Now my smart home’s getting really smart: I’ve discovered Home Assistant
With Home Assistant, I can finally control my smart home the way I need to – intelligently and automatically. Here you’ll find out why I’m so enthusiastic about it and how you can get started too.
For 8 years I’ve been using smart devices in my apartment. And I always had the feeling I wasn’t really exploiting their potential. Many apps made by manufacturers are limited in their capabilities. They can switch on the light or heating at 7 p.m. and control lighting via voice command. But they’re boring, and I was sure there must be more. There is, I just didn’t know where to start. That all changed last year.
One day, my brother was all excited when he told me about a smart home platform called «Home Assistant». «You mean Google Assistant?» I asked. «No, Home Assistant,» he said, holding his smartphone under my nose. «Here in my house floor plan – you see – you can see the room temperatures and whether a window’s open. There –» he swiped to the side «… whether the washing machine’s running. And here, how many watts the balcony power plant delivers».
«And that’s all in one app?», I asked him eagerly. At this point, I already had four or five apps for devices from different manufacturers on my smartphone. «All in one app. And if the temperature in the fireplace drops below 50 degrees, my phone sends me a push notification to put new wood on.» … All right, say no more! I soon found out that Home Assistant has many advantages:
- only one app to control all devices
- highly customisable control panels and overviews (dashboards)
- very wide range of functions, which enables unusual automations
- an active community for help and inspiration
None of this is possible with manufacturer apps or smart home platforms such as Alexa – at least, not to the same extent. It quickly became clear that I needed Home Assistant too.
What is Home Assistant?
You can think of Home Assistant as the brain of a complex organism. I use it to enable devices with different purposes and from different manufacturers to work together.
It’s an open-source platform that I use to control my smart home locally, i.e. without a cloud. All my smart devices – from the router to the robot vacuum cleaner, lamps and sockets through to self-made sensors – are integrated into one system. I manage everything via a browser interface and the Home Assistant app «Companion».
According to the Home Assistant developer website, more than 1,000 manufacturers offer an interface for their products or services that can be integrated and used on the platform. You can get devices with Matter Support in Home Assistant without the need for manufacturer integration. It works really well for my Govee lamps, like the table lamp(/s14/product/govee-table-lamp-500-lm-tischlampe-47491420) and the Gaming Wall Lights. Since March 2025, there’s also been a certification for Matter support.
And if neither Matter nor the manufacturer integration helps, the community often has a solution. As Home Assistant is an open source, you can easily add your own tools. That’s why there are often workarounds that work – and detailed instructions for them. It’s a nice feeling that there isn’t a huge corporation like Google Home behind the project .
When you integrate a device into Home Assistant, it reveals its inner workings. This is how I sometimes find sensor values and functions hidden in the manufacturer’s original app. It was only when I started using Home Assistant that I learnt that Philips Hue motion detectors have an integrated thermometer, for example. Any of these functions and sensor values can be used for automations.
How I got started in the Home Assistant world
I installed Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 5, an inexpensive single-board computer. It’s connected to the router via an Ethernet cable and has a WLAN module which is used to communicate with numerous devices in the network. The starter kit also includes a case and the necessary cables.
When you install the Home Assistant operating system, there’s no screen involved, and in my case it wasn’t entirely straightforward. I can’t remember exactly which manual I used for help, but this somewhat more recent installation guide reads quite reasonably to me.
One of the largest German-language Home Assistant YouTube channels, Simon42, recommends Home Assistant Green as the simplest method. This is a system specially designed for Home Assistant and is offered by Nabu Casa. The Home Assistant operating system is already pre-installed on it.
Home Assistant can also be installed on old Office computers or as a virtual machine. An incomplete overview of the possible platforms that support Home Assistant can be found here (link in German). It’s important that your platform is continuously running so that Home Assistant can reliably control all automations.
If you’re interested in Home Assistant, I recommend you find the right platform to run it on first.
Automations: the socket controls my heating
Automations in Home Assistant go far beyond boring timer functions. Basically, they’re «if this, then that» command chains.
My most sensible automation is probably that the heating only warms up my room when I’m inside it. I don’t need an Occupy sensor for this – my habits aren’t changing. I use the room 99 per cent of the time for work or gaming. In other words, the computer or laptop are switched on.
All desk devices are connected to a smart adapter plug. If the measured power exceeds 50 watts, this means I’m present and don’t want to freeze. As a result, the heating’s set to 19 degrees. If I shut down the computer and leave it off for two minutes, the heating switches to a target temperature of 16 degrees. And the best thing about it? The socket’s switched off shortly afterwards so that my devices don’t draw any standby power.
I don’t have to switch on the socket in the morning either. If I remove the charging cable from my phone between 6 and 8 a.m. on weekdays – the battery status changes from «full» to «discharging» – Home Assistant knows that I’ve pulled myself out of bed. 10 minutes later, the desk power socket switches on and my favourite lights come on. So everything’s ready when I enter my room. All I have to do is make my own coffee.
To design well-functioning automations, I first have to observe my everyday life. Time settings alone often don’t cut it. What are my habits and when do I do them? How can they be defined?
Motion detectors wouldn’t be suitable for controlling the bathroom lights, for example, if someone’s stood in the shower. The sensor can’t detect any movement in the shower corner. But the smart thermostat tracks the humidity. So I can see the changes in humidity and define limit values from it. Now Home Assistant knows whether someone’s taking a shower, and I can use this to interrupt the automatic light switch-off.
Personalised dashboards: my control centre
I don’t need most of the device functions and information all the time. I organise what I need clearly on a dashboard. This means I always have the most important information and switches at a glance – even on my phone thanks to the «Companion» app. Home Assistant offers a functional demo for illustration purposes.
The nice thing about dashboards is that I can design them however I want. I also don’t have to limit myself to just one dashboard. The community provides lots of self-made themes.
Or I can create one myself: with an additional plugin, the info cards understand CSS instructions and can be styled like a website. For example, I can create one for each room and each resident, or one just for lighting control.
This is also very helpful for my husband. Until now, he had little interest in downloading multiple manufacturer apps to control lights and sockets. But with the Home Assistant «Companion» and its own dashboard, things are simple and he uses it all the time, much to my delight.
It took me a little time to get used to Home Assistant. I first had to think about what I wanted and become aware of the many possibilities. But since I’ve had the heating control system, there’s no stopping me. I want to integrate more devices, automate more and visualise more. So I’m going to take you on this journey with me in future posts. The next article will be about dashboards. Since they’re highly customisable, I’ll show you what I used to create mine.
Header image: Debora Pape
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Feels just as comfortable in front of a gaming PC as she does in a hammock in the garden. Likes the Roman Empire, container ships and science fiction books. Focuses mostly on unearthing news stories about IT and smart products.
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