442 9 Hurdles of Home Assistant I Had to Overcome

[@MFBcode]

About performance: I took me lot of research to find how to speed up raspberry pi/finding faster boards/deal with problems of getting parts etc. After months and no ideal conclusion of fast SoC, I noticed that I was just waisting time. I decided to buy MiniPC and I added virtualisation (proxmox). Now I have home server with fast nvme/fast ram/hdd/lots of cpu cores. I installed HA (as VM), pihole, vpn, surveillance... and have a lot of place for more experiments :) Compiling esphome firmware? Matter of seconds, upload takes longer. Was it more expensive? Of course, you can pay like for 4 RPi4 but performance is like you would have 10 RPi4.

[@AndreasSpiess]

This seems to be an interesting alternative to a Raspberry. My concern is the power consumption. How much does your server use? and maybe you can post a search term to find your config (KZbin no longer allows links)

[@MFBcode]

@@AndreasSpiess I decided to got with AMD Ryzen 5600G and ASRock X300. Power usage is 24W (measured with shelly). I could be less if I decided to go with 35tdp CPU instead of 65tdp, but I was more focused on performance. At beginning I was a little scared of Proxmox configuration, but then I found github tteck/Proxmox. With one command you can create whole VM with HA.

[@CamiloSperberg]

I also struggled a lot with HA being slow. In the end, decided to migrate it to an (very) old 2011 MBP I had accumulating dust. Best decision ever! ESPHome doesn't take that long to compile and every action in my house now happens instantly. Also: I did go for Docker and it made my life so simple by migrating away from the rpi4. Another advantage is that I can choose when to update. Up until now, I've kept it running for about 2 years already and only when I have the time for it I update and change conf if needed.

[@AndreasSpiess]

@@MFBcode Thank you for the link to the helpers. Because I already ordered a second-hand thin client PC to tinker around. Maybe it can be used as a Pi replacement (lower performance but also lower power consumption)

[@AndreasSpiess]

@@CamiloSperberg Thank you for sharing your experience. As mentioned in the other comment I will try the PC way, too

[@Davvg]

I recently changed my HA install from a Pi to a used dell optiplex- it idles at around 12w which I think is pretty good for a full x86_64 computer and gives me more room for some higher strain applications. Using two Pis is a good solution I wasn’t even aware of, if only they were reliably in stock right now!

[@saidinesh5]

There are also cheap intel atom boxes that have a much lower idle power consumption and full x86_64 boxes. One example is atomic pi.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Do you run on Linux or Windows? And how good is Windows supported by all our tools?

[@Davvg]

@@AndreasSpiess I’m actually just running Home assistant OS on it. I’ve been thinking about switching to home assistant container on Debian so I can use it to run programs that aren’t available as add-ons in HA (e.g. a jellyfin server) - but it would mean I have to change my installation to move my add-ons to separate containers as well

[@Davvg]

@@saidinesh5 I had considered the atomic Pi and a few NUCs; I decided I wanted a little more power than the atomic pi offered but didn’t want to shell out the price for a decent NUC. These USFF PCs are a pretty good middle ground for the price and the hardware you get if you buy them used. Mine is an optiplex 3060 micro w/ an 8th gen i3. Not a powerhouse, but much more capable than a Pi and not too far from the retail price of the 8gb Pi at only about $120 (used)

[@saidinesh5]

@@AndreasSpiess My beelink Z83 (intel atom z8300) box came with an activated copy of windows 10, but i installed linux + home assistant on it and never looked back. Windows worked well for "home theater usecases" (media player + my rgb lighting control script), but the 2GB ram meant I couldn't use it for much else. For < $80, it was good value. Power consumption should be less than 5W at idle i think.

[@VassilisKoulouris]

I had the same setup and I was testing in parallel Openhab 3 on IOTstack (Openhab, MQTT, NodeRed, Pi-hole, TasmotaAdmin, NTP Server, Web Server and Portainer - all running flawlessly on a single Pi4 with SSD) and a stand alone HA running natively on a rpi4 with SSD. My conclusion was to abandon the HA as most of the functionality that I needed for my home automation was covered by Openhab and now everything is running on a single Pi4 - beautifully I might add! Thanks for all your work Andreas!!!

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for sharing! I also run IOTstack, but felt, that a lot of innovative work is done in HA and I wanted to participate…

[@breiti78]

First of all. As always great video. There is one thing which alot of people missunderstand in the Energy Dashboard. I think the picture they are showing is also a bit missleading because of the running dots on the wire. The Energy Dashboard is showing the Energy (kWh) consumption over the, in the filter selected, period of time. It is not showing the live power consumtion (kW). The Energy Dashboard needs a constantly growing value for each of the phases or sources (lifetime value). The rest of the calculation is happening based on the period you select in the filter. Depending on the integration you have with the Huawei Sun 2000 you can still have the momentary power consumtion as a sensor and do something with it. This has just nothing to do with the Energy Dashboard.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I agree. But all dashboards I know show power. Because this matters for decision making (e.g. is there enough power to switch the washer on. Energy is more foe an after the fact analysis.

[@krisgeusens162]

@@AndreasSpiess I measure energy with Shelly EM

[@johnmccormick2883]

Your video arrived at a perfect time for me… Thank you. It convinced me to steer clear of HA as a solution due to the many complexities involved and constant need for maintenance. Also maintainability in my absence. 73’s

[@TheUnofficialMaker]

your missing alot of fun, unless you don't have the time. look at homekit.

[@johnmccormick2883]

@@TheUnofficialMaker thank you for the reply VJ… if I was in my 30’s I’d probably gone it a go… but I’m nearing 70 and these days I ask myself what would my family do in my absence? I know I’d enjoy doing it as I was an automation engineer professionally for Westinghouse, GE & Siemens for many years and loved it. In my later years I was cognizant of “system maintainability” as a primary requirement of leaving the end customer with a good solution. All the best to you…

[@AndreasSpiess]

@John: We have similar backgrounds. I built global ERP systems… Stability and maintainability are important for me. (And also the WAF)

[@johnmccormick2883]

@@AndreasSpiess And we are also both ham radio enthusiasts. I got my novice license in high school and prefer code so I guess I’m eligible for the QCWA X 2 …. ..

[@tomvanhal4498]

Thank you for this video Andreas. I am using home assistant for 2 years now and i am still learning Everyday. I recently added my Huawei inverter to home assistant using the modbus connection. Modbus to USB converter 7€ and it's working great. The schematic i still don't have because i don't have a meter for in and outs tot the grid. The Huawei solar was easy added under hacs. My energy monitoring is great and correct. Normaly at the end of this week i receive new digital grid meters so i can add this to my energy dashboard.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Which integration do you use for your Sun2000 inverter?

[@wrbrower]

I really appreciate all of the pain you go through to create these step by step, in-depth videos.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Fortunately, it is not a pain. Otherwise I would immediately stop! But it is a lot of work, I agree.

[@peter.stimpel]

I fully support your call for less but meaningful updates in HA. And want to add some thoughts on your setup. I was using a kind of similar hardware setup, but disliked the RPI part, because of speed, and missing measures to survive a power outage, and I need my RPIs for different things. So I changed to two older notebooks, equipped them with some more memory, SSD, and installed proxmoxx. I added a VM for running HA OS. I added other machines, for pihole, openvpn, and a linux machine to run docker. And since I am a software developer in my dayjob, I added a LAMP environment and Jenkins as well for playing around. In HA I run only things that are truly related to it. But grafana, prometheus, mosquitto and so on are running in the docker environment. This way I have another benefit: the batteries of the laptops act as UPS for short outages. I am happy with it, and run this setup for more than 12 months. For the frequent changes in HA: I doublecheck the "breaking changes" on each release. This is where all the hassle is hidden in. One time I missed that, and the HA devs decided to kick some nodes from NodeRed in that release, which broke my workflows until I re-added the missing nodes in NodeRed. Thanks for the video, Andreas.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Your setup of course is much versatile. Up till now I did not upgrade because of the following reasons: 1. The power consumption usually is higher. And since I have solar I became focused on that topic. Maybe a bit too much ;-) 2. Maintenance of my infrastructure is the next thing I want to focus. You know, mi remaining lifetime is rather short! But maybe, if I loose more time waiting for compilation I will go to the next level. 3. Because my WiFi is the most critical part, I invested in a UPS for the Lab.

