Home Assistant is a free Open Source device integration platform enabling a wide range of sensors and automations to make life that bit more smart and enabling data to be displayed in a way that suits you.

I’m a late starter with Home Assistant and after watching loads of YouTube videos’ I bought the bits in February 24.

I must make it clear to start with, I’m a novice and not a programmer all my information comes from forums and YouTube.

The image above is the brains of Home Assistant and as you can see it is very compact, the enclosure houses a Raspberry Pi4B and fan, beneath the unit is an external SSD Hard Drive.

Home Assistant is powered by a PoE adapter, to the right of the picture you can see a Conbee II Zigbee Gateway used to receive data from wireless devices.

How do I use it?

Home Assistant is so incredibly adaptable, only your imagination is the constraint, my needs are a lot simpler and I wouldn’t know how to do half of the stuff its capable of 🙂

My main use is data collection to allow me to monitor performance after that I have a few alerts set up and linked automations.

The above is a portion of my main dashboard which is accessible anywhere on my home network, it is also available to me via the internet by subscribing to an inexpensive service.

From this one dashboard I can monitor a large number of variables to builds trends and performance management also there are of automations, the obvious one is for Octopus Free Energy, once a period of free energy is known and its duration, I enable the automation and a number of power hungry devices automatically turn on for the duration to make best use of the power, items turned on are the Immersion Heater, tumble dryer and underfloor heating, but it could be anything with a Home Assistant linked device.

A less obvious automation is based on Mains Water Pressure as where I live the water pressure can drop very low, so being alerted to this is very useful.

The automation is set so that if the water pressure drops to less than 1 bar for 1 minute, my mobile phone is sent a notification, I also get similar phone notifications if my leak detectors trigger, (Kitchen, Boiler and Irrigation System enclosure).

This is just a small introduction as to what Home Assistant can do, go enjoy!