A smart home that works offline
The heart of the house is a Home Assistant instance with roughly 2,600 entities across 41 domains — lights, heating, air quality, presence, cameras, security, the car and energy. It runs as its own VM, locally, vendor-neutral and with no forced cloud. If the internet drops, the house keeps working, and the data never leaves the network.
🧠One VM, 2,600+ entities
Home Assistant runs as a dedicated KVM VM on the N150 (not in Docker), with a passed-through Zigbee dongle. Deliberately separated from the rest of the stack so HAOS updates stay clean — vendor-neutral across 41 integrations.
🚶Presence, not switches
Aqara FP2 sensors detect in nine rooms whether someone is actually there — lights and extractor fans react to presence instead of motion. Across all rooms, 43 automations run, from "welcome home" to "all lights off."
🌡️Heating & air quality
Seven HomematicIP thermostats regulate each room to a target temperature; scripts nudge them all up or down by 1 °C. Three VeSync purifiers measure PM2.5, and the average plus trend sensors land on the dashboard.
🔌23 Shelly plugs with power metering
Smart plugs measure consumption per device — and detect from the power drop when the washing machine or dishwasher is done, push notification included. Total draw runs as a live value and a 30-day average.
🗣️AI by voice
Alexa forwards voice commands to Home Assistant; a custom skill controls devices through Claude as the primary assistant, with Google Gemini as a fallback. A counter logs every fallback — self-learning device mapping included.
🔌Hardware telemetry via MQTT
The Windows workstation reports CPU/GPU temperature and load via MQTT to the Mosquitto broker — auto-discovery makes the sensors appear by themselves. Dashboards and automations react to real hardware values.
🚗On the road too
Through the mySkoda integration the house knows the car’s location, fuel level and lock state — if it’s left unlocked a WhatsApp goes out, and a fuel-price tracker refreshes prices within a 5 km radius on location change.
🛡️Its own trust model
Unlike everything else, Home Assistant does not sit behind ForwardAuth (that would break webhooks and the app) but on native login plus 2FA as the trust boundary. External access is still controlled by Traefik.