[@peter.stimpel]

@@AndreasSpiess Yep, and that's the beauty: everyone can select one out of many paths for achieving a certain thing. If I would have told I run my own small hypervisor cluster at home, 20 years ago, people would told me "stop dreaming". But for the power interuption: I do not know why people pay so less attention to this detail. Having time to shut down databases properly when a power outage happens, is priceless.

[@jmr]

@@AndreasSpiess My UPS devices have been very helpful! I also value my local network during power outages.

[@AndreasSpiess]

@@peter.stimpel What I learned over time: A PC or Raspberry crash creates way less hassle than a network down. The software and particularly the built-in recovery procedures got much better over the years, and I no longer lose a lot of work due to autosaving, etc. But it usually takes one hour if my network is down, also to get a proper connection to my ISP. This was the main reason for my UPS. And with my solar plans, my UPS only has to cover a few seconds, and the big battery in the basement should kick in.

[@AndreasSpiess]

@@jmr So far, we do not have outages. But the predictions for end of summer forecast that they might cut electricity to save power...

[@anonymoususer6448]

Distributing the setup over 2 RPIs... great idea. I have it all on 1 RPI4 with an external harddisk and because of that I'm running an unsupported (OS) configuration. I know I'm playing with a loaded gun. Last week I was not able to do any updates anymore and I had to do a work-around on a work-around by using another work-around to fix this. It did cost me a whole Saturday afternoon. Your video just came at the right time. I'm considering a new deployment...maybe during Christmas holidays And as usual, you solved all the hard things for us. Thank you Andreas ! /chrisV

[@AndreasSpiess]

Reading the comments, I see that others use X86 systems instead of 2 Raspberries. Maybe also a good way. I definitively will investigate into this direction (also because Pis are hard to get).

[@anonymoususer6448]

@@AndreasSpiess indeed: an old latop with virtual machines which can be snapshotted. - In case disaster strikes... revert to snapshot. - If power fails... battery takes over And add an extra ESP32 to provide the RPI's GPIOs (which I use) This looks more and more appealing...

[@ManfredBartz]

Very good analysis. I agree that the flurry of updates is unprofessional, especially if they contain breaking changes. Maybe they should move that to a "beta-channel" and "stable" could be updated twice yearly? Personally, I am so annoyed with the bloody-minded, no-other-docker-containers-allowed approach that I am now making an effort to ditch Home Assistant.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Many others suggested to use proxmax with two VMs instead of 2 Pis. So I ordered a used thin client PC for 40 Euros. It should run faster than a Pi and not consume much more energy. We will see.

[@1over137]

I went with a different approach as I started out before HA was a thing. Originally I was sending raw delimited text blocks over raw TCP/IP. Starting with the PI, then moving to ESP8266s. I also started with heating control. A few years back I moved to MQTT and also integrated most of the existing sensors etc with HA as it became popular. Of course, Influx and Grafana, but the core is where the magic happens. The approach I use is in Python with PahoMQTT and a custom library with the most used class: MultiTopicObservableMQTTCache. For each automation I create a Python script, pull in this class, subscribe to some topics and attach listeners to the cache. The beauty here is, I can handle multiple asynhronous sensors, synchronously. If I get notified of a motion even from the upstair hall sensor, whlie in that context I can check the last message on the solar panel power topic and assess if I need to put lights on or not... and of course vice versa when the solar panel updates and there has been motion detect within a window of time turn the lights on as they are now needed. Hopefully YT won't remove my link to gitlab: gitlab.com/paulcam/home_heating/-/blob/master/new_docker/docker-compose.yml is a good place to start as you know docker. In addition to these there are also an HA docker, DHCP, DNS, Zigbee2MQTT and a few others. I have 2 MQTT networks. "PROD" which includes all the actual 3rd party sensors and devices and "HEATING" with is just the internal state machines for the heating controller.

[@1over137]

Almost all of my custom hardware sensors are gone now. Still an ESP8266 doing the outdoor temps and one in the boiler cupboard measuring heating pipe temps etc. They rest are SonOff temp/humidity sensors and my custom flashed smart sockets have all been flashed with Tasmota now. The only switch with custom firmware is the boiler control switch, which incorporates some safety condition software of mine I first need to intergration into a custom Tasmota before using that.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for the link. I will haves look at your project! Home Automation is not too important for me, it just should work. So I tend to stand on the shoulders of others… BTW, I see myself going the same direction with simple sensors and switches. Tasmota or ESPhome are so simple to use these days…

[@Mooooov0815]

For anyone who is getting into homeassistant and is also struggling with Raspberry PI availability: search for used thin clients by Fujitsu, Lenovo or other big vendors. They are usually easier available through IT refurbishment companies and are cheaper than current raspberry Pi’s. I have one with 8GB Ram, a 32GB SSD and a quad core Intel Celeron CPU; the system idles around 5W. This system cost me 70€ as opposed to the cheapest RPi 2GB that is available right now for 129€

[@AndreasSpiess]

Many others also suggested the same. So I decided to try it. Do you have a recommendation for HW for me?

[@morpheusde]

Hallo Andreas, das Video kommt genau zum richtigen Zeitpunkt! Werde ich mir in der Mittagspause in Ruhe anschauen. Vielen lieben Dank 73 de DG5GAF

[@AndreasSpiess]

Da brauchst du sicher Ruhe. Es ist etwas hektisch geraten. Aber man kann Details ja auch 2x ansehen... 73 de HB9BLA

[@morpheusde]

@@AndreasSpiess genau, dann kapier es auch ich hihi

[@evaldonascimento3347]

My 2 cents contribution: if you want to run esphome faster you can install it on docker over a notebook pc or a server. Once your esp card is uploaded, HA will find it as a new device. You dont need esphome installed on HA to run your esphome devices

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for the tip. Last time I tried it I was not successful…

[@AndreasDelleske]

I don't even tinker much these days (a little Tasmota and energy meters here and there), but the amount of hours I am sure would have saved just by watching your videos summarizes to more than a manmonth I guess :)

[@AndreasSpiess]

It also was quite an investment of time on this side. This is why I thought I can save it on the viewer's end...

[@AndreasDelleske]

@@AndreasSpiess You definitely do! I also like your practical experience with your neighborhood solar project! Thumbs up!

[@NickRains]

Thank you for the shout out. You have no idea how much this means to me. You’ve taught me so much and continue to teach me. 🙏

[@AndreasSpiess]

You are welcome! I liked your video.

[@HiruS22]

I have a lot of D1 Mini/ESP32 boards controlling and monitoring things around the house, all programmed and running with Blynk, which is moving to a new model and closing its server at the end of this year leaving me looking for an alternative. Home Assistant looks like it’s going to be the way to go, but watching this and reading the comments makes me realise I’m going to struggle to get my head round it in the limited time I can devote to it.

[@AndreasSpiess]

You are right, it will take time. But all other platforms have a learning curve. With your experience I would ask: How long the project will be around? Because changing a system just because the supplier stops is the most painful. In private and in business…

[@Grovion]

I really like the agile approach home assistant is going for and don't think it is unprofessional as well. I understand that some people don't like it but there could be a good midleground for everyone: Have two upgrade channels: A "cutting edge"-channel that is just as it is now and then a stable one, where you bundle all updates of a year into one big chunck. You could for example release such an update every January and take in all updates that have been released on the cutting edge channel until november or so (so that you only put stuff in there that had some hardening time). People could then be asked at installation of Home Assistant if they want stability or fast updates (there should of course be a setting to switch beetween them as well). I think that could please both of the major user groups: People that want to be involved and get frequent updates and people that want a more stable system with less points in time with breaking changes. In fact this way the stable users profit from the cutting edge users because once the changes come to stable all the cutting edge users have already reported the major problems and hopefully most of them are already adressed once they hit stable ;)

[@AndreasSpiess]

I would also vote vor a "stable release" for guys like me who want to use it a work horse. And a second channel (beta?) for the ones who want more.

[@brainwater]

I was thinking the stable wouldn't be useful for me, but then I realized I'm planning on setting up smart home automation for clients, and would really value the stable version for them.

