I used SmartThings for years and was hesitant to switch but I was able to control all my devices in ST from HA without moving/repairing/etc devices over. Once I had seen the power of HA I started a _slow_ migration over (took over a year cause I was lazy). The entire time the house worked just fine (except when the internet was down and then only the HA “native” stuff worked).

My biggest recommendations and I wish I could make this text bigger:

Do NOT use a raspberry pi for your HA host. They are unreliable and you will incorrectly blame HA for RPi’s failings (like I did). After moving to a dedicated cheap BeeLink mini PC my HA became rock solid.

You can play around with HA in docker or a VM as well and even host it there indefinitely but avoid RPi’s as your host, you’ll thank me later. If you want dedicated hardware (I do recommend that since smart house stuff often needs to be “always up” and the family doesn’t care/understand why your homelab is down, just that the lights don’t work) then go for a BeeLink or HA’s hardware offerings.

One thing I think is a little more unique is my home electrical uptime monitoring. I have my router, HA, and a few other devices running on a APC UPS. The UPS has a data port that I plugged into the computer running HA. I installed Network UPS Tools (NUT) on that computer and used a HA plugin to integrate with it. Then, I setup a notification to message my phone if the UPS switches to ‘discharging’ status. As long as the Internet stays active when the power is cut, I should get a notification about it. I did some power cord pulls as a test and it works great, just waiting for a real outage now. I also have a notification for when it’s restored (assuming it happens before my UPS runs out of juice).

I should also add that having a water leak sensor (with proper alerts setup) under the kitchen sink and next to a condensate pump has saved me from some real headaches if things had gone unnoticed.

If you like to tinker, Home Assistant can be a lot of fun!

However, it is very much a product by nerds, for nerds. My wife loves it but she's not going to bother writing YAML to create her own dashboards. She used to write simple web forms so I have no doubt she could, but it's not something that appeals to the average person. Imaging a machine is beyond the realm of what the average consumer is willing to do.

HAOS runs really well as a VM image and doesn't use much in the way of system resources, if you have a home server with 4GB of extra memory you can throw it in KVM and it'll be happy as a clam. I've never had it brick itself.

In my opinion this really devalues the reputation I am having for a publication and is a pity especially in this particular case as home assistant is such a great community.

For giggles, I had it set all the lights into a disco.

Next, we vibed a markdown file containing a to-do list of all my upstairs lights that are abstractly named by the different integrations. I put an x against a name and it turned the light off.

Once I identified it, I wrote a better name next to it. It updated the system.

We vibed dashboards and routines.

The problem with Home Assistant is that once it works, you don't touch it for a year and are back to square one with the layers of concepts. But I am left satisfied knowing I have backed up the conversation/context that we can pick up next year or whenever again.

A memorable computer experience.