Part hobby, part time and energy savings. One thing I love about Home Assistant is the integrations with so many devices and services. I have smart switches., remotes, smart plugs, energy monitors, RGB bulbs, thermometers, etc.

It’s a slippery slope of wanting to integrate absolutely everything! My doorbell, alarm system, thermostats, garage door, door locks, and so on.

Many are local “smart devices” using ZWave and ZigBee, and others are cloud integrations with other services.

I’ve gotten to a point where the Home Automation routines I rely on are so useful that I get annoyed if I ever have to do things “manually”.

Couple examples:

1. I have a remote by my bed that, when the goodnight button is pressed, turns off all the lights, sets the HVAC back to programmed mode, puts our computers to sleep, arms the alarm, locks the doors, and closes curtains.

2. I have a button by my garage door that sets an “auto arm” toggle that opens the garage door, unlocks the door to the garage and the waits for me to close the garage, at which point it arms the alarm, turns off the lights, locks my computers, turns off the HVAC, closes curtains, locks doors, etc.

Look into ZWave and ZigBee mesh networks. I run Home Assistant with a couple hundred devices and integrations. ZWave tends to be my hardwired switches, and ZigBee tends to be my battery operated motion sensors, remotes, etc.

Personally, I run Home Assistant on its native HAOS on a raspberry Pi. In addition to Home Assistant, I have lots of automations running in Node Red, a no/low code orchestration addon.

For voice control, I’m playing with the Atom Echo.

I wrote some flows and functions in Node Red to send me a daily email with a list of all devices < 10% battery, but what I’m noticing is that several of my battery devices aren’t properly updating their status. I need to update it to also email me on unavailable battery devices too I guess.

I use Z2mqtt and still get random powered devices showing as unavailable. Too bad there isn’t a “ping” feature like ZWave.

Nothing moves, and yet I get random unavailable devices that come and go randomly.

I guess I need to check my WiFi channels. One of my biggest complaints around Zigbee vs ZWave. I don’t have these issues with my ZWave devices.

I’d love to see a floating action button like Thunder has with configurable shortcuts. I love this feature for quick navigation, dismiss all read (not fully hide since a refresh can bring those posts back), etc.

That’s what I do with my dumb washer and dryer. Notifications when the washer and dryer are done, and nagging reminders if the washer is done, but the system doesn’t see the dryer turn on after some time (eg the wet clothes are still in the washer). If the washer finishes, but the dryer is still running, it tells me that too, then waits for the dryer to finish before resuming the wet clothes notifications.

I have an easier time using my Home Assistant dashboard to control my Sonos devices rather than the native app. Takes forever to load in Sonos but with HA, it’s near instant.

I had a blast learning and configuring vlans for my smart switch and putting all the IOT devices on their own network.