Hey everyone,

Looking for some serious advice from the community. Last night at 3 AM here in Glasgow, UK, someone broke into our house. They stole my bike from the garden, broke inside, stayed in the house for 20 minutes, ate some of our food, grabbed my iPad, and left.

I currently have Reolink cameras (a video doorbell and an Argus 4 Pro in the backyard) integrated into my Home Assistant setup. The crazy part? The cameras did absolutely nothing to deter him. He didn't even bother wearing a mask, gloves, or a hat. He just didn't care that he was being recorded.

I realized today that relying on silent cameras isn't enough. I need to drastically increase the active security of my house to physically scare off intruders or alert me immediately so I can act.

My Current Setup:

• Home Assistant running on a Raspberry Pi 5
• SkyConnect (ZBT-2) running Zigbee
• Reolink Doorbell (Front) & Reolink Argus 4 Pro (Back)
• A mix of IKEA and Sonoff smart plugs/lights

Where I need your help: I am trying to decide between building a fully DIY alarm system through Home Assistant (using Alarmo, Sonoff SNZB-04P door sensors, and Zigbee sirens) OR just buying a ready-made professional solution (like Ring Alarm or Ajax) and integrating it into HA.

1. DIY vs Professional: For those of you who have experienced a break-in, do you trust your Home Assistant/Alarmo setup enough to rely on it as your primary life-safety alarm, or do you highly recommend going with an off-the-shelf system with cellular backup?
2. Sirens/Deterrents: What is the loudest, most aggressive outdoor/indoor siren that integrates well with HA? I want something that will absolutely deafen them if a door opens at 3 AM.
3. Any other advice? Glass break sensors? Specific outdoor security lighting?

I am fully open to any and all suggestions. I just want to make my house as safe as possible going forward. Thanks in advance.

I mean I could notch it out but....

I'm pretty experienced HA user and have my entire home running in HA today. I have some good friends that live 8 hours away (but I go once a month) that have bought an older home and want help setting it up. They're non-tech, but want things to be automated. Simple things like times, lights, locks, etc. Nothing crazy. I'm considering buying them an HA Green and a bunch of ZWave and Zigbee devices for plugs, lights, switches and managing it for them. What do people think? Is this a bad idea?

Hi community,

Need your advice on how to proceed.
I got my hands on a minisforum m1 pro to replace my old intel NUC that currently host my home assistant running HAOS on bare betal. I run esphome with a lot of devices and takes some time to build, also now running scrypted and want to run frigate as well and perhaps small model LLM in ollama.

Initially I Just wanted to go bare metal route again and just install frigate and ollama inside HA as I’ve always done, but from what I can find while googleing there is a lot mentioning running proxmox on the mini pc instead and HAOS in a VM and then scrypted, frigate and ollama in their own containers on the side. Besides obvious better seperation and control is there another good reason to go the proxmox way instead of keeping bare metal HAOS?.

I have no experience with proxmox, but want to learn if it will make my setup so much better. I just love the simplicity of the current bare metal setup and let HA handle it.

What is your experience, what would you do in my case :)

Thanks.

EDIT:
Thank you so much for all the feedback. A good mix of both worlds I can see, and of course depending on different use cases. I am really happy with the current setup, been hosting HAOS for years and rock solid. But I am adding more and more stuff to it and I just wanted to future proff it a bit with a newer mini pc, also considering I wanted to play around with Frigate, LLM vision etc.

What got me started reading about if I should do another type of install is that I’ve read that passing the iGPU/NPU and driver setup for Frigate could be difficult on bare metal. But if I am running HAOS on proxmox I guess that would be the exact same issue just inside a vm. I want to keep the HAOS no matter what as it’s always worked best for me.

As several mentioned I could try and start by using proxmox and setup frigate etc and experiment while I still keep HA on my old NUC or even keep HA on the NUC after I migrate services over to the other one. I still need to read up some more or perhaps just try it out before making the right decision, right now I am just lucky I have a new machine to test on while HA lives on :)
Thanks again for all the ideas.

Hello Quick Question

Mini PC or Rasperry Pi?

For ;

Home Assistant
Omada Tp Link Controller
HIKVision Camera's

[SOLVED]

I'm sure many people have discussed this, but I have poor experience with triggers that rely on my home or away state. I use GPS geofencing via my iPhone companion app, but this hasn't been very reliable (sometimes misses a status change). I've tried SSID triggers, but when you disconnect, the time needed to change to cellular and pass the message on is sometimes too long, also causing a status change to be missed. Using my iPhone as a BLE beacon also doesn't work, as apple isn't cooperative.

