The BEST Smart Home System money can buy!

Hope this helped clear up any confusion on what I use! Another smart home tour coming soon, so make sure you're subscribed 👏

I hate homekit

Totally agree. I came to the same conclusion. Homekit+Hass! Thanks for the great videos.

😂 you don't know how much I enjoy watching your videos bro,,,

just a question, I want to buy home assistant yellow and I have no experience at all, what exactly should I buy with it to start the game. I really hope there is one package (yellow not green) and ready to go.

Thanks man.

I’m on HomeKit and home assistant combo. Couldn’t be happier. I tried my best to avoid using home assistant. Then finally took the plunge. It’s a bit of a time sink initially. But after that. It’s the great

What about homebridge?

Would be interested in the energy consumption of a Smart Home, which is "always on".

Threw all my Amazon stuff away.

Did you integrate Eufy Security with HA? If so, how did you do it?

I use hubitat because I like the rules I can create with it. But the mobile app is pretty bad. So I use Google Home to manage the devices. I can't seem to get a virtual button to show up in Home though.

u chose the lamest one possible

I am using Google + SmartThings.

Sonoff or Shelly you don’t need anything else

It seems that the smart home spectrum in terms of users is very broad. It is awesome that there are smart home geniuses that can configure fairly complicated setups. I wonder what percentage of people buying smart home gadgets are willing or able to go beyond setting them up in their native apps? Thanks for the video.

Your grouping.. What?? I'd group them into "brains" and digital assistants. Sure Samsung has Bixby - but I've never seen a standalone Bixby speaker. Google so far is assistant only. Alexa do have zigbee in some but still mainly an assistant.

Hi, can you elaborate on how you linked your backyard patio door to backyard patio lights as I am in the same situation you are as there is no switch close to the door. Would be interested in the sensor and lights used. Thanks

I'm moving into a 20 year old home soon and plan on doing a complete smarthome from the ground up. I've done SmartThings in my new home for the last 5 years and am so done with ST. I like your hybrid approach. If you didn't have any legacy constraints and were also moving into a 20 year old home (may not have neutral wires), what would you recommend for the smart hub (HA? or Homey?), still use Google for front-end/dashboard? and what about light switches (Lutron?), thermostat, cameras, etc? Appreciate y'alls input.

❤❤ Sir my Name is Beston and I just zip my mouth for now.

LOL loved the outro

i hate home assistant. homey is the best

I looked into Smart Home technology a couple of years ago and Node Red seemed like the most interesting tool I saw for creating interesting automations

So do you delete all your items from HomeKit and setup in HA? Or use HA for whatever HomeKit doesn’t support and then use HomeKit as normal?

My devices are basically Hue Bulbs, Ubiquiti cameras, Aqara items.

Trying to decide who should run what? I already have Ubiquiti cameras in HA and expose to HomeKit that way.

Oh if HA was as easy as you make it look :-(

Hey Reed, do you have a step step guide to set up a home assistant I new to this

yeah we'v been doing homekit+ha too, because none of the wealthy clients seem to be using android devices :) Just a tip: don't use raspberry for ha. it's reboot times are atrocious. Use minipc(n100) at least(same price as raspbery, sometimes cheaper)

The argument for apple and security is a bold face lie. Apple handed over user data to the Chinese Communist Party to help prosecute protesters in Hong Kong. Yet refuse to help the FBI. They bend over backwards for authoritarian governments prosecuting peaceful protesters and refuse the help prosecute a shooter.

Been wanting to switch to Home Kit from Alexa since Matter came out. I’m just so deep into Amazons ecosystem with several devices. Seriously considering just using both together

Question, I live in the country and I have a long driveway. I have smart flood lights on my house and I want to put a sensor on a tree pointing towards driveway so when tripped flood lights will come on. What are some good sensors?

I settled on HomeKit and Home Assistant a couple of years ago for basically all these same reasons

Vindicated lol

Should I go with your dongle? A different one? Is the sky connect any good?

We recently decided we wanted to ditch our amazon echos for privacy and advertising reasons, also tired of all the nagging and talking. I was always impressed by the reliability of HomeKit and it is surprisingly easy to work with if you use homeasisstant as your primary hub. Recently we moved and I decided to make the full switch over to HomeKit and homeassistant. I bought a HomePod for each room but I found myself using my iPhone for voice control more often so I returned all but one of them so I could have out of home access. By bridging homeassistant entities to homekit you can access most of your smart home functionality through the home app when on the go. Highly recommend the homekit and homeassistant combination if you want a fully local smart home!

