The house runs largely by itself, and Home Assistant is the brain.

What’s in it

• Around 1,700 entities across 11 areas, from the office and server room to the kitchen, laundry room and boiler room.
• Over 40 automations, most of them switched on and quietly doing their thing.
• Heating and climate control, lights, power and energy monitoring, air quality and weather, plus presence detection, so the house knows who’s home.
• Around 100 switches and 150 binary sensors, including a lot of smart plugs, door and window sensors, and small battery devices.

How I use it

Most things should just happen without me. Lights, heating and plugs follow the day, the weather and whether anyone’s home. Notifications are only for things I actually need to know.

Everything is local first, so the house keeps working when the internet doesn’t. It’s also my favourite place to try things out, because the results are very real: a bad automation shows up as a cold room.

Zig Home

A small Home Assistant integration I wrote that watches for trouble: an automation that keeps failing, a sensor stuck unavailable, a value that makes no sense, a device that won’t stop chattering. For each one it asks Zig how urgent it is, so a dead battery sensor doesn’t wake anyone and a broken heating automation does. It only observes. It never touches a device or changes an automation, and without Zig it falls back to plain rules.

Agents in the house

I let agents read what’s going on, and they can suggest changes. Changing something goes through a small set of actions I’ve reviewed first. Agents get to be useful without getting the keys.

If you’re setting up something similar and have questions, feel free to ask.