I've long resisted the idea of implementing smart home 'stuff' in our house. It's never been that attractive to me. Use an app to turn on a light? No, thanks!

The doorbell 'gateway drug'

That was until recently, when I got a Ubiquiti doorbell to go with the rest of our Ubiquiti stuff. The catch was that to get notifications of doorbell rings on mobile apps, you currently have to enable full remote access to the whole Ubiquiti system.

That kind of stuff exposed to the internet doesn't make me comfortable, so I sought other solutions.

One practical way is to set up a Home Assistant server, and use the Unifi protect integration to send mobile notifications to Home Assistant mobile apps.

Getting started

It took a little bit to get going, but adding another container to my NAS's existing Docker setup was pretty easy. Side note: I ended up using the LinuxServer.io Home Assistant image, rather than the official Home Assistant one, because the official image requires Docker privileged access, which (at least for my use case) is totally not necessary, and I am not comfortable using.

It was relatively easy getting it going with Unifi, and the doorbell mobile notifications are going great.

Some more fancy power monitoring?

After having the Home Assistant server working for a few weeks, I got curious about other practical uses.

Since we re-did our home energy stuff last year, a couple of things have been irritating me. Firstly, although the myenergi stuff has been great, the CT clamp that measures the aircon energy usage only shows the live power usage, and not the accumulated energy that it's used over time. Additionally, because the myenergi system uses CT clamps for the grid and solar inverter monitoring, they're not as accurate as the Fronius data provided by the inverter and smart meter directly.

So, I added both Fronius and myenergi integrations into Home Assistant. With that, I could flesh out the Home Assistant Energy dashboard with the devices I choose, to have more accurate data as well as get historical data of the aircon usage. Power Flow Card Plus is a great way of creating a custom visualisation of the live usage too! (shown below)

🤔 Maybe smart control of some lights would be useful...

After having that working for a few weeks, I got to thinking that controlling a few lights in a smart way might actually be useful. It has always been a pain going to bed at night, then realising the outside lights are on, and having to go down the stairs to turn them off.

I wasn't interested in using smart lights or smart switches, but after a bit of Googling I discovered that you could get smart relays that allow you to still use your existing lights and switches as normal, but still control the circuit using a smart home platform.

I chose some Shelly 1 Mini Gen3s because they work over WiFi, are well regarded, have a great UI, are pretty cheap, and integrate nicely into Home Assistant. After our electrician installed them, we now have our front and foyer lights controlled, and our main indoor set too. This allows us to do smart things like turn on the outside lights at sunset (Home Assistant constantly updates the sunset time based on your city's location), and off at a certain time (or from bed if we forget 😁)

Zigbee temptation

The next thing that I thought could be useful was having some data on the power use of our clothes dryer. It's the next-most power hungry device that we have no data on. I could get another Shelly device to measure the power on the circuit, but the easier option is to get a smart plug that can measure power usage.

Looking at IKEA, they had an upcoming model, but that used Zigbee, so I started looking down the Zigbee rabbit hole. For the unaware, Zigbee is a low-energy communications protocol for smart devices to mesh together to talk to each other and the home hub.

To use Zigbee, you need a coordinator that can talk from the Zigbee wireless stuff back to the hub (in my case, Home Assistant). Because Home Assistant runs on our NAS in our server rack, a USB-based coordinator wasn't practical. I ended up getting a PoE-powered coordinator from a Ukranian company (which was still cheaper than a lot of USB ones!), which I can put anywhere in the house that has a network port.

IKEA bargains

We then went to IKEA to get the INSPELNING plug. It turns out that it's slightly too big to sit side-by-side in a standard Australian double outlet, but we did get a lot of other things: many BADRING water leak sensors, and some great SOMRIG shortcut buttons. At $15 and $12 respectively, they're significantly cheaper than a lot of other reputable similar products, and they take standard rechargeable AAA batteries.

For the smart plugs, we ended up getting these Zigbee ones from Smart Home, which do everything and fit fine in a double outlet (they're also tested, approved, and registered in Australia).

Conclusion

I can see why people get lost down this rabbit hole! There are so many things that can be automated, and so many different solutions. Home Assistant is a great ecosystem, especially because it has integrations that support almost any device or platform, even proprietary ones.

I'm not sure that I would recommend a Home Assistant setup for the average consumer, though. IMO, it's not simple enough for people like my parents to figure out themselves and have a decent time. A walled-garden single-brand platform with phone support might still be better, even if it removes choice and significantly increases price.

Things have come a long way in the past few years, and with Matter (and Thread) slowly being adopted, things should hopefully be easier in the future.