5 Home Assistant Beginner MISTAKES to Avoid!

Be truthful...which ones are you guilty of? 😂

Thank you so much for not doing annoying injections of humor and non-revelant content like many of the other youtubers. Your channel is great!

Yeah, make part two!

i'm really glad i followed your backup video, it works great and gives some peace of mind

Just came here from Paul Hibbert's video on Home Assistant, and I've gotta admit: He's right. The "mistakes" you've named are a mismatch of expectations between normal people and Home Assistant. "Why didn't you read the Release Notes"? Because users shouldn't and don't expect to have to read the release notes. I appreciate the work that goes into Home Assistant, but let's not blame the user and pretend that this is an acceptable user experience design.

Point 3 & 4 go hand-in-hand so to speak. Always make a (full) backup before your update or change anything in HA. If something stops working and you can't get it to work fast enough, restore the backup and than take your time to research the issue. Sometimes it can be worthwhile to also backup the failing 'instance' before your overwrite it with the last backup cause if you have the answer, first backup your HA instance again (always use a fresh backup!), restore the backup with the failed upgrade, apply the fixes that you've found and test HA properly.. If you're using the file-based (sqlite) configuration system and it took several days or even weeks to find an answer to your issue, you might want to perform a fresh upgrade. Otherwise you can loose changes to automations that you (or someone else) made in the meantime. Another common mistake I want to add is that I see people immediately start adding tons of integrations for stuff they 'might' want to use. This is fine as long as you're in the playground phase, but once you really start controlling parts of your house (or office) you need to carefully choose what integrations you are gonna use and property configure them before you start adding the next integration. Take your time. HA looks very easy, but once you've got an issue, it can sometimes be difficult to debug the root cause.. Also document your automations! Node-red can visualize some automations, but scripts at the HA side can be missed. It when you first move into a new house and document which lights or sockets are connected to a breaker switch. Do the same for your HA environment. Document what a switch or sensor controls, but also which states are required for a light to turn on or a socket to become active.. I know that this takes a lot of time, but in the end it makes things easier when things stop working..

For what Pi's are going for these days, a refurbished mini pc is not that much more. I found one with a desktop i7 processor, 32GB ram and 1TB ssd on the jungle site for under $300 and there were lots to choose from. They just destroy a Pi performance wise, and you'll practically never outgrow it.

I would be very interested in part 2 of this video. Just getting started with home assistant so the timing would be perfect 😊

Good advice overall. One thing one might add is that the Raspberry Pi in its default version on a SD-Card can greatly be improved by using a SSD disk and (well-configured) MariaDB instead of the file-based database. I run a 4GB Ram RaspberryPi 4 with a crucial SSD + Maria DB and really everything is flying. Only exception is CPU heavy stuff so I can't really stream 12 cameras at once. But I have several dozen items running great.

Ha. I'm not guilty of removing old/unused integrations....but I am really bad about cleaning up my old entities, automation, and scripts. Not what you mentioned exactly...but this video reminded me that I need to get back to cleaning up my config. And I am trying to prune any custom integration that doesn't rely on an official API for integration.

Off course, up for the second part

Use IR LEDs like in a remote control to blind the camera. Look at your remote with your phone camera as example.

A second part would be great! Thanks for the vids!

I've little bit of problem with older integrations but getting better as I've standardized lot of IoTs around Sonoff/ESPHome. My main problem is with naming convention, at the time of setup names like switch-05 or Light-03 sounds so good but few weeks later I am scratching my head!!!

I am excited for a Part 2

Perfect video. Great information and advice.

A home automation platform introducing breaking changes frequently is insanity. If a breaking change on such an important core peace of software is introduced at all, there need to be huge warnings popping up before it installs that update, not something mentioned in the release notes. This type of policy will always lead to users not installing updates out of fear, or breaking their installations because they do. Terrible experience either way.

I made a backup before messing with the config yaml but it didn't restore it apparently, even though it said full backup. So I just wasted a full day of work because it didn't restore my backup or something. When trying to install from backup on a fresh install, it shits itself and says NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource. Excellent piece of kit this HomeAssistant 👍

Hi mate... love the vids as always.. One issue I see a lot is people not understanding Core vs Supervised. I still struggle to follow your videos as you use Supervised and I use Core. Biggest pain for me is an automated backup and export which isn't so easy on Core.

Those aren't unused add ons.. those are ones I plan to get at eventurally! Not guilty? Okay.. guilty...