[@Johan-bb4sy]

There is a HACS integration that shows the power distribution as you like it. It is called Power Flow Card, and shows kw instead of kwh.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for the tip. I will have a look at it!

[@akiko009]

Thanks! I set up my home automation well before HA and even before RPi, but the latest developments are certainly making me think about redoing everything. I'm glad that I have always avoided anything that must talk to the outside world (e.g. internet based services) to work. This has enabled my setup to continue working even though much time has passed. This is my major peeve with most of the offerings today. While many can exist without outside services, to use them in an efficient manner they simply have to talk to something to download updates, store state, etc.

[@AndreasSpiess]

My setup of course talks to the outside for installation and updates. Also for services like Radiosondy or weather forecast which need data I do not own. The rest does not need the internet with one exception: My Mailbox is still on TTN. But it will be changed soon…

[@unknownentity330]

​@@AndreasSpiess Hi Andreas, a lot of what you do is beyond the scope of my knowledge haha but it also gives me the kick up the bum to learn so your time and effort is much appreciated! Anyways, I just have a small query: I have HA setup on a RPI4. It runs great 99% of the time and my family love it. Super! However, when I set it all up I didn't know RPI4s lack a Real Time Clock (RTC). I learned HA uses NTP servers (online) to keep time thus when my internet cuts out (which rarely happens) but when it does, I lose control of devices/automations. I found a really nice digikey guide in adding a Real Time Clock to a RPI4 but apparently HA cannot use these. This leaves seemingly one solution: creating one's own NTP server. How do you keep everything running if your internet cuts out?

[@AndreasSpiess]

@@unknownentity330 Fortunately, I do not have a lot of such cuts. But I thought that the Pi continues with the updating the clock even without internet and only needs NTP from time to time.

[@unknownentity330]

@@AndreasSpiess Perhaps my network is going down as opposed to the Internet then. I shall investigate the issue further and I'll report back when I have a definitive answer

[@unknownentity330]

@@AndreasSpiess Hi Andreas, it was indeed my network going down, not the internet. I didn't know much about NTP but I researched it a bit. Computerphile released an explanatory video about how it works too. Interesting stuff. Thanks for your information, it was a great help in diagnosing my problem

[@MarkSpohr]

Useful and interesting! I have installed HA on a Pi4. First baby steps. Impressed so far. Much to learn.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Indeed, a good product!

[@matthiasnott]

Hat mich sehr gefreut einen (leider) ehemaligen Kollegen da zu finden - und einen krassen KZbinr noch dazu. Respekt! Ich habe gerade mit HA angefangen - noch viel zu lernen dieser nicht mehr ganz junge Padavan hat 😊

[@AndreasSpiess]

Als ich deinen Namen gesehen habe, habe ich gedacht: Den habe ich doch schon mal gehört! "Welcome aboard the channel"!

[@matthiasnott]

@@AndreasSpiess Hat mich jedenfalls sehr gefreut. Sehr beeindruckend, was Du so gemacht hast hier. Ich habe meiner Tochter (10 Jahre) gerade heute gesagt, schau Dir mal meinen Kollegen an, der hat 400k Follower auf KZbin. Wenn Du jetzt Python lernst, mach mal Videos darüber, was Du so herausfindest :)

[@matthiasnott]

Hallo Andreas, ich würde Dich gerne mal privat kontaktieren - mein Vater hat einen "Konstruktionsauftrag" für eine Installation, wo Du sehr wahrscheinlich beraten könntest. Danke im voraus!

[@atvarsgr]

I recently installed HA Supervised on MacMini M1 (16Gb/512Gb) via UTM/Debian/Docker. MacMini M1 regarding power consumption is very close to RPi4 (only around 6-8W) but incomparably more capable machine compared to RPi. My MacMini M1 also runs Selenium web scraping scripts (reads NordPool electricity hourly prices), stores them into MySQL database to be used in Home Assistant automations. I also plan integrate/to control my 6 security cameras as well by HA, to stream video to phone. In my opinion MacMini M1 is one of the best options for Home automations, very capable, small, universal (can run everything you might think of) and burns very few watts of energy.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Seems to be an interesting solution! I am not in Macs, so I decided to buy a used thin client PC with a similar goal. I am curious on how it holds up against my two Pis.

[@atvarsgr]

@@AndreasSpiess was considering Intel NUC with newest 12th gen processor, but at the same performance, M1 is still consuming 2x less energy. And for device running 24/7 it is an important factor.

[@mauriciovega7431]

As usual, Spot on Andreas! Granularity always has to be applied wisely. This is a good example considering your use case and for sure will be used by many people who like to have full control of home automation/monitoring. Thank you!

[@AndreasSpiess]

You are welcome!

[@JakobKobberholm]

Great video. Regarding Zigbee2MQTT, the answer is always more MQTT :) It will allow you to observe all your sensors over a standard protocol from third party applications. It will allow you to move between Home Assistant, OpenHAB, IOBroker or even using commercial SCADA systems and still have access to all your sensors. And making virtual devices is trivial. If a value can be read and written to from a terminal command, writing a Python script that will publish that value to an MQTT topic is around 10 lines of code, so you can easily convert your PC volume, monitor brightness or favorite web service status to an MQTT device that will Just Work(TM) in all systems, without writing custom integrations. There are already MQTT bridges for hundreds if not thousands of services and other protocols, like media players, Modbus, KNX etc and I hope eventually we can just completely move beyond the idea of building drivers/integrations into each smart home platform and have it all in the neutral MQTT layer instead.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I am a big fan of MQTT! But for the integration of a few PIRs and switches I could live without it ;-)

[@Larz99]

Thanks Andreas! As always, excellent analysis. I also agree with you on the release strategy used by Home Assistant. I would like to see separate stable and development releases. I don't know enough about the development life cycle with large complex systems such as this, but I imagine there could be a more organized approach. I would bet that having more testers doing regression testing would help greatly. (...cautiously raises hand to volunteer...). Thanks again for you excellent work!

[@AndreasSpiess]

Many projects use such a strategy. But it needs some organization. Maybe I have this need because I implemented large ERP systems during my career…

[@gordon861]

Thank you for that, on first watch I think I understood about 25%, but I am sure watching it through again later when not half asleep will help. I will have to dig out a spare Pi4 and stick node-red on it, it seems better than the HA unit for automation, which I have never got on with.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Node-Red for sure is very different to HA automation. And I like it a lot!

[@mysystem32]

At 15:31 Energy Dashboard, use ulic75/power-flow-card. This card displays real time power kW. In terms of the setup, I use 1 x RPI4 4GB with USB-SSD + Debian + Docker for home assistant, mostquitto, samba, wireguard, postgresql-14, pi-hole (inc dhcp), smokeping, grafana vnstat for network usage. The base os is also my main router, nftables firewall. CPU load is ~7%

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for the tip with the power card! And your router seems to be quite strong ;-)

[@peli71]

My advice: use a reliable platform instead of raspberry. A NUC, like a Dell Optiplex for instance, in combination with Proxmox gives you a much more reliable platform and the option to install multiple virtual machines. And from an energy usage perspective: such a platform consumes less than several pi’s

[@JohnMayfield-NS]

This is the way I went. Also lets me separate out things like mqtt, node-red, etc in their own lxc/container, making HA a little more light. Plenty of machine left over for running Pi-Hole and a few other things. Bonus is auto-back ups once a week so if anything goes wrong update wise I can roll back quickly - but a bad update hasn't been an issue for me for a while.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Many others advocated for that solution. So I bought two used thin client PCs (Intel and AMD) for playing around, installed Proxmox and HA. Now I am stuck with Grafana container on the Intel platform ;-) It does not like the I386 manifest

[@JohnMayfield-NS]

Interesting.. I've only used grafana inside HA but I've been thinking of moving it to it's own promox container... good to know about this issue!

[@AndreasSpiess]

@@JohnMayfield-NS It seems to work now. I had to use a different debian version.

[@JohnMayfield-NS]

I should have thought of that. I've run in to that with a few things (other programs). Recommends to use ubuntu, I put on a new ubuntu, nothing works. Put on older ubuntu, works for. (for example). Good to know!

