I’ve been in my home for about 4 years now. It’s safe to say that over those 4 years, everything has gone to pot and now my smart home doesn’t work.
Everything is running through my network of Amazon Alexa’s. I have mostly Philips Hue bulbs with a few GE switches and Samsung Sensors connected through Samsung SmartThings. August Smart Locks. A few other odds and ends.
I’m to the point now where nothing in my Apple Home Kit shows as online anymore. None of my timed or sensor based automations work now.
I’m sure this is normal…right? Has this been your experience that everything slowly stops working? Any tips to keep things alive and fresh? Is the only solution to delete everything and start over?
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Tail as old as time for home automation. The lesson is always go cloudless.
You e got a mish-mash of brands and no real home automation controller.
A “network of Alexa’s” is not an HA controller.
Try to hold everything together with duct tape and this is what you can expect. Home Assistant is the answer.
Not really. I had a major update to OpenHab which to be frank, isn’t the best at regression and backwards compatibility, and that kippered a lot of stuff, but once I had worked through those everything was back to normal.
Batteries run out, and sometimes kit can fail (touch wood I haven’t had that).
Though I think if you go down the commodity route with a mixed in ecosystem, you’re more likely to hit issues over a more involved system.
First thing that stands out is the combination of so many ecosystems that should work with each other, but in my experience demand constant attention to actually do so.
It’s one of the main benefits of home assistant, that it is built around working with outside hardware, whereas a lot of the things you are using have no interest really in making other manufacturers stuff play nicely.
Edit: just to add I have noticed a marked deterioration in alexa specifically over the last year or so, directly correlating to amazon pulling away from developing it.
Over a decade in and this has not been my experience.
My personal setup is composed almost entirely of Z-Wave devices, with a small few WiFi connected devices. All of my devices work without internet access. There is no cloud dependency, except for remote access when I’m on the road and notifications. Over the years, I have swapped out controllers because I just wanted to try a different controller, or some other reason. But, regardless of controller, I have not experienced the deterioration that you report.
I have had a small few individual devices fail and require replacement. But, the overall system continues to function well.
I would guess that your deterioration is caused by a few factors. Things such as disparate systems, cloud connectivity, and WiFi issues are a common source of unreliability.
Experience with home assistant is not this. Everything runs great with extremely limited maintenance many years later for me. YMMV I guess.
Honestly, I haven’t don’t much research in recent years and this is the first I’ve heard of Home Assistant. What is there to know about it? And significant differences to setting it up?
You’re spot on. Home assistant and cloudless devices is the only way to build a smarthome, anything else will eventually stop working as cloud services are shutdown.
I’ve been building up my home assistant system and trying to stick with cloudless as much as I can because of this. Curious how often the small devices like sensors or other hardwired items need to get replaced for you? Or have they all lasted quite well? Wiring everything isnt feasible for me at my current residence but I’ve been trying to hardwired everything within reason to make everything more stable/hopefully last longer.
I haven’t had to replace any yet and have 12 zigbee temp/humidity sensors which are all battery operated.
That’s good to know! I got myself a bunch of zigbee battery sensors for temp and humidity too so that gives me some piece of mind. Have had a few go offline over the past few weeks but restarting always solved it. I’m still waiting for a proper zigbee dongle though and am currently using the Aqara hub with their sensors.
Same here. I have hundreds of devices. So far homeassistant has been reliable as hell. Especially compared to cloud based shit
You said you’re doing pot maybe that is the root of the problem. Is there a chance that you flipped a few breakers or even the main one and lost power? Are we sure this is even your house? Is it possible you’re in the wrong house and forgotten what yours looks like?