From Overwhelmed to Automated: My Journey With Home Assistant

How Home Assistant Found Me

If you've been around reddit or really any other place in the techverse, you've probably seen someone suggest Home Assistant as a way to solve a weird tech problem, and probably even one most normal people would never think of. More times than I'd like to admit, I avoided Home Assistant. I'd start reading the documentation and very quickly felt overwhelmed. The classic ADHD trap of it's too complicated so I'll never get started.

When people suggested Home Assistant as a fix I'd spend my time working around it. Normally by stitching together solutions that were good enough. Well many years ago, I ran into a problem that had no easy fix, no shortcuts worked and that was when I knew it was time to setup Home Assistant.

What was this problem exactly? Well, my Google homes were being extraordinarily crappy with audio cast groups and the Google Home HACS integration for Home Assistant would allow me to reboot the Google homes on a schedule.

My Review of Home Assistant

I've been really impressed with the quality of life improvements and sheer number of things I've been able to automate both inside and outside of my home. Home Assistant is relatively easy to use, really stable and there's tons of documentation though Youtube, Reddit, Home Assistant community forums, and the official documentation.

My wife had to grow into the Idea of having Home Assistant run our home. That being said, if I lost everything in my home lab tomorrow, Home Assistant would be the first thing the family would ask me to fix.

To sum it all up life just wouldn't be the same without it and I highly recommend Home Assistant, so go set it up now.

Home Assistant in my Home Lab Today

Currently I'm running around 250 automations and 150 scripts.

A Small List of Things We've Grown to Love

• When close to home the indoor and outdoor lights turn on, so we never have to come home to a dark house.
• Notifications to our phones when the clothes are done washing or drying.
• Notification when the refrigerator door is left open.
• Set the Brightness on the TV from a home assistant dashboard.
• Motion activated night lights.
• Lights that we can turn on and off without getting out of bed.
• Lights that turn themselves off if left on for too long (probably another ADHD thing).
• Notifications that pester us when we have not done the budget in awhile.