[@the78mole]

The energy view in HA is correct. It is always showing the total energy for the current view, e.g. if you select the day, it shows the complete energy for the day (up to now or the wohle day in previous days). If you want the apparent power, you need to put it simply on your own dashbaord with numbers or graphs or use graphana for the graphical representation.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I agree. However, as a user I am not too much interested in the overall energy produced up till now to decide if I want to start the washing machine. This is why all inverter apps I know show power in this chart and provide other charts for energy (with different aggregations like day, week, or month).

[@the78mole]

@@AndreasSpiess I totally agree. Even if the display is correct, the power would more interesting, also to me, than the total energy. Therefore I used display modules with ESPhome at my front door and at my desk, to show me live power and other interesting values :-)

[@JamesMyatt1]

I think there's a frontend piece in HACS that provide the power view. The Energy dashboard is really for comparing different periods, rather than a live view.

[@the78mole]

@@JamesMyatt1 You are right. The front-end module in HACS is called power flow card and looks exactly the same as the energy distribution card on the energy page. Thanks!

[@JamesMyatt1]

Finally on this topic, most utility meters only show total net energy consumption and only provide updates at low frequency (e.g. smart meters are half-hourly at most), so very few installations will have live power measurements. If you have a solar inverter or consumer access device (CAD) then maybe you get instantaneous electrical power measurements, but that's a minority of homes and doesn't help you with gas (or water). So, like I said, the energy dashboard is specifically for looking at long term consumption trends, which is applicable to everyone, and the power flow card (or any entity card) will show the live consumption rates on any dashboard, if you have them.

[@PL-VA]

Long time viewer, new commenter. I'm a big HA fan and you're right it's come a long way. I have it all running on single Pi4. Mine is fully containerized, and while early on there were a few issues "it just works", even when addons fail updates etc, you can restore, revert etc. I don't see the need to move workloads like nodered off - it's nicely interegrated and at least on a Pi4 runs without delays. I'm 100% agreeing with you on ESPHome - it's how I get into HA actually. However, I don't use ESPHome in the way you lay out - I compile, test etc. all my ESP8266/ESP32 projects on workstation - not the Pi. I add the IP of the HA to the ESPHome configuration and a password/secret. When the unit starts up it sends a request to HA, and the addon will issue a popup where I can enter the password to adopt (I have a notification saying I need to adopt it). The ESPHome device is then fully adopted and "just works". If I have OTA enabled, I can update from my workstation without having physical access to the devices, and the overhead (if you can call it that) on HA is minimal - it just lists the ESPHome devices and if I click on them, the device/entities associated with that ESPHome. All in all, I think you're taking it a bit further than I would - I would not hesitate to use HA in production environment but not as a single unit. That's what MQTT and other messaging systems fix. But I haven't had a real downtime even when I screw up for years. I can revert add-on updates. Yes, during a system update the sytem will reboot and not react to changes for the 20-30 seconds it's down. I'm not monitoring critical ICU patients, so production ready yes - monitoring healthcare and a nuclear power plant, no :D

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for sharing your ESPhome setup. I have to look into it. Concerning „Running a nuclear power plant“: I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation and Ken Olsen, the Founder, had the rule that his systems are allowed to run everything but a nuclear power plant!

[@djashjones]

I'm giving HA another try after 3 years. Currently using Hubitat. Got fed with updating HA and something always breaking. I'm hoping it's better now. I have also learning with other devices I have to update later and see if other people had any issues. QA for software releases has been dropping in the past few years. Pi's are great for testing but for production nothing beats a low power mini pc. My HA setup is on a cheap N100 pc with HAOS and backed up daily on my NAS. For testing I can always run a docker image on my NAS.

[@AndreasSpiess]

HA made a long way and is now the defacto standard supporting nearly everything...

[@patrickpaganini]

Excellent video - thanks very much. When new to HA, even installing HACs, then installing a HACs integration via the HACs tab, then going to settings, and installing it once more via devices/integrations is far from obvious or straight forward.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Indeed, it took me a while to learn. That was the reason for this video...

[@JamesMyatt1]

For your setup , zigbee2mqtt is definitely better since it'll integrate with NodeRED directly over MQTT rather than also going via HA. If you already had everything (or almost everything) on your HA machine the ZHA might be better.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for sharing! For the moment, I see it similarly.

[@JamesMyatt1]

​@@AndreasSpiess Also, I would (or rather do) run Zigbee2MQTT on the same machine as Mosquitto, etc, so that part of my smart home doesn't go down when the network does or I have to restart HA.

[@AndreasSpiess]

@@JamesMyatt1 For the moment, I use Zigbee2MQTT, too. We will see in the future if I will change.

[@usefulelectronics]

Amazing content. this tutorial included a lot of important concepts regarding IoT and handy tools that makes development process easier ! keep up the good work !

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for your kind words!

[@nonsuch9301]

An interesting video for an experienced user with complex requirements. For those of you who have simpler requirements I would ask the simple question : "Do I actually need this ?" . Do you need to run HA in two flavours over two machines : No. Do I need NodeRed to create my automations : I would say No, HA's own automation GUI has become more capable and honestly most people only have simple requirements. If you know that is not true for you then fine try NodeRed , but only after knowing the built in tools are inadequate. Also , if you are starting out , you can make your life a LOT easier by choosing your products (switches, sensors etc ) because there alreday is a native addon/integration to support them. I don't know why HA channels are always showing people dismantling electronics and soldering stuff prior to flashing them - if you are into that then great but most people don't have the skills/interest/equipment and it just deters them from trying HA. In this specific case there is a HACS integration for Sonoff ( it has had its problems recently , but at least there is no need to get a soldering iron out ). I do absolutely agree with you about the awful change control situation with updates in HA , it is frankly a shambles and really needs sorting out.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I agree that most people probably only need HA. However, this channel is not for "most people". Most of us are a little bit nerds ;-)

[@misteragony]

I run my HA dockerised with addons on a RPI4 8GB model booting from a SSD usb stick. I never ran into any performance issues even if it's running about 20 containers at the moment. I like the dockerized setup since it allows you to revert very quickly to older versions if needed. The only performance tweak I did was installing zram.

[@AndreasSpiess]

So your setup is logically similar to mine. The critical stuff still runs on docker…

[@DerTou]

As an alternative to Raspberry Pi for Home Assistant you could also get a used or refurbished thin client. For example I got a Fujitsu Futro S740 with Intel J4105, 8GB RAM, 16GB SSD for 44€. It should be faster than a Raspberri Pi 4 and has PSU and a small SSD already included, so you don't need any additional components to get started right away. Power draw is also pretty low, I didn't measure it myself yet but from what I read online it should be around 5W.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Good idea. Would one with an AMD processor also work? I see a lot of s920 but no 740…

[@ivanbrunello6068]

I am a (quite) happy user of the UNSUPPORTED supervised installation: that is, installing home assistant on top of a raspbian os+docker. This allows me to have several advantages: I can run addons (and make backups the easy way), just like in native HASSOS, consolidate services (got a couple other containers running on same underloaded machine), and make some tricks not available easily in HASSOS install: my HA server cannot have usb connected and I happily have an USBIP gateway to map e.g. my Z-wave2usb adapter, and present it to Home assistant as a local resource.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for sharing your experience!

[@klassichd10]

Thanks for the insights. I appreciate, that you decided to use a standard home automation system now and not a patchwork of different sytsems. According to my experience this is essential for an effecive and efficient continous work and growth. I will observe your experience with HA. Personally I am using ioBroker for years now and it runs well for me. Zigbee, Modbus, EPSHome, RFLink , Homematic, etc. But it always good to know what is going on in the home automation world. Btw. I did not start wich punch cards but with punch tape. :-)

[@AndreasSpiess]

I used the punch tapes not for programming but for teletypes. An interesting story: In military service we got two identical tapes with random noise. One was handed over to the sender and one to the receiver. A device mixed the pain text with one "noise" tape and the other "demodulated" it. Of course, both had to start the tapes at the same place. This is why they had a number every 100 letters or so. Like that, we had a perfect encryption. Already in the 1970s ;-)

[@klassichd10]

@@AndreasSpiess Thanks for this interesting insight! Crypto-people were always smart! Even with simple tools. As students we had to use these noisy teletype machines (5 track punch) to type in our Algol or Fortran programs. Every typo was painful. My first printer was a used Teletype with cylinder print head and modern 8 bit ASCII code.

