My Favourite Things To Use With Home Assistant (HASS Top 5)

Over the past three and a half years I’ve accrued a lot of experience with the frankly amazing home automation software called Home Assistant. More and more device makers are joining the “Works With Home Assistant” program, and in general HASS is getting easier to use and more feature rich by the day. Since I’ve spent so long testing devices, writing automations and even making my own smart devices, I thought I’d share my favourite things to use with Home Assistant. I’ve specifically picked my top five, which includes both incredibly useful and powerful free software, and devices that are worth every penny. Let’s dive in, starting from five and working to my favourite at number one!

Coming in at number five is the first free bit of software that completely changes what you can do with Home Assistant, the Home Assistant Community Store, or HACS. This is basically a requirement when you install Home Assistant, and somewhat frustratingly it does require a GitHub account to work, and you’ll need to link HACS to your GitHub account, but once you’ve done that… man this thing is amazing. HACS basically acts as a one-click-install agent for thousands of community made integrations. You can search through all the repositories available, and chances are if you can think of it, someone has already made it. These can be integrations for devices – one of the top downloaded integrations is for Miele devices to work with Home Assistant, but everything from MySkoda to your TCL TV Remote is here – or integrations for cloud services – stuff like OpenAI Extended conversation agent, but also openWeatherMap or one that I found while writing this, SolCast. SolCast gives you a forecast for how much solar energy you are likely to produce today, and once you’ve got an API key you can tie it into the integration and view your expect versus actual solar power generation. This is pretty amazing, especially because it’s surprisingly accurate, at least in the trends. I might need to tweak the values slightly, but damn this is cool. The other cloud integration I use from HACS is actually the DVLA service – yes, the UK Driver and Vehicle Licencing Agency have an API – which lets me see when mine and my wife’s cars are due for MOT or road tax. That’s pretty cool, and handy!

There are also a bunch of integrations that just add really useful features like the Adaptive Lighting integration I use. This automatically changes the brightness and colour temperature of your smart lights throughout the day, so it’s a cool and bright light in the morning, and gradually warms and dims into the evening and night. I think this was the first custom integration I installed, and I love it so much. It makes the smart lights genuinely smart, and makes the house feel more bright and active during the day, yet warm and cosy at night. This is a must-install for me. Oh, and there are also dashboard integrations in here too, mostly things like different cards to show information or control entities – there’s loads here. I have a few, like the mini-graph-card, but there’s loads. Weather cards, mushroom sliders, and so much more. HACS is an incredibly useful tool, and something I highly recommend you install, if nothing else because it lets you install part of the next item on the list.

At number four, we have my favourite automation software, NodeRED. NodeRED is a visual programming tool that basically acts as Home Assistant’s automations on steroids. All of my truly smart functionality is run by NodeRED, and once you install the Add-On in the add-on store, you’ll also want to use HACS to install the NodeRED companion which ties HASS into NodeRED. Within NodeRED you have ‘flows’. These are basically pages with all the functions and logic you need to make something smart. There are loads of Home Assistant nodes, things like regularly polling an entity’s state, getting history, zones, times, and sending actions too. For example, my smart heating flow. This does a whole lot, like presence detection using mine and my wife’s phone IP addresses, setting the temperature of the central heating based on multiple temperature sensors, and turning on and off individual radiators based on that room’s temperature, and changing what rooms to base the set temperature off of depending on the time of day. My solar energy flow does a whole lot too, mostly calculating energy usage and cost savings, but also now controlling my automatic changeover switch too. I use NodeRED kinda ‘wrong’, in the sense that because I know javascript pretty well – that’s what the “function” blocks use – I mostly just use the nodes that get me the data, then I write the code I need in function blocks, then use the action or entity blocks to update or control stuff. The ‘correct way’, and I put that in quotes because if it works, there is no correct way, is to use the built in logic blocks. Stuff like switches, changes, or range blocks. But, use this however you want. This is just a great way to do a lot more with your automations – control multiple devices from one, do different things depending on certain states, it’s so customisable and I highly recommend it. 