I have a eve smart plug but it won’t connect to my home app 😔 do I need something else to make it work? Thank u

I would love to use HA, but every time I watch a how-to video the steps are different from those I can see, plus the person doing the step-by-step normally misses a step or fails to actually describe what and why something happens. Start off small, like motion detected, turn on the lights

Your "cost" column in rating the systems is wrong. It's inverted - if a system is cheaper, it should have a larger number, not a smaller number!

Oh boy! Paul Hibbert you gotta watch this....... Reed just lost his mind! 🤣🤣

Thanks for the rundown of the current options and limitations. I've been pretty happy with google home front end and smartthings back end. I guess I don't do anything too crazy so I'll probably stick with smartthings. I'm going to stop buying zwave devices though as I feel zigbee/thread is where the market will be going.

Would you still recommend an AppleTV setup for someone who does not own an iPhone and does not want one?

So what you described with using Home Assistant and HomeKit is my exact motive operation. I use Home Assistant for all of my automations, but I use the HomeKit dashboard on my phone when I want to control devices and not use Alexa. I really would like to put together a nice HomeKit dashboard but as you stated it takes so long and it's complicated to get what you want so it's been an ongoing project for two years now that really don't have a lot of urgency to complete because of the HomeKit dashboard.I'm in the process of redoing my Home Assistant set up, I'm going from the supervised version running on a standalone Debian, VM to the container version of Home Assistant, running on my Ubuntu VM, with the rest of my docker containers. I'm also totally dumping SmartThings and have picked up one of those Sonoff zigbee dongles. Right now I'm running in parallel between my all set up and the new set up as a POC. It's been going well and I have some time over the holidays and I'm going to definitely complete my transition. Thank you for all the great videos that you make. I learned so much from you and others in the home automation community.

Google Home has become dumb as a bag of rocks over the last 18 months and is failing to recognise even the most basic of tasks. I can't wait for Home Assistant to have voice command hardware released as I can see all companies moving towards LLMs and charging a monthly fee for them.

I was really bummed when Google essentially became incompatible with IFTTT

All american solutions should be banned for harvesting data.

I have a homekit set up with homebridge on a raspberry pi. Would love to see more videos on how to use home assistant with my set up!!!

One of the challenges I have right now is - integrate IKEA hub that manages ALL the light in a home, into home assistant. With android and Dirigera Hub it is literally impossible, there is only way through iOS integration... I even started thinking to throw the hub away and connect all the lights and buttons directly to HA, but then Alexa & Google integration will suffer, and e.g. IKEA hub updates firmwares OTA on devices, so I'm going to lack this feature and likely something else :( if there is anybody who managed to connect Dirigera Hub to HA without Apple devices, please let me know.

Do you use home assistant on raspberry pi??

👌🙏

I have home assistant on a vm on a server that also runs my vpn and a Minecraft server. It works really good

I have an idea to use NFC tags to help me remember/complete tasks (with my ADHD). To-do lists and reminders are ineffective with me. So, I figure some creative solutions are needed. I just don't know how to go about it to make it a reality.
The idea:
I want to make life more like an RPG, with completed tasks gaining me experience points. Do the dishes, tap the tag, XP added to a leveling system. Any chore or activity I want to incentivize. I could assign different values to each tag, so I'm motivated to continue completing things. Then, I could come up with rewards for myself when I level up.
Have any idea how to do this? Or as a thought experiment, how would you go about setting this up?

As someone who was initially pretty intimidated by the complexity of using Home Assistant, I can say that my fears were over-exaggerated and the more that I've gotten into it, the more I've been able to slowly learn from channels like this one. The thing that really made my decision was that I'm extremely privacy conscious and I do NOT want to send my data to the cloud (i.e a computer on the internet owned by corporation(s) with extremely sketchy records on privacy and security, especially with all of the recent data breaches). The thought of putting an amazon echo in my home that listens to you 1984 style is incredibly disturbing and I encourage everyone I know to avoid the Big Tech companies especially when it comes to smart home products. It's easier to use them of course, but at the very cost of your privacy and control you have over those devices.

One tip for HomeKit Bridge is use a .yaml file instead of the GUI. It's a lot neater and honestly easier to add devices instead of having to mindlessly scroll with the GUI. Plus you get more device customizations that way.