Home Assistant has been on my server for three years. In that time I’ve gone through two complete configuration rebuilds, added and removed probably 40 integrations, broken my heating automations twice, and spent one memorable Saturday afternoon restoring a backup because an update wiped my dashboard configuration.

I still use it every day. Here’s what actually stuck.

How I Run It

Home Assistant runs as a dedicated VM on my Unraid server, not in Docker. The VM approach matters for one specific reason: USB device passthrough. I use a Zigbee coordinator – specifically the SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus – and Zigbee2MQTT needs reliable, consistent access to that USB device. VM-based USB passthrough is more stable for this than Docker’s device mapping.

The VM gets 4GB RAM, 4 CPU cores, and a 32GB virtual disk for the Home Assistant OS installation. The Zigbee dongle is passed through as a USB device. It’s been running this way for 18 months without a stability issue.

What I Actually Use Home Assistant For

Lighting automations – This is the bread and butter. Lights turn on at sunset based on the actual time, not a fixed schedule. The bedroom dims to 10% after 9pm. The kids’ rooms turn off automatically at 9:30pm on school nights. These automations run probably 100 times a day and they work every time. It’s the thing that would be hardest to live without.

Presence detection – The house knows when everyone has left and arms the alarm mode automatically. It knows when we’re coming home and turns on lights. This uses phone GPS via the Home Assistant Companion app. It’s not 100% reliable – occasionally it thinks someone left when they didn’t – but it’s right often enough to be useful.

Unraid server monitoring – I have a custom dashboard that shows drive temperatures, container status, and memory usage from the Unraid server. When a drive runs hot or a container crashes, I see it on the HA dashboard before I get to the server’s own UI. This uses the Unraid integration from HACS.

Energy monitoring – I added a clamp-style energy monitor to the main panel and now I can see whole-home power consumption in real time. After a month of monitoring, I identified that my old chest freezer was using 4x what a modern one would. Replaced it, cut about $15/month off the power bill.

Notification routing – HA sends me a Telegram notification when the laundry finishes (via a vibration sensor on the machine), when a door is left open for more than 10 minutes, and when smoke detectors trigger. These are quality-of-life additions that don’t sound impressive until you’ve used them for a week.

What I Tried and Gave Up On

Voice control – I set up Wyoming + Whisper for local voice commands. It worked, barely. The response latency was 2-3 seconds, the false positive rate was annoying, and the command recognition wasn’t reliable enough for my family to use confidently. We still use Alexa for voice control because it just works, and it hands off to HA automations through the Alexa integration.

Complex multi-condition automations – I got ambitious and built automations that combined presence, time, weather, and calendar events. They were impressive when they worked. When they didn’t work, debugging was miserable. I now keep automations simple: one or two conditions, clear trigger, predictable outcome. The fancy stuff gets rebuilt when it breaks and never works right again.

Thermostat control – My HVAC system is old enough that the integration wasn’t reliable. The heat turned on at wrong times twice in a week and I disabled the automation. Some things aren’t worth the smart home treatment.

The Zigbee Setup

I run about 30 Zigbee devices: light switches, motion sensors, door/window sensors, smart plugs. Zigbee2MQTT manages the mesh. The SONOFF dongle is the coordinator. Everything goes through the MQTT broker and into Home Assistant as entities.

Zigbee is more reliable than Z-Wave in my experience and cheaper than Matter for this scale. The mesh self-heals around dead devices. I’ve had devices offline for weeks, replaced them, and the mesh recovered on its own.

Is Home Assistant Worth the Setup Cost

If you want smart home features that work exactly the way you configured them and don’t require a subscription or a cloud connection to function, yes. The setup cost is real – expect to spend a weekend getting it configured properly. The ongoing maintenance is lower than the initial setup, but it’s not zero.

If you just want lights you can turn on with your phone, buy a Hue starter kit and don’t look back. Home Assistant is for people who want control, not convenience.

Next: setting up a reverse proxy at home without losing your mind.

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Affiliate disclosure: Some links in this post are Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through them, I get a small commission at no cost to you. It helps keep the lights on here.