Number three on my list is even more customisable, and that is ESPHome. ESPHome is made by the same people who make Home Assistant, Nabu Casa, and it’s basically a platform to really simply create your own smart home devices, specifically using ESP boards from Espresiff, like the ESP32 and ESP8266. I’ve made a number of ESPHome devices, including to control my studio lights, and doing it is pretty simple. You don’t need to code anything, you just write out what you want the board to do – say toggle a pin high or low, by using a switch, or talk to a specific sensor by telling it to use that sensor’s library. You can do clever stuff like interlock inputs so you can’t have two opposing switches on at the same time, or really advanced stuff like lamdas – basically little snippets of code that let you filter or alter data from the board itself. I use this for my DIY weather station, and while I do need to tweak this to make it more useful and accurate, the fact you can do this so easily, with incredibly cheap NodeMCU boards like these, is amazing. I highly recommend you check these out if you want to make your own smart devices – specifically making dumb tech smart. 

Number two on the list might end up being number one in a few years, but for the time being it stays at number two – Matter. Matter is a mesh networking protocol (to be pedantic it’s actually Thread that does the networking) that lets all your smart tech talk to each other, strengthen your network signal, and work as one cohesive unit. Matter devices – specifically Matter-Over-Thread devices – don’t connect to your WiFi, and therefore can’t become part of a botnet, aren’t horrendously insecure, and don’t clog up your WiFi either. Thread-based Matter devices connect to Home Assistant with a little dongle like this one, which is generally around £30, and it means devices like smart bulbs, plugs, sensors and even door locks can all talk to Home Assistant, and only Home Assistant. I personally use an EVE smart plug, a Nanoleaf smart bulb, and amazing the Homekit enabled Nanoleaf strip actually connects to the same Thread network too. Matter is likely the future of smart home tech. The big players like Philips and Samsung seems to be pivoting to Matter over Thread devices, so in a couple of years it’s likely that you’ll find more Matter devices than basically anything else. 

But coming in at number one is the current favourite, Zigbee. Zigbee is, at least currently, the gold standard for smart home devices. It is a full-stack protocol, meaning there’s none of this Matter-over-Thread nonsense, it’s Zigbee, or it isn’t. Zigbee devices mesh together, so even if a device is right at the other end of your house from your Home Assistant machine, those devices can still connect and work via other (mains powered) devices. I have a lot of Zigbee kit – switch plates, bulbs, thermostats, radiator TRVs, a custom Zigbee doorbell I made myself, and by far my favourite, these Sonoff R1-Mini relays. These things are a complete game changer. These take your regular wall mounted switches as an input, and output to the light, or lights, you want to control. These things are amazing for one crucial feature, which only just started working properly in a recent update to Home Assistant – decoupled mode. Basically, instead of your main light switches killing power to your smart bulbs – either without the relay directly, or by controlling the relay itself – the relay can basically take the switch input as a separate input, and then you create an automation in Home Assistant (or NodeRED) to control the lights via Zigbee. This means the lights retain power, so the adaptive lighting can keep updating the lights so whenever you command them on, they are at the right brightness and temperature. They also stay connected to the network, so they can act as repeaters for the whole network, rather than being switched on and off throughout the day. These things are my favourite smart home product, specifically because they enable everything else to work so well – oh and because these are mains powered, these are repeaters too!

You can find a Zigbee version of basically anything smart. Door and window sensors, curtain bots, temperature or motion sensors, smart radiator valves, light switches, relays, heating controls, literally anything you can think of, there’s likely a Zigbee version of it. The magic thing about Zigbee too is that it’s been around a while, and lots of supposedly proprietary smart tech is actually just Zigbee. Take the British Gas Hive smart thermostat. That is actually just two Zigbee devices paired to each other. In Home Assistant you can pair them and use it like any other smart thermostat and controller, which means these things keep working. You don’t have to rip them out and replace them when Hive end-of-life’s them – which they already have mind you. Head to the Zigbee2MQTT website to see a full list of supported devices (although I use ZHA in Home Assistant instead of Zigbee2MQTT specifically) – there is a lot to choose from!

I think by far my favourite thing though is Home Assistant itself. The free and open source nature makes it inherently loveable, and to have such a powerful – and ever improving – bit of software to take control of your own smart home tech is just incredible – and for free no less! Now I’ve got it, I can’t imagine not having Home Assistant automating my life. The quality of life features it brings – from soft-on colour-changing-throughout-the-day lights, to a smart heating system I never need to think about – it’s just amazing, and the fact that I control it entirely – no connections to Chinese servers just to turn my lights on, no Amazon spying on me – is just perfect. If you don’t already have Home Assistant set up, I cannot recommend it any more than that. You need this, and luckily I have guides on how to get it up and running, and set up all the cool tech I’ve got here, live on the channel already. I’ll link that in the cards above and on the end cards for you to check out.