As a general rule anything with ‘smart’ in its title is suspect – Smart motorways, Smart Export Guarantee and Smart Meter all are anything but smart. So what about ‘smart’ homes – are they smart or not?

Too often smart just means anything with an app – and usually an app that relies on information about you and your household heading off to their servers. Take smart plugs as an example – they let you turn on and off an appliance, perhaps monitor power consumption all from your phone. But what’s actually smart? Convenient for sure but smart is stretching.

For us smart starts when information from different systems can be collected together and actions taken based on the state of those systems. It’s not about individual silos no matter how clever or convenient they are. Smart is turning on the heat pump hot water when its warm and sunny outside not to a fixed schedule. Smart is turning off the EV charging when the house battery level falls too low. Smart is turning off the garage lights if they have been left on accidentally. And all that is where Home Assistant comes in.

Home Assistant (HA) is open source software developed and maintained by its community that can see across all the individual silos and take actions based on what’s going on. HA will run on lots of different hardware including the reasonably inexpensive Raspberry Pi 4.

HA uses what it calls ‘integrations’ to talk to all the different systems in your home – it works with more than 1000 different brands. Here’s some of the integrations loaded onto our HA.

Integrations work with our heat pump, Solar PV, Powerwall, Hue lights, and several different smart plugs – one can even send notifications to the iPhone. Dashboards allow you to display and interact with data from any or all of these different systems as you want. Here’s our heating and hot water dashboard – almost all this information is available in the MELCloud app but with HA it’s just a glance rather than switching between screens – it also integrates a couple of other temperature sensors we have and shows what’s going on with the immersion heater. It’s also much easier to see exactly what the heat pump is doing.

The dashboard is also a controller – can set temperatures and force hot water heating. HA also logs all the data for 7 days (user set) so it’s possible to look back and see what has been happening.

Our electricity tariff is Octopus Go – the Smart meter knows nothing about this Time of Use tariff so all its figures for how much we’ve spent this day, week or month are useless. Before HA we had to wait for a bill to know the cost – now we have live numbers.

The above display uses grid import information from the Powerwall and applies it to separate cheap and peak rate virtual utility meters – switching between them at the correct time. The unit rates have been entered manually and HA calculates the cost – winner!

HA makes monitoring and controlling our home so much easier and more convenient – that’s smart!