After testing slightly different solutions, the choice for our smart home solution fell on Home Assistant.
Home Assistant is one of the world’s largest smart home integrators, with over 1700 integrations of devices and services. At the same time, it is based on open source, which makes the solution very flexible.
The threshold for using Home Assistant is probably a little higher than if you have chosen a more traditional supplier, where everything is arranged and set up. But the advantage of being able to adapt and integrate almost anything you want in the solution, I would argue, is higher than the disadvantages.
You can install Home Assistant on everything from a Raspberry Pi, Intel NUC, Windows server, Mac, Linux machine, etc. We ran our smart home on a RaspberryPi 3 in the beginning, then we upgraded to a Raspberry Pi 4 and now we run on an Intel NUC installation. The disadvantage of the Raspberry Pi is that the SD card is not made for much reading / writing, so it will eventually break. But it is a cheap option to test Home Assistant. It is possible to set up the solution with an SSD on Raspberry as well, but we chose to set it up on a NUC with SSD in the end.
In our home, Home Assistant controls a lot, here it is probably only the imagination that sets the limits on what we can control in the end.
Home Assistant offers a web interface where you can work in order to set up all the integrations and automations. At the same time, you get a mobile app where you can perform manual actions or follow the status when you are not at home.
You can get push notification on your mobile if you want this, and you can set up tracking of your mobile to know if you are at home or not.
Some examples of automation in our home
- Light control based on time of day
- Lighting control based on whether someone is at home or not
- Heat control based on time of day
- Heat management based on whether someone is at home or not
- Vacuuming based on whether someone is home or not
- Warning about garbage disposal, so you can put out the garbage can at the right time
- Car heating
- Fan control in the bathroom
- Temperature warning on freezers / refrigerators
All of the lights uses the Zigbee protocol, same as Philips HUE and IKEA uses. We do not need to use IKEA or HUE hub, but connect these directly to Home Assistant.
The sensors in the house are a good mix of Z-wave sensors and Zigbee sensors.
Home assistant then connects all this, and you do not have to think about whether one solution fits with the other – Home Assistant makes sure that works.