Home Assistant has been a staple in our home for years, and if there was one thing I would have done differently from Offset, it would have been using Zigbee for all smart home devices. It’s been way too long since I got on the Zigbee networking train with this feature separating clients from congested Wi-Fi bands. Not only is it more reliable at scale, but Zigbee devices can even act as repeaters, creating extended smart home coverage.
Zigbee is the way to go from day zero
It’s worth the extra steps to set up a new smart home
I wouldn’t wait a while to get Zigbee sorted and ready to go. Choosing Zigbee (or Matter, etc.) to integrate smart home devices immediately provides a network infrastructure. Smart home devices do not support both Wi-Fi and Zigbee. It’s usually one or the other, and if you go down the road of choosing Wi-Fi-enabled devices like I do, you’ll eventually end up with a mix of different connections, which makes for quite a mess.
It’s also easy to get lost in connecting devices and building automation right away before the rest of the package is out of the box. This is due to weak signal strengths etc. can lead to frustration, so proper placement of your Zigbee router is critical. This is another thing I would change. Instead of plugging the transmitter into the back of the Home Assistant, I would follow the online instructions and use a USB extension cable.
I wouldn’t wait a while to get Zigbee sorted and ready to go.
Not every Zigbee device can repeat the signal. Battery-powered Zigbee equipment is typically designed to save power and is therefore not equipped to route data, which can drain a small battery. I’ve found smart plugs to be great repeaters that double as power monitors and remote switches, allowing for some sophisticated automation as well as data collection. Energy dashboard.
If you’re running Proxmox, it’s a good idea to get all the hardware you plan to use installed and activated so that you don’t get confused with PCI devices, where names change and things start to break. I had a second GPU on the NIC when its address was changed. It’s always a good idea to have some means of interacting with your local server via the screen and keyboard. But once Zigbee is up and running, everything is handled by Home Assistant.
Not installing every HACS integration
You probably don’t need to have everything in HA
The challenge with a smart home is to make it smart. It’s like the uncanny valley in computer graphics. If you go too far with a smart home, it can create situations that work against you. Sometimes it’s just not worth the time and effort. One of Home Assistant’s greatest strengths is its extensibility and support for custom integrations. IF NOT is great in that it can provide an easy way to install custom community-built features.
The challenge with a smart home is to make it smart.
It’s easy to install custom maps, animated floor plans, custom device controls, and even gable modifications. This not only creates unnecessary difficulties in managing the platform, but also makes it difficult for beginners to understand how everything works. Home Assistant can be difficult at the best of times, and while developers are making waves in simplifying it as much as possible, it can be easy to back off.
I currently keep our HA installation as vanilla as possible since not much is installed on top of the base package. I have Zigbee managed as well as community integration to manage EcoFlow access Get data about our solar PV installationbut that’s about it. I made the HA setup easy for everyone to use, not just me. I want everyone in the household to trust the smart home platform that controls everything without having to check the knowledge base or ask questions.
Start with the basics
If I were starting over, I would have to link the absolute essentials first and ensure I had a stable base to work from. Zones really help, and it’s something I’ve overlooked with previous rigs. One thing I have squared away on is backups. HA has its own backup system, which is great and helps you roll back to previous configuration versions, but Proxmox snapshots are another layer that should be used. Just like the rest of your smart home or home lab, backups are everyone’s new best friend.
Renovations can be another headache when there is too much integration in the kitchen. If an update goes wrong and conflicts with something in your setup, you can update the base platform as well as custom integrations, maps, themes, JavaScript, plugins, configurations, and more. have to check. I wouldn’t recommend avoiding HACS altogether, but I would be much more strategic with the types of integrations I prioritize.
Document everything for later reference
Don’t lose yourself in your spaghetti madness
If there’s one thing I’d like to do more quickly with my more spacious home lab and local network, it would be documentation. A label maker, QR codes and self-hosting Gitea completely changed the game by allowing us to create tools that power real software or have up-to-date resources about what the system is doing. IP addresses etc. I can add to the labels along with any other data I need and Home Assistant is also involved in documenting.
It can become spaghetti connecting to countless devices on the network. Documenting everything you do with Home Assistant is a great way to avoid losing yourself when trying to make further changes or diagnose a problem. I decided to document not only what was configured, but also why. Even if this is not directly related to the problem at hand, it will help you troubleshoot.
Since then, I’ve tweaked the smart home platform to get the most out of it, but if I were starting over, I’d put it all together to create a much better and more stable Home Assistant setup to build the ultimate smart home.
- OS
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Windows, macOS, Linux
- Compatible with iOS
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Yes
- Compatible with Android
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Yes
