5 Home Assistant Beginner MISTAKES to Avoid!

home assistant is an amazing piece of software that we all know and love but if you're just getting started then it can be really overwhelming trying to learn all of the features and intricacies that home assistant has to offer and it's really easy to make mistakes that will come back to haunt you later down the road so today i wanted to cover five mistakes i see people making all of the time and what you can do to fix them how you can avoid them so that by the end of this video you should be in a much better place to keep your home assistant running perfectly so mistake number one that i see all of the time is admittedly a difficult one when you are first starting out and that is not sizing your hardware appropriately a lot of people i see fall into the trap of installing home assistant on something like a raspberry pi so that they can test out with maybe a couple of devices and see if it's going to work for them fit their needs and do the things that they want it to do fast forward two years later and they've went from maybe a handful of devices to hundreds of devices with tons of automations scripts multiple add-ons video recording and just lots of super intensive tasks and they wonder why things are slow sluggish or just not working properly now i'm not saying that the raspberry pi isn't a great device for running home assistant far from it but it does have its limits in terms of performance and depending on what you're doing it can be pushed to those limits and so it's important to make sure that the hardware you are using is up to what you are asking from it to keep things running smoothly if you want some of my recommendations for different hardware and their use cases then you can check out this video up here for all of my different hardware recommendations and you can get a better idea of how to size your hardware appropriately the second mistake i see is one i'm sure we are all guilty of i know i definitely am and that is not removing old integrations from your install and this can often cause issues particularly with startup times because home assistant may try to connect or communicate with those devices as it's starting up and it may try to keep doing that over and over again for a few minutes until the timeout period occurs and so that can really add a lot of unnecessary time or wait time to the time that it takes for a home assistant to start up the easiest way to confirm this is by checking both the home assistant logs and also the startup times which should really show you quite easily how long it's taking for an integration to start up and that may identify any integrations that you need to remove you can also check under the integrations menu and it will often tell you if a integration is struggling to start up or if it's struggling to connect to a device so removing all of these old integrations can really help speed up your home assistant system and really help keep those loading times down removing these old integrations can really help to improve the speed of your system so it's worth making sure you keep on top of those old integrations and get them removed number three is something that everyone should be doing frequently without question and something that we've talked a lot about on this channel and that is taking regular backups even now it's pretty shocking how many people either don't take backups frequently enough or simply don't take them at all and it's probably because we think that nothing bad will ever happen to us right but trust me it definitely does backups are super useful for being able to restore to a point in time when things were working properly before something went horribly wrong or an update made one of your devices stop working or something like that plus it's so easy to automate all of your backups so that you never need to worry about it again but it's there when you actually need it i've actually done an entire video on how to automate your backups to google drive which you can check out up here and there are also other methods such as using a samba share or as well as some other cloud services so it's make sure to get your backup set up it's really easy it doesn't take long and it will massively save your bacon in a pinch mistake number four is one that i am noticing a lot particularly in the last couple of months and that is not reading the release notes i know i know crazy idea right as we all know home assistant is an open source project that is constantly being developed with new features being added and bugs being fixed and that often means that sometimes the way things were implemented or the way things work need to change in order to make things better or add more features or even for security reasons and that can often cause issues when updating to a new version but home assistant does a very very good job of listing all of the breaking changes well in advance of actually implementing them and do you know where you can find them in the release notes they tend to warn you of any upcoming breaking changes quite a few releases in advance before they are actually implemented but the problem is that people aren't reading the breaking changes for example there was recently a change for people in the 2021.7 release of home assistant for people who were running reverse proxies using nginx that basically required a couple of lines to be added to the config but the amount of people that i saw complaining that the latest update broke their home assistant was insane simply because they hadn't read the release notes and it even warned about this upcoming change in the previous versions release notes also so a lot of time and effort could have been saved if they just took the five minutes to check over the breaking changes before hitting that update button remember this is something that for a lot of us are running our entire homes so save yourself lots of headache by simply reading the release notes and finally we come to our fifth and final mistake and that is running custom components now hear me out hear me out before you get the pitchforks out it's not so much the running of custom components that i have a problem with i run many custom components myself and many of them are really amazing but rather it's people who don't understand the difference between the official made integrations and community made integrations and so they install a community made integrations to get something working which is totally fine and is all working great but then an update happens either through a core or the integration itself or something just generally stops working and then can people complain about home assistant updates breaking their stuff when really it's not the home assistant developers they need to speak to it's the maintainers of the community made integrations now again i'm not saying you shouldn't run community-made integrations i'm just saying you should be aware of the differences between an official integration and a community integration so that you know where to go to make a bug report or ask for help so that you can get things back on track so that is a really important distinction to have and that is distinguishing between official made integrations and community-made integrations and there we go that is five mistakes that i see people making absolutely all the time when it comes to home assistant and i'm absolutely definitely guilty of making lots of these mistakes myself as i'm sure lots of you guys are out there too i think that's part of the journey of home assistant but if we can let some of the newer people joining home assistant know about some of these mistakes perhaps it will save them some hassle in the future and there's tons more that i didn't cover here so i don't know if you guys are interested in a part two of this video if you are then do let me know in the comments down below i had tons more listed down that we could have went over and talked about so yeah do let me know if you want to see a part two and we can definitely make that happen if you want to support the channel you can do so by becoming a patron on patreon and your support allows me to keep on making these videos thank you to all my current patreon supporters as always your support is massively appreciated make sure to drop this video a like and get subscribed and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 49,333

Rating: 4.8682041 out of 5

Keywords: home assistant, home automation, smart home, home assistant mistakes, home assistant getting started, home assistant best practices, home assistant guide, home assistant hardware, home assistant backups, home assistant how to, home assistant setup

Id: i1083cCR2CI

Length: 8min 4sec (484 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021