I am failing to see the interest in having tons of IOT devices to manage, connect, segment, etc… Why would someone want to do it? To be clear, I have friends deep in it but… I still don’t understand. Can anyone try to explain the magic I am failing to see?
Edit: Thank you all for sharing your experiences! The ones I found more interesting are those that can easily translate in reducing or tracking consumption. The rest I hear but makes more sense when I look at it from an hobbyist perspective.
Yes, I’m running HomeAssistant, 100% local. Knocking on wood, no, it didn’t need a lot of maintenance, but there was a lot of tweaking necessary, e.g. until the heatpump controller hit the right indoor temperature depending on outside temp and wind speed.
There were some breaking changes in HA over time, but the authors of the integrations I’m using followed those. If they hadn’t, I would have had to push some python around myself, which I probably would have managed.
I’m doing regular restore tests and I’m monitoring the health of the HA backups. That’s my plan in case shit goes south.