The one thing I wish I knew before I went all in on Home Assistant
I’ve used Home Assistant to control and automate my smart home for over a decade. I do not regret my decision for a single moment; In my opinion, it’s the best smart home software out there. I just wish I knew how much work it was going to be.
Maintenance is a full-time job
The truth is that Home Assistant requires a lot of maintenance. It’s not something you take time to set up, and then happily continue to run in the background while you go about the rest of your life. Once you start using Home Assistant, you’re set for the long haul.
There are a lot of things you need to maintain to keep your smart home up and running. Unless you’re incredibly lucky or incredibly smart, at some point something is going to go wrong. Trying to figure out why your bedroom lights come on in the middle of the night isn’t always a quick task.
I’ve spent hours and hours trying to fix problems in Home Assistant or get things to work when they should. Although the challenge of trying to solve the problem can often be fun and perverse, I spend a lot more time trying to get things to work in Home Assistant than I ever imagined.
Then there are the smart devices themselves. This isn’t a Home Assistant-specific problem; This is true for any smart home, but if you have many battery-powered devices, then you will have a lot of batteries that will need to be replaced at some point.
I have an automation that monitors the battery levels of my Zigbee sensors and other battery-powered devices, such as smart locks and video doorbells, and alerts me when they get low, helping me stay on top of my work. Despite this, I regularly find myself recharging or replacing batteries at home.
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Dealing with constant updates
Another time-consuming maintenance issue concerns managing updates. You might think that you might need to update Home Assistant every once in a while and that would be it, but the reality is very different.
Home Assistant usually releases one major update every month, which isn’t a huge burden. However, core updates are far from the only updates you need. Add-ons, custom components, devices, integrations, dashboard cards and more all require their own updates. Home Assistant’s “Updates” section could soon become a long list.
It is possible to configure updates automatically, but it is not ideal. Many updates include significant changes that may prevent parts of your Home Assistant setup from working or require changes to get them working again. If you leave updates too long, you may be faced with several large changes at once, which can take a long time to sort through.
You can just bury your head in the sand and leave the updates intact if everything works the way you want. However, this leaves you more open to potential security vulnerabilities, and you may find that some integrations stop working anyway, as companies change their API or security framework.
Major updates usually bring great new features and additional integrations, so they’re definitely worth it. This is still a lot more work than one might initially expect.
Device lifespan may be shorter than you think
You might think that once you’ve filled your smart home with devices, you’re golden. However, things don’t really work out that way. Unfortunately, smart home devices don’t last forever and the lifespan of some devices may be shorter than you think.
One of my Philips Hue bulbs broke recently. I’ve had it for several years, but the bulbs are rated to last up to 15,000 hours, and it definitely didn’t last that long. I didn’t expect it to die just yet, and it was a colored bulb, which isn’t cheap to replace.
Sometimes, when a device breaks down, it is not even possible to replace it. For several years, I used a Harmony Hub and remote to control my AV devices so I didn’t have to constantly switch between eight different remotes. Logitech stopped making these products, so when it died I couldn’t buy a new one, and in the end I had to cobble together something similar on my own.
Upgrading is also an important factor. Sometimes you might want to upgrade a smart home device just because you can. Other times, however, you might have to; some people are now abandoning their Ring video doorbells after becoming concerned about how images from these cameras are used.
Replacing appliances is also not always a quick task. You may need to spend time fixing automations that relied on old devices so that they work with the new ones.
You become technical support for your home
This is something I hadn’t considered at all when I started with Home Assistant. I wanted a way to automate my smart home rather than just control it remotely, and this has been a lot of fun.
However, I am not the only one living at home. My family uses all the same devices as me and needs them to work as expected. It’s fine for me to remember that there’s a button on my remote that will switch audio from the TV to the surround speakers if the volume control automation goes haywire, but unless they know that too, they’ll be stuck, unable to control the volume.
Trying to get my smart home to the point where “it works” without having to provide an instruction manual for the rest of my family is an ongoing challenge, and one that I don’t imagine I will ever be able to overcome. There’s always something that ends up going wrong, and when that happens, I become the tech support for the whole house.
I love Home Assistant. It is truly inspiring that there is free and open source smart home software, constantly being improved not only by its developers but also by its users. Although I never imagined I would have to spend so much time working to make everything go smoothly, I don’t regret it at all. Even solving tricky problems has given me hours of fun and a real sense of accomplishment when things finally work.