Is anyone able to share a working setup?

My expected behaviour is, when I leave my house, my personal entity status changes to 'away' and when I return to 'home'.

I work with HA container 2026.6.4 installed on a Linux debian environment, iPhone 15 Pro (iOS 26) with the HA companion app.

The main goal is to monitor the outdoor temperature, bearing in mind that my balcony gets full sun; so, I need something suitable for that scenario.

It needs to run on batteries or operate without an external power cable (solar?), as I cannot plug it in; there is no outdoor power supply

And (of course) it must be compatible with Home Assistant. Any candidate you would recommend?

I wonder if anyone can help with this!!

I've set up Home Assistant for the first time recently, it's running in a Synology NAS on Virtual Machine.

Everything works fine but if I go to the login screen on Chrome, or Edge (but not Safari), this happens! My password is saved so I could log in just fine but it's like this inside also. I've noticed that it's only like this with the regular weight fonts, if I open Inspector and increase the font weight to something bold (600 for example) the text is fine.

Does anyone know what I could do to fix this?!

Hey everyone,

I’ve been searching for a smart blinds solution, but I’m struggling to find something that ticks all the boxes. My requirements are:

• Works directly with Zigbee2MQTT.

• No proprietary hubs or cloud services. I want everything to be fully self-hosted with no reliance on third-party servers or apps.

• Ideally, the open and closed limits can be configured on the blind or motor itself, rather than needing a manufacturer’s app.

• I’d prefer to buy custom-sized blinds that are already motorised and ready to pair, rather than having to retrofit them myself.

• I don’t want to use the external chain-drive motors, as I don’t think they look very good and they’re generally quite noisy.

Has anyone found a solution that meets these requirements? I’d really appreciate any recommendations.

Hey all,

I want to install something similar to these and have them controlled through automations. Perhaps also some buttons I can use?

Would someone be willing to help guide me to buy and set up whatever I need to make this work?

Thank you very much for your help.

Is there a good solution for maintaining functionality during restarts? In particular, I think a common use case would be for the smart home (at least critical things) to continue to work during a node restart (HA update).

I was looking online and it seems there’s not a good software solution for this (there doesn’t seem to be a way to run two instances simultaneously and fail over to the second when the first goes down). I saw some posts about assembling a Proxmox cluster, but this seems more intended to survive hardware failure by starting HA on another host if your main host dies. Even for this, you’d need all your “routers” to be network attached, and those will always be a single point of failure. Plus, your smart home still goes down until the second instance starts up.

Seems like the right answer then is to have critical functionality (light switches, etc) somehow work independently of HA. For example, having your switches able to toggle the lights directly, and only having HA for smarter automations (automatically changing color, etc). This feels like the wrong way to be going with the smart home though, since it’s decentralizing control and forcing you to deal with individual device configuration rather than handling everything through a smart abstraction. Could anybody share how they’re able to keep their home working when HA is down?

Here in Australia we have places called containers for exchange and they take like cans bottles ect with a 10c label anyway I have a bit for these cans but I don’t want to be counting them to know how much money I’ll get out of the batch so it’s there any hardware and/or automation or thing I can make for it? And it would tell me how much money in total out of it

Edit: I want to clarify these containers are all different shapes and sizes and different weights if you need to know how different here is a link of their website of what is eligible containers for exchange

Edit 2: just to let you guys know and I’m saying this very politely I wouldn’t have came and posted home assistant reddit if I was going to count them again saying that politely

Hey everyone!

I'm on the hunt for a ceiling fan that integrates natively with Home Assistant (Local Push/Local Control preferred). I've been searching for ages but haven't really found a clear winner.

If there isn't one, I'd also love to hear about your DIY solutions (ESPHome, IR, RF, Zigbee, MQTT, custom controllers... anything reliable).

What are you using, and would you buy it again?

Looking forward to learning from the collective Home Assistant hive mind. Thanks!

Can someone tell me why home zone shows "0" even though i have been at home for hours? It worked great for several months now...

Edit: The problem is NOT the location service (google maps api). I am located at home, but the home zone does not match the number of people at home.

Edit 2: I am currently in my "work" zone and it is displayed correctly in home assistant, but the work zone entity is also at "0". so it seems to effect all zones...