[@sophiesmith5922]

Very nice. This video may inspire me to try Home Assistant. I like the dashboard. I have not created much for automating things just yet, a work in process for plant lights and so forth. The ability to interface so well with many home projects is a plus.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I also see the biggest advantage of HA the dashboards and some of the standard sensor integrations (for example for my Huawei solar inverter).

[@RomanBaeriswyl]

If your Huawei device supports ModbusTCP, you can very easily integrate it in Home Assistant without any other addons. Modbus and Modbuc/TCP are natively supported in HA. I just added my heatpump via ModBus/TCP to Home Assistant to show all sort of graphs and switch modes, adjust the temperature offset or switch to vacation mode entirely.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Good to know. I still hope I find an integration which does also the mapping. But maybe I have to fall back to your proposal.

[@Wijnsema]

Hello Andreas, njce to see a new video again! My question: what is the added value of HA if you already have IOT stack with Node red, MQTT, a database and Grafana? With these services you have top notch solutions for information exchange (MQTT), automations (Node red), logging (influx or Postgress) and visualisation! If you need remote control you can easily build a UI in Node red as well. Saves you all the trouble of installing and maintaining HA with all its shortcomings. My philosophy: KISS, keep it simple stupid. Well, as simple as possible that is...

[@AndreasSpiess]

I like the Dashboards, kiosks, and the Smartphone interface. In addition, it offers many add-ons and integrations for particular problems (like a ready-made interface for my Huawei Inverter). We will see which I will use in the long run...

[@thesimbon]

Instead of 2 rpi4 I use a mini pc with j4125 and proxmox: 1vm hassos and another one with extra software. Nodered and zigbee2mqtt can be run directly in the addons. If you like pihole you could consider adguard addon that works the same

[@AndreasSpiess]

Many others suggested your solution. So I decided to try it!

[@thesimbon]

@@AndreasSpiess from a power consumption perspective I got 0.05 kWh dayly increase from a rpi3, but I got more cpu power, 8gb of ram and 128gb ssd and I added another 500gb sata ssd I had around for extra storage if needed (since it fits inside the case). I also bought a 12v 100w UPS with LiFePO4 battery that powers mini computer and router for 3.5h, this way I removed all wall power supplies.

[@AndreasSpiess]

@@thesimbon Thank you for the info! I ordered a Fujitsu and a Lenovo thin client PC... UPS is already here 🙂

[@brainwater]

I'm supposed to get my home assistant yellow this week, so this is perfect timing.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Mine also was scheduled for November. But I recently saw that they shifted it to the next year :-(

[@jakobhalskov]

Looking so much forward to watch this as I just got home from a Home Assistant presentation :D

[@AndreasSpiess]

I hope the video was ok ;-)

[@joshweir3806]

Over the last 5 years I’ve switched from pi3 to pi4 to intel NUC i3 to now having the minisforum b550 and intel nuc setup running proxmox - HA as VM, everything else running in LXC containers Like others have said the mini-pc’s when idling still very economical to run and far more power than we can get from a Pi - looking to redeploy the pi’s with rhapsody for remote satellites In regard to energy - With ginseng inverter I’ve got an AC output that shows me watts and the KWh total consumption today as separate sensors so I can see watts available

[@AndreasSpiess]

Many others suggested to use some sort of miniPCs. So I decided to try it. Do you have any suggestions for me?

[@RalfVogler]

Last time I tried HA it was just too slow and annoying to use. node-red just works, I don't have to restart it and wait all the time and the editor is much nicer for automations (which are the main point of my smart home). InfluxDB/Chronograf or Grafana are also much nicer for looking at data. Don't need a dashboard for controlling stuff since it's all automated anyway or I use voice.

[@Wijnsema]

Totally agree with you Ralf! And if you need to control stuff, the Node Red UI is really simple and adequate.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I agree with node red for automation. However, the HA dashboards look nicer, and you also have a mobile client. I just integrated a ready-made sensor for my Huawei Inverter (in minutes) and I do not want to tell you how long it took to RTFM and include it in node-red. So, for me, both have advantages and disadvantages...

[@RalfVogler]

@@AndreasSpiess As a mobile client I have MQTT Dash to check and control state. Of course, whatever is easiest for you. For me it's definitely node-red, having everything run via MQTT makes it very flexible and easy to manage. Everything is automatically stored via Telegraf and it's simple to control.

[@JohnMayfield-NS]

Good video, only part I disagree with is feature updates/updates/breaking changes. HA is evolving pretty fast now and most of the updates include very useful additions, which is usually followed by updates and fixes. Doing them every 6 months or so would mean putting in more features all at once, more potential problems all at once, and much more potential for a mess, imo. Breaking changes tend to me relatively minor, or notice of changes well in advance, or moving things from yaml to interface (which is done automatically for the most part). For example the formatting for mqtt changed but there was 6 months notice before it will be depreciated and no longer function. Fixing the format for my 30-something entries (thanks, weather station) took all of about 10 minutes. There's a certain amount of OCD for me in seeing an update and doing it right away, but there's certainly no requirement to actually do them if a breaking change is going to be an issue. With Proxmox automatically backing up my vm I have a bit of a yolo attitude to updating because I can just restore back, but I haven't had to yet (year+ of running HA this way)

[@AndreasSpiess]

So you would be a typical candidate for the beta channel. And I would be one for the stable channel… On which architecture do you run Proxmox? Because of many comments I would like to try it on a AMD or X86 system

[@jmr]

Nice overview. My energy dashboard aligns with my electric company nearly perfectly. kWh is how our energy is reported here by all my inputs but you may want to use a Riemann helper to make a compatible input since yours is kW. There is also a very nice blueprint available to notify you of updates to your phone or tablet. It helpfully links to the changes and has actionable links to make updating or skipping updates very easy.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I know the Riemann helper. But I do not like the fact that we all measure Watts (no instument measures Wh which always is calculated) and integrate it to Wh over time and then differentiate it again to get back to W. Thank you for the tip for the update function. It seems valuable.

[@psilin9473]

@@AndreasSpiess well, here you miss an important point: electrical energy has a base unit of Joule(J). And because Watt is the equivalent of 1 Joule per second, the electricity company uses kWh. ( 1kWh equals 3600000 J). So in other words: energy is calculated in J and not in Watt. To go from power (W) to energy, (J) one needs to integrate. To harvest the total energy during a certain period hou only have to add the numbers of the measured time intervals.

[@renaissancelawyer]

@@psilin9473 Excellent explanation. I had been stuck like Andreas is on the kW v. kWh question until realizing this.

[@oscargr_]

@@psilin9473 Was going through the comments just to find someone saying this. Didn't quite get what Andries meant by "kWh depicts a momentary situation" To me kWh depicts the integrated situation. The device that is on now is represented by its Watts, How much you need to pay the energy company is represented by the Watt-hours.

[@psilin9473]

@@oscargr_ Watt is the unity of power. Power is momentary. kWh is an adjusted value of energy. That is what you pay for. Suppose you buy a candy bar. Then you buy an amount of energy. You can eat the candy bar within five minutes (high power device) or you can eat the candy bar during a week (low power). In both situations you payed the same amount for the energy stored in the candy bar.

[@PlatimaTinkers]

Excellent video, granted I have to say Home Assistant changes so bloody quickly!

[@AndreasSpiess]

Welcome aboard the channel!

[@robingerritsen862]

Hallo Andreas, Cooles Video mit guter Erklärung! I use the HP ProDesk 400 G4 Mini PC. This has low power consumption and is a good alternative to the Raspberry Pi. I have configured this with Proxmox so I can also virtualize other services such as an adblocker. Should anything break, everything can also be easily restored. For the Huawei converter, you can put a Solar-Log in between. This allows you to still read the Huawei data from Home Assistant.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I currently installed an add-on that reads the data from the Huawei directly into HA. I just tested it and it looks ok. Now I have to decide which sensor values I want to store. And: Watch the next video ;-)

[@jyvben1520]

Best update option is letting the user select which update item(s) to run ... but that might be too difficult as in "is the current installed HA able to run the upgrade", always updating all makes the "playing field" simple. the tester/developer (before distribution) has only to test against the latest base HA os.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I agree that two releases (stable and beta) need more discipline for developers.

