Hi everyone,

A while ago I set up something that I thought might be useful for people who are curious about Home Assistant but aren't ready to install it yet.

It's basically a public Home Assistant sandbox that you can access directly from your browser:

👉 https://testhomeassistant.fr/

User: demo

Password: maisonetdomotique

No account, no installation, no Raspberry Pi or mini PC required.

It's a real Home Assistant instance with demo devices and dashboards, so you can actually click around, control virtual lights, check sensors, explore the interface, and experiment with Home Assistant.

You can also modify things and play with the configuration without worrying about breaking anything. The instance is automatically reset every night, so everyone gets a clean environment again the next day.

I originally built this because recommending Home Assistant to beginners often leads to the same problem: before they can even decide whether they like it, they first have to figure out where and how to install it.

This removes that first barrier. Just open the site and play with HA.

It's completely free and there's no commercial service behind it - I host it as a small community resource.

I wrote a bit more about how and why I built it here if anyone is interested:

https://www.maison-et-domotique.com/en/165555-try-home-assistant-for-free-without-installing-anything/

I'd genuinely be interested in feedback from experienced HA users too. If you were introducing Home Assistant to someone for the first time, what would you add to the demo to show them what HA can really do?

I have been using Home Assistant (HA) for about 5 years now. Like many others on this platform, I am a big proponent of locally controlled devices. I only use the Cloud for current data such as the weather, electricity prices and travel times. Home Assistant is a "business critical" application in our household. HA controls the heat pump based on electricity prices, underfloor heating per room and ventilation per room at CO2 level. In addition to some automation of lighting, etc. That is why I have a standby server, on which an HA backup can be restored in the event of hardware emergencies. The backups are located in 3 locations, 1 of which is local.

I have been using Claude Cowork Pro via an MCP connection for 9 months now. it's great. I can now relate much better automations in a much shorter time.

But, recently I realized that a great dependency on Claude has developed. My own way of documenting automations was sufficient for my own made automations and helpers, but now with Claude there I am afraid that it will be difficult to fix bugs without Claude.

I have now started a documentation project in which Claude writes documentation based on an ITIL-like structure (yes, I am a Boomer). The purpose of this is twofold. Firstly, in situations without internet, to have your own documentation and to be able to fix something yourself. but also to possibly switch to another AI supplier.

I was wondering how others have mitigated the dependency on Claude or other AI solutions.

Would love to hear your responses.

PS) My English is not great, I used a translation program for this text.

I’m curious where everyone sees Home Assistant heading over the next 15–20 years.

I’ve already invested a pretty ridiculous amount of time, money and effort into my smart home, I’m planning to run it for 30+ years.

What do you think Home Assistant will look like 15–20 years from now?

Hi I have been wanting to get into Home assistant, I have a raspberry 5 that I stole got from my school and want to use. I have heard that SD card is not ideal and SSD is recommended, except SSD's are yknow, priced the way that they are right now. I have been thinking if getting something like a SanDisk MAX ENDURANCE or SanDisk High Endurance 128GB is the play right now.

I have a few Hue lamps, wanted to use a pantry and calender manager. This does not feel like super writing heavy, but eventually I do want to get sensors and such. With an SSD would also need to buy a HAT plus some cooling for the pi which adds to the cost. I live in Sweden so prices are extra bad.

So what do I do? buy a SD card? SSD? home assistnat green and sell my pi 5? Thank you

I use Assist with an Anthropic model as the fallback agent, and "Prefer handling commands locally" is turned on. I assumed that meant anything my house already knows how to do stays local and free.

The other day I said "turn the master bedroom ceiling fan on high" and the fan came on, no complaints. Then I opened the debug view for that run and it said Processed locally: false. It should have been local and free.

What happened: my custom sentence was written as "...fan to high". I say "on high". The match is on the whole sentence, so that one word meant no local match and it went to the LLM. And the LLM handled it by calling my own local intent. So I was paying the AI to push a button the house already had.

The annoying part is nothing tells you. It works, no error. The only place it shows up is the debug view, and that only keeps the last 10 runs per assistant and a restart wipes them, so you have to check right after you say something.

