Home Automation: Extend, Not Replace
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The idea of the smart home is decades old, especially when you think all the way back to cartoons like The Jetsons. A home that works with / for you. Speed up to 2025 and we're a good decade into what people think of as the smart home with smart light bulbs. Since then, you can go as far and deep as you want with smart appliances, lights, locks, etc. with a bunch of various protocols and standards like Zigbee, Bluetooth-LE, Matter, Thread. What I wish to specifically hone in on is my personal usage and mindset of Home Assistant, an open source application and platform for orchestrating smart home devices with a local-first mindset, and on top of that, how I think about using smart home devices.
I have dabbled in smart home systems, specifically with lighting since the mid 2010s, though for the longest time the tools I used had either gated systems with hubs just for a particular brand as well as relying on cloud infrastructure for managing them. When you think about smart lighting, Phillips Hue is likely one of the first brands that come to mind, and they have a lot of tooling and features that are siloed into needing either their hub or cloud services. As of this year, they do allow you to use Matter to hook up them into an Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, or other ecosystem with a limited / more manual feature set, but that is relatively new on the scene. As well when you start thinking about expanding your setup, you would likely be adding more and more hubs or apps on your phone which definitely is cluttered.
A lot of these downsides are mended by a platform like Home Assistant. Due to its open source nature, the setup could be just installing the application on a local computer, but as well Home Assistant offers prebuilt setups like the Home Assistant Green as a relatively inexpensive device that will run Home Assistant for you on your network. From there, depending on the protocol that your smart devices speak (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Thread) Home Assistant will recognize them and add them to its interface. Then you can manage them as you would with any other home app, but the main difference is the lack of needing to jump up to a cloud service, so if the external internet is having outages or issues, you still can control your local devices without any issue.
Continuing on, Home Assistant then will provide all of the metrics and controls of all of your devices to power automations that you wish to use. They don't require you to write code but at least understand logic principles like if-then statements. So say I have a smart plug connected to a coffee machine that I know I will only use during the morning, I could have it turn on the machine at say 6am and turn it off at 11am by setting up a scheduled based workflow. Or maybe I have a space heater that I want running for my evenings. I could grab the temperature of a room off a temperature sensor and similarly use a smart plug to turn on the heater only when needed.
Now say I want to work outside the bounds of either of those workflows and say make a cup of hot chocolate at 3pm or warm my office up at 7am regardless of the actual temp. Both of those examples I could just turn the smart switch on and have the devices still function, and this I think is a good mindset about the smart home having fallbacks. For people like myself who live by themselves I could go as deep as I want and complex as I want. That said, for families or people who live with others and don't want to teach everyone how to use the lights or other devices, you should have a fallback to the standard interface. For lights you still can use the physical switches on either lamps or switches in your living space or install smart switches that can still work when Home Assistant is down. For devices with smart plugs, this would be having buttons on the actual plugs to be able to turn things on and off. For smart locks, you still can use a physical key or turn the deadbolt on the inside. Across all of these, if your internet or power are having issues, you still have ways of using the devices and aren't locked out until Home Assistant comes back online.
The ecosystem of the smart home can be as shallow or deep as one wishes, but I feel for the longevity and to reduce the burden and stress that comes out of them, one should focus on a mindset of extending but not replacing. Get the benefit of automations and all of these devices working with each other, but have the fallback of using them as you would even if they didn't have the smarts enabled. We may not be fully automated like the Jetsons, but we're in a state where the smart home can definitely work for us and not against us.