[@SAerror1]

Have you looked at OpenHAB 3 at all? 1 and 2 were quite clunky and hard to learn but I think they really nailed the UI and data model in the third major version. Both platforms have good node-red integration so you can always glue them together if you need HA to control something which OH cannot, or vice versa.

[@Frem_Kra]

Open HAB looks way more promising.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I never used openHAB. Home Automation is not my most important topic. This is why I googled and found a 100:1 ratio. Not a very sophisticated method, I know.

[@marcellomaia3451]

@@AndreasSpiess The reasons you highlighted here are the ones that moved me towards Openhab. Much more stable(few releases on the stable branch) and running on a standard raspberry OS build.

[@Steve61]

Andreas - thanks again for another useful video. I agree with you on the frequent updates - especially those requiring a restart. However, I also know the developers are under a lot of community pressure to add new features - I was following one for an air conditioner controller and it was frustrating waiting for it to be properly integrated. It's the price you pay for free community driven software. Just on the energy dashboard - I think that number for the "house" should be KWH - it is the progressive consumption for the household throughout the day. That dashboard does not show current. For example, so far today, my house has used 13.6kWh (gross) and generated 33kWh from the solar panels, but that dashboard doesn't tell what I am drawing right now. The energy dashboard does have a lag of at least 15 minutes, so I have set up my own with additional current & cost sensors. My additional sensors show we are currently drawing 0.55kW and exporting 2.8kW, so maybe I'll turn on the dishwasher!

[@AndreasSpiess]

I agree that we need kWh, but after the fact for analysis. For decision making, as you mention, we need kW. And all other apps I know show kW in a very similar diagram. That is probably also confusing...

[@flibustieros]

Nodered is overkill. You can do everything with ha natively. Also i recommend to use odroid h3+ with n6005 cpu. Extraperformance and very low power consumption. 2 SATA ports support. Most of SOC motherboard doesn't have it. I have supermicro with 2670v2, but it requires about 60W without load. Moving to odroid will save me about 130$ per year. One thing is stopping me is ECC memory. It's necessary thing for storage

[@AndreasSpiess]

I love node-red because I have complex tasks. Also, I like JS much better than YAML. Concerning the platform: I made a video where I used an Intel system as you propose. But I used a cheap used thin client PC. And I use Proxmox

[@nixellion]

Internal HA Automations are now capable of full IF - ELSE IF - ELSE logic, as well as CASE logic, with introduction of nodes like Choice and If-Else. And UI got less cumbersome to work with, now that they added collapsible things and better titles, etc. It is still easier to work with large logic trees in NodeRed, but HA native automations made a huge step forward and can be used for a lot more now. If previously "IF ELSE" logic was a complete blocker for a lot of things (to be fair, templates could be used to workaround that but it was far from intuitive) - now it's purely about which one is easier to understand and manage. As someone who works with different node editors a lot I also think that NodeRed's implementation is actually quite far from being comfortable, it is still very techy and I often keep scratching my head about how to do this or that in NodeRed, something that would've been easy and intuitive in most other visual programming and other node editors out there. Feels like there is an open niche for user-friendly newbie-friendly automation node editor. Big con of NodeRed is that it's UI is a pain to work with on mobile, it's practically unusable, unlike Hass native automations. I often find myself needing to make a quick adjustment to some automation when I'm away from PC or laptopt, and it's not hard to do with HA automations, but it's practically impossible to do with NodeRed.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I agree with your judgment about the new features in HA and the mobile node-red. I do not program on mobile devices. I need at least 3 big screens for my work ;-) I would not consider my usage of node-red "beginners" and I think, the new HA functionality is already a good thing for beginners.

[@nixellion]

@@AndreasSpiess I have 3 big screens, and I even have a secondary screen for my laptop :) And still, as I mentioned, I was not talking about 'programming' the automations or doing serious work. It's more about when you need to make a quick adjustment to something that you didn't foresee like RIGHT NOW and for whatever reason can't just go up to PC or laptop, or maybe you're not home and you need to tweak automation for someone who is home, wife, parents, etc. I was in a situation where my light automation was causing problems for my mom who was staying with our kid while we were away on vacation, and I had to go all the way back from the beach to hotel room because it was in NodeRed and I could not even simply turn it off temporarily. I mean node-red kind of can be sort of used in landscape mode but even then it's unbearable. So it's not so much about beginners vs non beginners, but about overall UI and UX.

[@Bob-Is-A-PotterNow]

Thank you Andreas! This will be incredibly useful for my upcoming HA project!

[@AndreasSpiess]

Glad it was helpful!

[@sinisternerd6664]

Raspberry PI's are great, but I think you'll find that you quickly outgrow them if you do a lot in HA, at least I did. There are some great tools to run ProxMox on an old laptop, small formfactor pc, or any old computer. There are of course several other ways to run HA on a full PC. But HA is a one line install in the ProxMox terminal. This will resolve things like slow compile times and provide a much more responsive system at the cost of power consumption. And ProxMox offers some benefits like Snapshotting before updates and full VM backups.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Many other commenters also mentioned that they use a miniPC. So I decided to try it, too.

[@ufootje]

nice video! I agree about the updates, releases,fixes etc. Its too much and unreliable now, it make me ignore updates and do just one or two updates a year, usually in the winter when I have time. As an automation alternative; I use small python scripts that interacts with HA through mqtt, that works really well. (if you are comfortable with python)

[@AndreasSpiess]

I also plan to use HA mainly for the user interface and for some adapters. The rest is still Node-Red here...

[@EdoDijkgraaf]

I think the version rant is very personal. I love to follow the progress the team brings us. I guess that is personal as well. I can’t boot up Ubuntu without sudo apt-get…

[@AndreasSpiess]

I agree. So you would chose the beta channel and I would subscribe the stable one. As in many other projects. Not my invention ;-)

[@Guillaume_tournabien]

About espxxx usage. Instead espeasy, you can use tasmota Thatcher is suported by HA without need to edit yaml to configure it. Tasmota is more friendly and flexible than espeasy. Also HA detect and allocate function automatically. Ex if you select dht11 tasmota over HA create topic and signal temp, humidity, last boot ... have a look to see if it's more convenient for you. Nice video as usual 👌

[@AndreasSpiess]

I agree that Tasmota is a good project. I thought I even mentioned it in the video.

[@rancidbeef582]

I only use Home Assistant for the GUI, accessible from the web or my phone. For the "brains" I use a custom Python program that uses an Message / Actor pattern to control everything. And most all devices have some sort of MQTT gateway someone has written that integrates well with my Python code.

[@AndreasSpiess]

So your approach is somehow similar to mine. I also mainly use HA for display and interactions.

[@peterhvidholm1805]

fanally someone who agrees with me to many useless updates in ha

[@bennylloyd-willner9667]

Great video! I have put my HA project on the shelf for the moment due to, well, life happening😁, but the dark season is upon us in Sweden so more IT-nerdy times are to follow. This was a very good kick-in-the-butt to start over with a fresh setup (I only have a couple of cameras, lights, and switches so no biggie to start over and do it properly)

[@AndreasSpiess]

Go for it and enjoy!

[@willb1242]

That's funny. I also find my interest in electronics is seasonal - a crowdfunded product came this summer and by the time it did I lost interest from the prior winter!

[@K-politic]

I am running HA on my proxmox server and it is super easy to install HA as a vm. There are even scripts on github to do this. The nice thing is I can pass usb devices to the vm and add things like zigbee and zwave

[@AndreasSpiess]

Many others also mentioned that it is a good thing to use a miniPC and proxmox. So I decided to try it. What kind of HW do you use?