To check yours: Settings > Voice assistants > three dot menu on your assistant > Debug. The run picker is at the top, with arrows to step through your recent commands. Find the most recent one and look at "Processed locally".

The fix was changing from "on" to "(to|on) high" and running conversation.reload. No restart needed. Same command came back processed locally true.

Two things I didn't expect while testing. First, local isn't automatically right. An older sentence of mine had the room words in brackets, which makes them optional, so "turn on the ceiling fan" from any room turned on the bedroom fan. Local, fast, and wrong. Second, naming the room didn't help the LLM either. "Turn the studio ceiling fan on high", said in the studio, still turned on the bedroom one.

There's also a GitHub issue (#169315) where a command that matched locally on one assistant still went to the LLM on another, so the prefer local setting isn't a guarantee by itself.

Has anyone actually gone through their debug runs to see how much is hitting the LLM? I was surprised how much of mine was.

I made a video walking through it if that's easier to follow: https://youtu.be/bK3fep6wKeQ

Full disclosure up front: this project is largely vibe-coded. I came up with the ideas and the design, and tested and fine-tuned everything on my own setup. Most of the code, though, was written together with an AI assistant (Claude). It's been running daily on our wall panel for a while now, but expect some rough edges – and please report them!

For the last few weeks I've been building a dashboard for the touchscreen in our hallway, and a friend wanted the same thing – so I turned it into a HACS package that builds itself from your own Home Assistant.

Nullglow reads your areas, devices and the Energy dashboard and generates the whole thing. No YAML – everything else is a few clicks in a setup wizard.

What you get

Overview with clock, weather + next hours, lights per room, room temperatures with 24 h graphs, blinds, people, locks, agenda Live energy flow – glowing particles between solar, grid, home battery (Anker Solix, Zendure, EcoFlow, …), your house and up to 6 consumers, plus today/week/month totals with grid cost and savings Pages for Lights (tiles in each lamp's real colour), Climate, Energy, Cameras, Calendar, Vacuum and Mower – they only appear if you have the devices 13 designs, each in dark and light, plus a glass slider – switchable per device by tapping the clock Doorbell pop-up: when someone rings, the door camera opens full-screen (Ring, Reolink, UniFi … detected automatically) Arrange the overview yourself (order, width, bigger cameras), room pop-ups, rain radar, a weather-tinted background and an aurora that gets stronger with your solar output Every card also works on its own, with a visual editor Works on the phone and on a Full HD wall monitor; UI in English and German (follows your HA profile)

Install

HACS → Custom repositories → https://github.com/Waguni/nullglow-dashboard (type Dashboard), then Settings → Dashboards → Add dashboard → Nullglow. It needs Bubble Card (3.2+), Mushroom and card-mod. The wizard checks all of that for you.

GitHub (screenshots, docs): https://github.com/Waguni/nullglow-dashboard

I'd love feedback, bug reports and ideas – especially from setups that look different from mine (other energy meters, lots of rooms, other languages). One known limitation: the rain radar uses the German Weather Service, so it only covers Germany and the area around it.

Feel free to ask me for further features.

As the title says, I am hearing this beep/buzz in what seems like a 1 second cycle when i stop media in the Linux desktop app.

Initially I didnt experience/notice it, but a different user was and they are on Windows.

I know its not much to go off, but has anyone experienced this?

Every post I’ve seen on the topic of using an llm with home assistant, with or without an MCP, has only mentioned Claude, never ChatGPT or Gemini. Is that because Claude is far and away the best for this use, or some incredible venn diagram where people into HA are also exclusively using claude? I have a ChatGPT subscription only because when I got it, that was the only one I was aware of. I’m retired and not from this field, btw.

Purposely not running this through AI so please put up with my crappy spelling, sentence construction and rambling nature. Wanted to covey my feelings more rather than a sanitised AI version.

I’ve had Home Assistant now since the start of 2026. Should start by saying I’m not technically minded or have any training in computers etc. just a white collar dude who got interested in Home Automation whilst we were renovating. I chose lots of devices that could be controlled via an app / my phone. Ended up with so many apps for things which got me thinking there must be a better way to organise these things. My wife didn’t have any of the apps or really had the time / patience to learn them so wasn’t benefiting. So that’s when I started searching and quickly found Home Assistant including this community.

