent smart devices since.
And to be clear, would not fault HA for either of those.
That said, I do spend time on HA over the years… but that’s because I keep (and enjoy) tweaking things… so a lot of self-induced maintenances; not because HA would break by itself and would require constant upkeep.
Much the same here - power outages and internet outages. The router is more fragile than HA is (ie not very), but I have several cloud-dependent integrations, so there are usually knock on effects.
Tell me about it! 
Great to hear this feedback.
I’m attempting to run only on HA for the next month to see how it works.
I managed after a couple weeks to have it in a place where it just runs now.
My old system is in shutdown for now.
So how is your z-wave setup these days? Is it some kind of USB dongle for z-wave?
I had the impression that Homeseer’s z-wave implementation is relatively solid. What’s your take?
I have around 30 z-wave devices that run 100 percent of the time.
I have 5 Zigbee devices.
Both are USB sticks.
As for everything else, Lutron Caseta and RA2.
I would never know. Home Assistant is one of my few hobbies and to not touch it for 6 months I would have to be in a hospital or worse 
There were absolutely no issues with Home Assistant itself since 2018 and version 0.64.
The major problem I encountered was with the SD card in my Raspberry Pi, which became corrupted. I suspect this was due to the high volume of read and write operations in the Home Assistant database. To address this, I migrated to using MariaDB on my NAS, and I haven’t experienced any issues since.
Furthermore, this transition is just the initial phase of a larger project. My goal is to establish a Home Assistant cluster with high availability. The plan is to have a standby Raspberry Pi that remains idle but automatically activates if the primary one becomes unresponsive or fails. This setup ensures no data loss, as the information will seamlessly continue to be stored in the NAS database where the previous instance left off.
Look on the forum for HAHA. (high availability home assistant)
Thanks, I already did but I’m an old school nerd and runs the Core version for 6 years+.
I don’t like the docker way.
Moreover, as Miley said: “the journey is usually the part that you remember anyways”.
I’d like to learn new things from the project 
Me too, but docker got me…