[@zyghom]

Ha, finally Andreas came to HA ;-) My 3 cents (my HA is on RPi4 with 8GB RAM and 1TB SSD M2): 1- you touched it very nicely: on RPi4 ESPhome is dead slow and it does not provide sdk for ESP32-S2, C3, S3 etc - solution: I installed ESPHome on my Macbook. Speed increase - probably gazyllion times + on MacOS all boards are supported 2- Node Red - it also kills RPi4 - I moved to dedicated RPi4 - Speed increase is significant - good point from you here as well 3- internal Automations are nowhere near Node Red of course ;-) 4- Zigbee2MQTT is way above ZHA 5- choosing dedicated Linux distro was very good decision IMHO - here I need to give point to HA developers 6- I totally agree on point "too many upgrades" - all upgrades should go to BETA and HA should support STABLE release, that should be STABLE for minimum 18 months and unless you need new features/devices supported, you don't need to upgrade at all. There are also TOO MANY breaking changes - many times I had to spend a lot of time on "recovering" well working HA from before the upgrade... - that is really not they way it should be. Yes, I know I can always STOP UPGRADING but that is not the same as "stable, long term supported distro" 7- you could have mentioned also Nabu Casa cloud integration with Alexa and Google ;-) 8- I am not 100% sure that you really need Node Red companion installed - as above described, my Node Red is on another machine and all is working well without companion I am super happy Andreas finally touched HA - btw, your contribution to that project would be amazing with your experience all over. ;-)

[@AndreasSpiess]

1. How does the integration into your main HA instance work? 2. Actually, my biggest performance killer is Grafana/InfluxDB when I want statistics over a longer period. 6. I agree. I would love the idea of "stable releases" done by the developers 7. As you might know: Both do not understand Swiss-German". So they are not used in our home (my wife was not happy when they did not what she wanted ;-)

[@zyghom]

​@@AndreasSpiess 1- ESPHome is a standalone program - you DON'T need HA for ESP based devices to be visible by ESPHome that you run i.e. on your Macbook. So provisioning of ESPHome devices is one thing - you don't need HA for this. Seeing sensors in HA is another thing - once sensor is provisioned in HA you don't need ESPHome instance running (the one on Mac in my case) - sensors once deployed communicate with HA over integration (in HA). If I got your questions properly. In short: I run ESPHome on my Mac only if I want to provision new device or edit existing one (edit the code I mean). Fun fact: you can use ESPHome with MQTT directly - without HA at all. 2- yeap, once I clicked "show me last year" - after an hour or so I restarted RPi4 ;-) It is not Grafana but InfluxDB issue I suppose 7- WAF (wife acceptance factor) is an issue - you are not alone there ;-)

[@5Komma5]

Nice overview. Agree with the constant breaking changes for HA. This policy ensures that a lot of people do not update. I switched from a native install to the docker version so I can easily revert any updates that will kill my setup. This is less hassle to me then reading the release information for the chain of updates I am applying every 6 months or so.

[@AndreasSpiess]

So it seems do fulfill my wish of bi-annual releases;-)

[@OmarMekkawy]

I got a seat in the first row ♥️😂. Thank you before watching the video.

[@iamkrishnendudas]

I also got one 😂

[@Reducer]

That was the perfect time for this video! I have a Pi with a CC2531 USB stick, and that's a pretty outdated model with bad range due to only having an internal antenna. I just got a ZigStar Stick v4 in the mail, so I was thinking about remaking my entire IoT network from scratch since I need to reconnect all devices to the new stick anyway, and my Pi is a bit of a mess of things running natively as well as in Docker. I'd like to take some time to actually get that in proper order, and try HA as well -- I've been using Node Red exclusively so far. I think I'll steal that idea with HA on a separate Pi, didn't even occur to me to try that.

[@AndreasSpiess]

One small remark: I Vevey plug the Zigbee stick directly into the Pi. Too much noise. I connect it with a USB cable and put it away from electronics…

[@jbhorner]

I’ve found that Zigbee2MQTT is more reliable than HA’s ZHA. I had devices that “fell off” HA regularly, but have had no issue with Zigbee2MQTT. I am running two instances of HA, so it was easy to move the failing devices to the second instance. I’m too lazy to convert the other 50, however. So, they’ll stay on ZHA.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for sharing your experience!

[@gzxto]

The absense pi-hole in HA OS dosen't bother me since there is AdGuard Home available, to me it's at least as powerful than Pi-Hole. It has everything I need, Encrypted DNS, DNSSEC and it's highly customizable. Using Wireguard additionaly which is the second important add-on included in HA-OS, I can use the AdGuard functionality not only on my LAN but also evereywhere else. Än schönä Suntig wünschi.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I agree (i only used it as an example)...

[@jorgeferreira2009]

Great video Andreas. Thank you for sharing.

[@AndreasSpiess]

You are welcome!

[@MatthewN8OHU]

You could use the Supervised version on Raspberry OS, which allows the use of add-ons, which is probably the way I will go with on my second Home Assistant installation which will be running Frigate, Deepstack, and DoubleTake for cameras. I'll probably use the Remote Home Assistant integration from HACS to manage the pair of servers.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I know but I decided to go with their OS. As said, I fear they will mainly support their OS. Otherwise it would make no sense to have one for them.

[@MatthewN8OHU]

@@AndreasSpiess Their whole system is container-based, even on the OS, but the majority of new users are going to have the easiest time getting started if all they have to do is flash an image and point a web browser to a local IP address.

[@pacolucas7512]

I will check this video later again, great summary

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you!

[@SierraLimaOscar]

Have come to the same conclusion and also run the native HAS OS on one RPi and my mqtt and node-red on another. I also think that the automation/logic workflows are more versatile and easier to troubleshoot in Node-Red, but only from a certain complexity forward. For the simple stuff HA is very good. Using mqtt as my main communication protocol for my sensors and devices also gives me a parallel/redundant way to control stuff if HA dies - which is why I prefer zigbee2mqtt (and zwave2mqtt) over the native integration. Can't wait for your video on dashboards - that is the part I am just too lazy to tackle properly. My automations are quite finely tuned, but my presentation of them is sh*t, so maybe seeing yours will give me both the inspiration and motivation to fix it.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I will probably not make videos about dashboards. There are many specialized channels for that. And anyway, a good automation does not need a lot of dashboards ;-)

[@stevesfascinations1516]

Another great video! I use TASMOTA on the S26 and love it. I also find updates on Home Assistant can blow up your setup. Using Proxmox it is easy to backup your install by cloning the virtual machine. I also backup the .yaml files just in case....Home Assistant is amazing, but you have to backup...Also MQTT is high on my list.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Im just sitting in front of my computer tinkering with proxmox ;-)

[@brettemurphy]

My solution for slow pi building was to use a companion Hyper-V VM. When I am tinkering, I export my "production" pi HA config to the VM (and turn off my pi). Once all my ESPHome tinkering is done I export the HA VM's config back to the pi and switch off the VM.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Interesting process...

[@ch94086]

Watching your node-red demonstration brought me a new meaning to spaghetti code. 😁 But seriously, it makes me wonder if a domain specific text format is better than graphics. Thanks for a nice video.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I assume it depends on your preferences. I like the message approach of Node-Red and the many available nodes. Saved me a lot of time.

[@166912]

Hi Andreas, For energy visualization, let me suggest to check out the Tesla power card in HACS. Works great in my case and is nearly real-time.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for the tip!

[@bbjunkie]

The energy dashboard is really difficult to get working (I still cant get mine working!). The reason they use kWh is because it's measuring energy consumption the same way your utility meter does. Try the "Riemann sum integral" integration addon to convert your watt/kilowatt usage to suitable kwh units.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I use kWh, too. But in the evening. During the day, for decision-making (can I start the washier), kW is a better thing for me.

[@horatiuslavescu]

I'm using Home Assistant for three years already and never had an update that broke something. More than 100 devices, Zigbee and WiFi, 20+ integrations. Running as a VM (actually OVA) on Proxmox hosted on a cheap i5 based compact PC.

[@AndreasSpiess]

So you were lucky. Others commented that they had to re-install HA because they did not do regular updates.

[@horatiuslavescu]

Andreas, well, this might be the difference. I'm doing all the updates (major and minor) when they are released. And always reading the release notes before. Thanks for your videos.

[@casperghst42]

One major problem I have run into with HA is that if you use the nativ intergration to intergrate a device then if that device goes off line then HA will continue to try to connect (not just once every 10 minutes), that result in high utilization. Which is why I use MQTT and zigbee2mqtt for all intergration - loosly connected.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for sharing your experience!