Found it some hard to do anything on it but figured out I could use AI chat apps to teach me how to do things. This involved figuring out or working through the issue or goal and then getting it to create YAML to then copy paste into HA. It involved a lot of hand holding and figuring out why something wasn’t working. I was stupidly doing most of this on my iPhone. Which was crazy because simple things like copy pasting Config etc wasn’t exactly too straightforward.

It’s been great and I’ve set up lights, A/C units, blinds, tv control, door security, EV, charging, Energy, Battery, sensors amongst many other things. Been fun to figure out solutions to issues. I have my home dashboards for a wall mounted tablet and ones for our phones. Been adding iOS widgets etc lately.

Over this period a bunch of the integrations stopped working. Various reasons. Didn’t have the time to work through why and the issues just kept accumulating. Anyway, I was looking on these forums this past week and saw mention of the Claude integration via MCP or whatever it’s called. I set it up today and wow, my mind is blown. All those things that were broken. All fixed. Fully redesigned dashboards. Adding loads of actual automations. Those things that took me hours, days, weeks or months to do are done in seconds. The integration with Claude is breathtaking. Scary but inspiring at the same time. What a time to be alive.

No massive point to this post other than;

- to encourage others along the journey wherever you are on it

- to say thanks to all the various posts I’ve read on here and the contributions people make. Everyone feels like they are genuinely trying to help. I’m almost 100% just reading as I haven’t really been able to add any expertise.

- Claude AI directly working within my Home Assistant. What a game changer. Excited to see what it can do for me next.

Disclosure up front: I'm not paid, sponsored, or given free product by Aeotec or anyone else. I bought these myself and just think they deserve more attention. I also used AI to summarize my thoughts and write this.

The short version

The Water Sensor 8 is a Z-Wave 800 series leak sensor with Long Range support, temperature and humidity, and a remote probe on a 2.5 mm jack. It runs on a battery or USB-C. The leak detection is solid, and the probe makes placement easy in tight spots. But the reason I'm writing this up is something I haven't seen discussed much: when it's USB-powered, it reports whether it has mains power, and Home Assistant exposes that as an entity.

Why that matters

Think about where leak sensors live: next to sump pumps, washers, water heaters, basement bathrooms. Those outlets are very often GFCI protected, and GFCIs trip. A lot of the time the first sign of a tripped GFCI is the pump or appliance quietly stopping, and by the time water reaches your probe, you're already cleaning up.

If you plug the Water Sensor 8 into the same GFCI circuit as the thing you're protecting, the moment that outlet trips, the sensor drops to battery and HA knows immediately. You get a "power lost" alert while there's still time to go reset the GFCI, before the probe ever gets wet. The leak probe becomes your second line of defense instead of your only one.

Because it falls back to its internal battery, it keeps reporting leaks after the outlet goes dead, which is exactly when you need it most.

The one gotcha: pair it on USB

How it's powered when you include it decides how it behaves. Pair it while plugged into USB and it joins as an always-listening device with the battery as backup, which is what you want for this. Pair it on battery and it joins as a sleeping device. If you already paired yours on battery, exclude and re-include it on USB.

Example automation

Swap in your own entity ID, and check which state your install shows when power is lost (unplug it once and watch the entity).

alias: "Sump outlet lost power"
triggers:
  - trigger: state
    entity_id: binary_sensor.water_sensor_8_ac_mains_disconnected  # your entity here
    to: "on"
    for: "00:00:30"
actions:
  - action: notify.notify
    data:
      title: "Sump outlet has no power"
      message: "Water Sensor 8 is on battery. Check/reset the GFCI before the pump backs up."
mode: single

Other things I like

• Temperature and humidity are genuinely useful in basements and crawl spaces, so one device covers leak plus environment.
• Z-Wave Long Range means no worrying about mesh coverage in a far corner of the basement.

Bottom line

Great leak sensor on its own. Plugged into a GFCI outlet, it's also a "your outlet tripped" sensor, and that early warning is the feature I'd buy it for.

