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My experience is similar to GP, if only about a year long. There's a clear point when my Home Assistant setup graduated from tinkering into serious, almost critical infrastructure at home: the moment I got A/C controls working with it. Hear the tale of the two apps: 1. Haier hOn: takes between 5 and 15 seconds to start up. Assuming it didn't randomly log you out, it takes a minute of tapping through bullshit multi-level screens, with multi-second delay between each, to get to the point when you can control a single aircon unit. Switching between units is 2-5 seconds - and you need to be careful, because if you press the phone's "back" button, it'll shut down the app, so the whole 1-minute ordeal restarts. Every 5-10 control interactions, it'll go "oops, something went wrong", and then to get state and control over units, you need to restart the app. You look at it sideways, believe it or not, restart the app. Total time to set three aircon units: some two minutes, maybe more, and a lot of frustration. My wife flat-out refused to do it, instead always asked me (as I have much more experience in quickly navigating buggy software). Myself, I hated it every time. 2. Home Assistant app: takes 2-5 seconds to cold-start into the app, less than that for warm start. The default dashboard shows all three A/Cs, with controls, temperature graphs - everything at a glance, on a single screen. And then below there are controls for floor heating and other stuff. Zero crashes. Total time to set three aircon units: 3-10 seconds. I sometimes race to see how fast can I do it. My wife loves it, I never get asked to do anything with A/C for her anymore. I'm only beginning to integrate and automate more things. Recently I upgraded a bunch of cheap (but stylish, and importantly, well-built) IKEA PM2.5 sensors with ESP8266 (decade-old NodeMCUs I had in a box), and through a bunch of graphs quickly added to another Home Assistant dashboard, we've learned a lot about what does and does not affect air quality around the house. I've also started to set up automated notifications for bad air in different rooms, because it's stupid easy to do. Another stupid easy thing to do was to make my washing machine notify both of us when it's done. Or auto-dimming that one Hue bulb my kids are using as night light. Etc. If my setup died today, nothing would stop working - a few things would become less convenient, aircon would become stupidly annoying to operate again - but we would feel it, so I'm now trying to beef the hardware durability up a bit. And yes, I ain't buying anything "smart" that can't talk well with Home Assistant anymore. |