[@yekutielbenheshel354]

Excellent! This is really great stuff Andreas! Digging into the granular details and coming up solutions is the tedious, yet important part of engineering that is often glossed over by hand wavers (marketing wonks). Making new technologies actually work properly in the real world is often much, much more difficult than it seems.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Glad it was helpful!

[@dijoxx]

What does HA bring to the table exactly? If it is just prettier dashboards I would rather build or integrate my own in Node RED. I believe it would take less time and effort in the long run than dealing with all this overhead of HA.

[@AndreasSpiess]

It has lots of built-in interfaces (for example for my Huawei Solar plant). And it has a Mobile client with many possibilities. Plus a nice Front-End including one for my tablet in the kitchen. Still, I use Node-Red for the automation...

[@IamTheHolypumpkin]

Instead of having two R-Pis I kinda run 1.5 RPis. I use Home-Assistant Supervised install which is considered an "advanced" installation method. It install the whole Home-Assistant ecosystem on any (debian based) linux distro. I originally intended to use alien to convert the HA Debian package into an Read Hat RPM package but to many dependencies which are more debian specific and conflict with similar red hat dependencies. For example App-Amour conflict with SE-Linux on Fedora. I than installed it on Raspberry-Pi OS 64bit. Still considered "unsupported" by Home-Assistant because they only support pure Debian but RPiOS is basically 99% Debian anyway. I choose Home-Assistant Supervised install because I wanted full control of the underlying linux system and the docker engine, So I can run containers which HA and HACS does not support. InfluxDB, Pi-Home-Unbound, Minecraft-Server and many more containers run as Podman-Containers on an Latte-Panda V1 with Fedora 36. Home-Assistant and some other containers on the RPi. I didn't knew of the HACS Store and I might switch to Node-Red to reduced my work of creating custom python scripts to run inside containers.

[@AndreasSpiess]

After many comments I am now tinkering with Proxmox on an old Intel PC where I installed HA OS and a Debian VM with IOT stack. So I also have two Pis in one system...

[@McTroyd]

Put differently, I'd be glad for the frequent updates being available. One of my biggest pet peeves of commercial IOT products is the lack of a built-in updating mechanism (assuming updates are offered at all). They should definitely manage that better though. It's different to pounce on someone for a security update, than an update because someone misspelled something.

[@AndreasSpiess]

It is much easier for the developers to decide what is a feature and what a bug. So the stable version would only get bug fixes.

[@TheSmartGerman]

Hello Andreas, for your ESPHome compile time "problem". You can run ESPHome on a local PC to and update / compile it on this machine. I have to use this method for one project, because it can't compile the code for the ULP core of the ESP32 (only works on x86 compiler). I did a batch script to xcopy the esphome data to a temp drive, run comile & upload and delete... :P

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thanks for the tip!

[@TheSmartGerman]

@@AndreasSpiess I installed samba-share add-on to easy access the files.

[@EvenTheDogAgrees]

Better title than the first one. Less clickbatey. Better. :)

[@AndreasSpiess]

:-)

[@drbytes68]

I've been struggling with the same question.. zha or zigbee2mqtt. I run the latter for the moment but binding to devices/groups can be hit or miss and frustrating. I spent many hours on trying to get it to behave. I'm coming from deconz and was tired of the deconz software. In hindsight it was good enough. Nowadays I'm thinking of going back to a dedicated hub since I could place that in the mddle of the house/network. I have the z2m container on a 1u in the garage so it's not ideal to have the coordinator several meters and walls removed from the actual meat of the mesh.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Indeed we always have to consider the propagation of these radio waves. If these signals are weak, the link is not reliable.

[@anlumo1]

The lack of addons for dockerized HA isn't that big of a deal, because addons are just a replacement for docker containers on HassOS. In my setup, I was able to install all of them as simple containers instead (except Terminal and File Browser, which are not needed in the first place). I really don't like HassOS, because it requires a keyboard and monitor on the device itself for administration of lower level things. WIth the dockerized version I can do that via ssh.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I agree. That is what I first thought, too and started to play around with them (IOTstack supports this way). I do no more remember which problems I encountered, but they were enough to change. Maybe this was because I am a Linux noob

[@alexanderskorokhodov9453]

Hello Andreas, Thanks for this video and shared experience. Let me advise the idea for a further HA development :) What about failover clustering setup for home automation using RPi as servers? It might be Proxmox-like virtual environment, running LXC (not Docker) containers with HomeAssistant installed, with hyper-converged (might be done with ZFS, for instance) or other suitable type of common storage. Not certain it can be done on RPis, but the idea looks challenging (at least for me), and might have its own pros in comparison with your design. WDYT?

[@AndreasSpiess]

Because many others suggested to use a miniPC I decided to try it out. However, I would not go the cluster way. My home automation never failed because of a HW issue. And I invested in an UPS for the most important systems in my home. But I am open for suggestions on my planned setup. Low cost and low energy consumption are the most important things for a Raspberry replacement.

[@ivanbrunello6068]

Highly interested in your modbus 2 nodered project. Got at least 3 different modbus implementation running around house (heat pump, photovoltaic solar inverter, and a nifty little not-networked DAIKIN thermostat I wish to control remotely. please share the WIP. thank you!

[@AndreasSpiess]

I just use the standard Modbus nodes. Timed one after the other.

[@bsdguru]

The energy dashboard in kWh is not wrong because the energy consumption is updated once an hour (hence kWh). But it's confusing because you can see the power in realtime flow (kW). Also water is added in the 2022.11 release which is not energy. So the energy dashboard is overdue for an update. I would rather see the kW and kWh in the totals below.

[@AndreasSpiess]

I agree. And all other apps I know show kW. Because this is what I need for decision making (can I start the washer, for example).

[@bsdguru]

@@AndreasSpiess Ok, but the energy dashboard is *not* for business rules it's only an overview of the utilities like a dashboard in the kitchen. The power and all other measurements are available as entities. I use a couple of kWh meters which have a ton of measurements ideal for automations.

[@mahudson3547]

Ha, punch cards! Difficult to believe what you are now doing is in one working lifetime.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Indeed, we came a long way on technology. Unfortunately not on the human side. I was listening to the Russian Army during my military time and 1989 hoped that this separation is gone…

[@Frem_Kra]

@@AndreasSpiess Now we have USA occupation.

[@mahudson3547]

Yes, technology has been remarkable. Human evolution not so.

[@VolkerHett]

At the moment I'm very frustrated with MQTT in Homeassistant. I need more intimate knowledge about what is transported how in MQTT and how and what to add to the configuration yaml file. I don't like yaml at all which doesn't help too 😊 Finding instructions for integration of a gadget via MQTT on the HA Webseite is easy enough, but they don't have information on what version of HA the example works. So you start with an outdated example and try to figure out what every statement is supposed to mean and then search for replacements for the statements which are not supported anymore. My EQ3 bluetooth thermostats are the perfect example, they used to work out of the box a year or two ago but now I can't get them to work with HA anymore 😢. Yes, I know, buying new thermostats would solve the problem but I want to keep my working thermostats! Looks like I have to find the time and energy to really study how HA uses MQTT and what changes they'll make there ...

[@AndreasSpiess]

Change management in HA is definitively a negative. I set a filter in my searches (not older htan 1 year) because of that.

[@TecSanento]

One trick that I just recently discovered, if you need to change something in the configuration.yaml - there is a partial reload available at the developmenttools :)

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for sharing. I saw this too. But so far I did not use it...

[@TecSanento]

@@AndreasSpiess i have a lot of manual mqt devices and template Sensors that need some tweaking from time to time so this is quite useful :)

[@jameszahary]

Trick to speed up esphome compiles: install ha on virtual machine on pc - plenty of cpu and memory for development, then adopt the esp on your pi device.

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for the tip!

[@johannglaser]

Are you also looking into security functions like intrusion detection, alarm, cameras, ... into your home automation?

[@AndreasSpiess]

For the moment I have no such intentions. I keep this secret;-)

[@johannglaser]

@@AndreasSpiess Sad for my own plans, but for sure better for yours! :-)

[@WoLpH]

I would suggest distcc to speed up the compiling. Use your computer as a fast compiler :)

[@AndreasSpiess]

Thank you for the tip!