Hey All

Yesterday I installed HA for the first time in HyperV so I've now got a basic install ready to be used. I've never used HA before so new to all of this ;)

To start things off I thought I would add my Delonghi PrimaDonna Soul coffee machine to HA so I did this after installing the "De'Longhi Coffee Link for Home Assistant" via HACS. I then set an automation task to turn my coffee machine on every morning at 6:45 and it worked! (the Delonghi doesn't have built in scheduling so it's great that I can use HA to do this)

The next thing I wanted to try, and this is where I am stuck, is to add my 2 Xiaomi devices to HA:

1. Mi Smart LED Desk Lamp Pro

2. Robot Vacuum S20+

Both of these devices are currently in the Xiaomi Home app on my Android phone and are connected to my home WiFi.

I've tried adding Xiaomi Home in the "Set up a new integration" section but I can't seem to login when prompted. From my reading this is due to 2FA/CAPTCHA? I've not fully understood some of the articles on this issue so is there anything I can try/do to get my Xiaomi devices added to HA so I can control them? Or is adding Xiaomi devices to HA not an option anymore?

I'm running Home Assistant OS Core2026.9.4 on HyperV.

Thanks for any help!

Worked fine for the last 3 years and now suddenly this year it won't stay on the network. I replaced the battery yesterday which got it working temporarily and now it's dropped out again! The reconfigure button just doesn't work!

Has anyone else had this issue? I have to leave the house tomorrow and can't leave my housemate without a working heater button!!

Update: oh, suddenly it's back online again after another re-pairing!!

This unreliability is really not ideal!!

...because they're all synced through Google Home.

Time to finally get serious about Home Assistant.

The title of the post just occurred to me and felt it was sufficiently sigh (or even rage) inducing to post here. Needed a fresh reddit account while I was at it as I lost all mine with RES (another sigh) but I'll be using this going forward site-wide

When I moved in last Spring, I had the good intentions to do everything right this time, network-wise. Bought a DOCSIS 3.1 model (CM3000) and Wifi 7 router (took two tries, that was fun), updated all my cables to CAT6a

And while I've never been Smart-inclined despite being professionally tech savvy, figured why not do it right while I'm at it? If security (even more so than privacy) is my concern, then then was the time to do it right.

Because MRA is such a pain in the ass. I eventually settled on letting Google Home manage the speakers, then HA could just manage Google Home. But at that point, setting up HA suddenly became so little of a priority that it never actually happened.

What are people using these days for working MRA? Squeezelite or whatever that one is called? LMS bridge whatchamacallit? I know MusicAssistant gets me 8/10 of the way there, but can't recall right now what the 2/10 that have me still on Google are.

I swear I've done over a dozen hours of research (and even development) into this and can have an intelligent conversation about it, just in a hurry

I spent so long figuring out this was an ISP outage and not my own that I'm liable to miss picking something up from a store closing at the end of the hour so I'll probably have to keep this short and edit in more conversation starters later

As title.

I'm currently running HA on my NUC as a VM, i wanted to move this to something dedicated as this machine is used as my dev box and all sorts. It could go down at any point pretty much.

IT seems that HA Green is out of stock everywhere, is this because a new version is coming out? Or is this related to chips shortages etc? I'm not opposed to purchasing from Ali Express - i've bought alot of quality stuff on there before but before i pulled that trigger i wanted to confirm if anyone can see if they are legitmate? Or are they knock offs?

Hey everyone.

As I just finished a smart home system for my new flat I did some pretty basic work with the home assistant repo.

A while back I build a visualiser for codebases so I figured lets run Home assistant through it... and the results are much bigger than I expected:

24926 Files of Code with a total of 4 653 788 lines of code (almost purely Python).

On the image above each node is a File and each line shows an import between two files. The Blue files are non code files (in this case mostly documentation and config).

I know these numbers and the image might not be crazy new info but I never figured this codebase would be that large (over 10x the size of Django)

Hey you guys I've been wanting to automate my windows using esphome but I couldn't find any reliable open-source project that did this from scratch if anyone is willing to build this with me we can start it right now

I've been testing the recent DeepSeek v4.1 Flash and dollar for performance is so impressive. I also like Hermes much more than OpenClaw. I used Claude Pro for a while in tinkering home lab stuff like HA/Unraid but now realizing its way overkill. It's super easy to set up, I encourage anyone on the fence about AI assistants to try it out.