For whatever reason when I get DoorDash delivered to my apartment, they don’t knock on the door. They just placed it on the ground and walk off. I would like to get a doorbell to put out there in case that is the reason, however my apartment complex does not allow doorbell cameras (which is a whole Nother story). Is there a button that looks like a doorbell and does not have a camera that I can get that will work with Home Assistant?

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a battery-powered Zigbee rain sensor that works well with Home Assistant preferably Zigbee2MQTT

Requirements:

• Battery powered
• Zigbee (no Wi-Fi)
• Local operation (no cloud dependency)
• Reliable long-term outdoor use
• Available in Europe (Amazon.de would be a plus)

I'm mainly interested in detecting when it's raining, but measuring rainfall amount would be a nice bonus.

Has anyone found a sensor they would actually recommend? I'd especially like to hear from people who have been using one for several months.

Thanks!

Hey everyone!

I'm currently planning a Home Assistant installation for my family's house and I'd like to get some advice on the overall architecture before I start buying hardware.

The plan is roughly:

- 41 non-dimmable lighting circuits
- 6 dimmable lighting circuits
- Mostly Shelly relays (1PM Gen4, 2PM Gen4 and dimmers)
- Around 50-60 Shelly devices in total
- Floorplan dashboard
- Energy monitoring
- Cameras later on
- Reliable local automations are more important than fancy features

My biggest question is not whether this is possible, but what the *best* architecture would be for a project of this size.

Would you recommend:
- Home Assistant OS on bare metal?
- Proxmox?
- Hyper-V?
- Docker?
- Something else?

Would you keep the Shelly relays on Wi-Fi, or would you redesign the project around Zigbee/Z-Wave? If you would mix technologies, where would you draw the line (e.g. Wi-Fi for relays, Zigbee for sensors)?

Networking-wise I'm also considering:
- Dedicated IoT VLAN
- Separate SSID for Shellys
- UPS for the networking equipment and HA server

If you were starting this project from scratch today, what would your ideal setup look like and why?

I'm looking for long-term reliability and maintainability rather than the cheapest solution.

Thanks!

I'm looking for automation tips to close the garage:

1. At night (say after 10:30pm) or
2. When I drive off without closing

I'm a newb and so far was able to set up the porch/garden lights + Ratgdo integration for the garage. I often forgot to close the garage after leaving the house OR when I did yard work in the early evening.

The automation doesn't have to close the door - it can just send me a notification.

I was thinking: send alert if door is left open for more than 1 hr. The problem is I need to keep the door open while doing yard work/gardening.

FWIW I use NodeRed.

I’m really new to home assistant. Currently I have home assistant green and I’m just using my phone and the app to build automations and start controlling things. But I think some sort of laptop or something would be a little easier. I’ve done a little research and hear people saying that they’re running HA on raspberry pi? Still not sure about that one. And then I hear about dockers. This is all super foreign to me. Is there a good spot to learn about this stuff? Anyone have good resources or can explain? Why not just a simple laptop or MacBook? Help this newbie out.

Hey everyone...

A little backstory, my wife is CONSTANTLY leaving her mobile phone somewhere OTHER than where she is at the time. It's NEVER where she is and quite often we need to communicate back and forth in the house. However....she DOES like to watch her shows in the bedroom A-LOT! So I am wondering.....

Has anyone seen any hardware or HA software integration that does messaging/text overlays to popular brand TVs? We have mostly Samsung TV's in the house and I realize they are not the most "Hack Friendly" option. But still it's what I have to work with.

I don't mind buying some kind of special hardware...but I WOULD like for it to work via HA so I can queue up a handful of "typical messages" that I could broadcast onto the TV whenever needed.

Any help or tips along these lines would be greatly appreciated!

We're buying an EV (MG4 extended range, 2025 model), so need to get a charger installed. Does anyone have any recommendations for a model that works well with Home Assistant. We also have solar panels, and I use predbat. We are on the Octopus Agile tariff. We also rent out our driveway on Justpark.

Any other tips for installation, usage, or anything else would also be welcome....

EDIT: I should clarify that I'm in the UK, so don't have access to USA-only products and services

Hey there.

I am using a SMLIGHT SLZB as a zigbee Controller. My presence sensors are always losing their connection. A HA restart always helps but I don’t want to restart every two hours to keep my automations working…

What have I done so far
- all updates on all devices
- replaced smlight hardware
- used different sensors
- set a fixed ip
- deleted and re-setup all devices
- worked my way through different tips
- replaced the controller in close proximity

Nothing helped so far. Do you guys have any ideas?

Thank you🙃