Why use Home Assistant? That is a really good question these days. The answer at the end of the day is personal. Do you need Home Assistant, or any device or service these days? No, you do not “need” Home Assistant, and if you don’t think need it, there is nothing I can write which will change you mind. However, you should want it.
Our household is probably similar to everyone else’s home. Over the coarse of the past several years, we needed to replace old televisions, a few appliances and in some cases, we made a special purchase. Our cell phones became smart, included video cameras, social networks and an app to do just about anything dreamt up by anyone. To say that our lives are saturated with information and technology, would be an understatement. Home Assistant allows you the start to bring this tech deluge under control.
Most people start with Home Assistant as a means of creating automations around there house. The platform is so much more, it is, in fact a home information and control system.
Centralization
The biggest benefit of the Home Assistant is that is allows you the centralize all of your devices and services into a centralized platform within your home, which can be access via an app or a web browser. Essentially, this makes it easier to control all of your home devices from a simple unified interface, at not being locked into a specific brand, technology or phone app.
Currently, our household requires the following apps to configure everything in our house. In no particular order:
- Ring
- My Q
- Risideo
- Shark Clean
- Smart HQ
- Smart things
- GE
- Samsung
- Visio
The fact that you can manage most of these system without jumping between apps on your phone should be reason enough to install home assistant.
All of these apps need to be configured and updated, and in the case of my household, need to run on multiple cell phones. This does not consider that some apps do not like running on multiple devices at the same time.
An additional concern, is that I would like the ability to control things with my laptop from time to time. I don’t always want to be on my phone.
Information
As your installation of HA grows, you will soon start to gather information about your home. As an example, I have picked up several of the Sonoff Zigee Indoor Thermometers.
These little thermometers can be placed in any room of your house and sync with Home Assistant using a USB Zigbee hub. It takes just a few seconds to integrate them and when you live in the desert, it is nice to be able to monitor your home temperature, even when it is just a dry heat. I actually installed on under my patio cover which gives me an idea of the temp and hummidy.
When I first started with HA in my house, I purchase a few smart plugs to control Christmas light. They work great for this purposed and now I have reallocated a few of them to my server cabinet. In addition to offering the ability to power cycle computers, these devices allow me to create pretty usage graphs.
The number of sensors you can buy is virtually unlimited. I am not sure what I will do at this point, however, it is nice to expose information like this in a easily usable way.
A lot of appliance manufacturers are offering smart appliances. They will text you when the laundry is done. They may have 30 different settings you can look at. It sure would be nice if ALL of the appliance companies all started implementing power usage into the smart systems.
Bring on the Fun
The fun part of Home Assistant is not what I thought it was going to be, when I first installed it. At first, I thought the implementation would be automatic lights. Which is very cool and useful. The light automations is fun, however, once you get them working, they just sort of work.
First thing I did to bring the fun, is that I named the home assistant server “benson”. This is just a fun attempt to give the server a presence in the home. The biggest change is that I install the “Frosted Glass Theme” onto the server. Immediately, the interface just looked and felt better.
At some point in time, I decided to create a intranet dashboard inside of Home Assistant. This user interface made my life a bit easier, but it not really fun.
Finally, I was watching a youtube video from Smart Home Solver and he let on to “Team Tracker” and “Team Tracker Card” which allows you to create servcies to download sports schedules of your favorite teams. This means you can everything in one place and possibly get rid of another app or two.
Immediately, I had something better than a phone app. I created a feed to each of my sports team. This feature was a winner with my wife and suddenly, the Home Assistant became more than a timer system for lights around house. It became something more…