Home Assistant; Home Automation (Case Study)

Software & Applications
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Hi Everyone!

We’re back with another case study. Today, we’re featuring @Zack-45Drives and his exploration of the very popular Home Assistant application.

Here’s his experience as he deployed it for his homelab, which we hope you’ll find valuable if you’ve never used it before, or you’re just beginning to explore its function. As always, if you have any questions for us or for Zack, please do not hesitate to drop them below for us to answer.

Why I chose Home Assistant
by Zack Perry

Zack
Zack1920×1280 138 KB

Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform that focuses on privacy and local control.

I chose Home Assistant to test and use at home because, after setting up Plex, Google Home, two different types of cameras for home security it was just getting too cumbersome to go to a different app for everything. With Home Assistant I was able to use a single app/web UI to handle all of these in one centralized space — this made things very convenient.

I chose Home assistant is because I had an “application zoo”. In other words, I had a bunch of different applications and services, all scattered across different containers, VM’s and physical devices. As you can imagine, this was frustrating to manage at times. After deploying Home Assistant, I was able to solve that issue and make my homelab/smart home environment easier to navigate.

In my experience, Home Assistant was easy to deploy, but depending on the integration it can be slightly challenging. For example, Plex was easy but getting my security system integrated gave me trouble due to my unfamiliarity with security systems at the time. This will obviously vary from person to person, depending on one’s knowledge but I’d say overall, the process was seamless and straight-forward.

Home Assistant has tons of integrations available too. The amount of hardware and software integrations that are available to deploy in Home Assistant is actually staggering. There are literally thousands upon thousands of them, and for the most part it’s all very well documented.

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If I have a ton of different smart devices between a (to keep the analogy going) menagerie of different management apps like Govee, Google, Nest, Philips Hue, etc. - is it possible to eliminate the need for all these apps entirely?

A while back I tried out Home Assistant and I found it somewhat redundant when also using Google Home. Yes, it’s great at home automation but every smart app that I have ever used has that kind of stuff built into it. So unless I don’t have to use all the other apps any more what is it’s purpose? I do like the idea of eliminating the need for all my devices to have an active internet connection to work.

Was I just using Home Assistant incorrectly? It’s like the one thing as a homelaber that I feel that I don’t run that everyone else does, haha.

I guess a simple way to put this questions also is: “What problem does Home Assistant solve?”

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If it’s set up correctly, you should be able to eliminate the need for those other apps. Right now, I have several different ecosystems and home assistant set up and rarely do I ever go into the native apps. I only use home assistant. Only very seldomly do I need to go into Phillips Hue to turn on/off a light because home assistant shows it as “unavailable”, but that’s not very common.

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Thanks for your reply. I think once I get my HL15 and I can get my NAS removed from my Proxmox server I’ll use that room to try out HA again! It has been a few years since I tried to use it.

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Being an iOS house, the big reason I really use Home Assistant for is the built in iOS HomeBridge functionality. I can have Siri control smart home devices it doesn’t natively. Example: I have my TP-Link smart plugs in Home Assistant and expose them in the HomeBridge and they show up in iOS’s Home app - so I can just say “Siri, turn on the computer room lamp” and it will control the TP-Link HS103’s.

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Hey there @Glitch3dPenguin nice to meet you!

@ignorantforager sums up my experience with Home Assistant, I rarely go into the native apps for my integrations

depending on what you plan to integrate there are some great tutorials and videos online that I use pretty frequently

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@Zack-45Drives Once I get get my NAS off of my main server and into my HL15 I will be looking into trying out HA again. I recently moved and the number of smart devices that are now in my house have grown like crazy in the bigger place. Also dealing with multiple stories so if I can figure out some cool automations to handle things like what temp sensor to read data from depending on the time of the day or when to turn the dehumidifier on would be really cool.

The one thing I hate about having a “smart home” is all the apps I have to have to get everything set up.

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