[pammf]

I love Home Assistant but I now have a pretty strict minimum effort rule after years of configuring integrations and building dashboards that I would forget about after 2 months:

I only do automations (no dashboards at all), and try to keep them as simple as possible. Once I feel I’m reaching diminishing returns territory, I stop.

Only use HA if I need to mix different vendors (e.g. turn on the hue lights if the tuya sensor switches to on) or if the vendor app/service has a limitation that doesn’t allow me to do what I want. For instance, I have some automations for my Mitsubishi airco units cause their app sucks. Otherwise I’ll just use the default app or service.

Only configure an integration if I’m going to use it in an automation; I have a bunch of integrations detected that I don’t configure.

I decided to follow these rules a couple of years back, and since then I could address all my needs with almost 0 maintenance.

[AdrianB1]

How many apps do you have installed to control everything? And how is the stuff integrating if you have equipment from different vendor that need to talk to each other, like AC units with PV inverter to start and shutdown based on electricity net production and real temperature in the rooms (using external thermometers, not the one in the AC)? And how do you consolidate and monitor power consumption in a single place, are you using a different solution for that?

[c0wb0yc0d3r]

It sounds like I use HA in a similar manner. For me, I make HA available to Google Home and HomeKit. HA is just glue to hold everything together.

I tried do make a dashboard some time ago but it felt rather complicated. Google Home and HomeKit integrate the best into my life and the lives of my family that there is no way HA can compete. Maybe that will change if I find myself in a house that I own… Maybe spending time to make a dashboard will have a better value prop.

[shepherdjerred]

At the other end of the spectrum, I just managed to split up my HA automation files and mount them into a ConfigMap on my K8s cluster

https://github.com/shepherdjerred/homelab/tree/main/cdk8s/co...

[c0wb0yc0d3r]

I assume then, you don’t use HAOS? What benefit do you see by managing your config this way? Do you also have an operator to reload HA when when you update configs?

[shepherdjerred]

It’s mostly a fun way to learn Kubernetes for me. I don’t have an operator.

[c0wb0yc0d3r]

I hear ya! For awhile earlier this year I was playing around with using k8s as a router, but trying to firewall it properly was a headache.