A household gradually moved onto Home Assistant. Most devices run locally over Zigbee and Wi-Fi; only a few are still connected through the manufacturer’s cloud.
What is measured and controlled
- Heating: boiler and per-room temperature control by weather and time of day – one schedule for the study, another for the bedroom, another for day and night.
- Energy: electricity consumption (a Shelly 3EM meter on the supply cables) and gas consumption.
- Temperatures: room thermometers, a weather station and phone notifications when limits are exceeded – in the attic in winter, in the pool in summer.
- Voice control: in Czech through Assist, comparing local and cloud models and with custom sentences for energy and the TV.
- Waste collection: the collection calendar in Home Assistant. For one of the municipalities, a connector was added to a community integration (homeassistant-wastecollection).
Devices
- Zigbee thermostatic valves, thermometers, remote switches and smart plugs (IKEA); devices ZHA does not understand (an mmWave presence sensor, a MOES valve, the IKEA SOMRIG button) are handled by custom quirks;
- Wi-Fi devices (Tuya), a weather station and Shelly switches;
- custom ESP32 devices programmed with ESPHome that expose entities directly to Home Assistant;
- still via the cloud: Mitsubishi air conditioning units and an Ariston boiler.
Timeline
Temperature measurement has run since roughly spring 2025, boiler control since autumn 2025, and the rest was added in 2026.