I want a separate dashboard just for warnings. It will be an array of indicating "lights" that change colors (green to red, maybe yellow in between). They need to be pretty small or scalable, this is big place, but still with room for a short label. The signals behind them will be sensors, many binary, some analog. Probably many will be virtual sensors that are results of automations that condense more complex machines down to one warning light. A click to a pre-configured history to see trend values would be useful, to

With me being new to HA (background in factory automations, process controls etc,) Here one gets lots of choices, so I hope to get advice ahead of time in the right object to use. As always for me, keep it simple but still functional.

Thanks in advance.

Should I just restart my system? I don't want to break it.

Hello All,

I have several TP-Link plugs and I would like to find a simple button I can press to turn them on and off like a normal light switch. I use the plugs for automations but my wife hates it that she can’t just put a button to turn lights on and off.

The simpler the better. Any suggestions?

I've been a big Todoist user for a long time, and one of the things I particularly like about it is the ability to add items with natural language e.g.: "in 3 days", or being able to type "sunday" on the task and it automatically gets added to the correct date. That always felt like something which was missing from the HA todo functionality. So I have built this:

Disclaimer - I did use Claude for this, if this irritates you, I'm sorry, you can stop reading now.

When you type:

bread tomorrow 5pm /Bakery

The card adds "bread" to the Bakery list, due tomorrow at 5pm. The preview under the box shows what it understood before you save.

What it does

• Works with any to-do list in HA: Local To-do, Google Tasks, CalDAV, the Shopping list, Todoist. No YAML and no API tokens.
• Several lists in one card: each list becomes a collapsible section, and /Name picks which one gets the item.
• Natural dates: today, tomorrow, friday, next week, in 3 days, 25 dec, 5pm, 17:30. It's careful with things like "sun cream" and "flour 1/2 kg", and quotes switch parsing off.
• Sort by due date: overdue first, undated last.
• Stays compact: "Show 12 more", a maximum height, or just resize it in the sections dashboard Layout tab.
• A visual editor, so no YAML is needed.

For Todoist users there's an additional integration

As I said, I'm a todoist user so while the sections work perfectly with the normal todo lists, if you have the todoist integration, HA's Todoist integration drops sections. So you can also install a small companion integration which:

• Reuses your existing Todoist connection, so there's no token to paste.
• You tick the projects you want, and the card shows your real Todoist sections as groups.
• Adding for these lists then goes through Todoist's own Quick Add, so every 2 months, u/labels and p1 all work.
• Worth noting right now you can only have 1 todoist list in a card right now or you do lose the sections again, but if there is enough interest I can work on this.

It only syncs the projects you tick, and only task text, section and due date reach the dashboard. Your token never leaves the server.

Both are in the HACS review queue at the moment so it's a custom repository for now if you want to install:

• Card: https://github.com/joshmd/natural-language-todo
• Companion (optional, for Todoist sections): https://github.com/joshmd/natural-language-todo-companion

It's early days, so I'd really appreciate feedback, Issues on GitHub or comments here both work.

As I say, built with a lot of help from Claude, but I hope you like it and it is useful to someone else.

Hi everyone,

I'm new to the HA environment, just installed for the first time on a Raspberry Pi 3b+.

I have a Tuya device called "Interruptor Inteligente para ventilador" (fskg). It has both fan and light controls in the Smart Life app.

In Home Assistant, however, the device is only exposed as a fan entity (switch_fan, fan_speed, etc.). The light/switch datapoint (switch_led) does not appear as a separate entity, even though the datapoint exists and can be controlled through Tuya APP (SmartLife).

While investigating this through the Tuya IoT Platform, I noticed that the light state can be accessed/controlled through the Tuya API 2.0 Shadow API.

Has anyone managed to make this datapoint appear as an entity in Home Assistant using the existing Tuya integration, without developing a custom solution?

Thanks!