What it is
Home Assistant is the brain of the house. I run the full HAOS distribution as a Proxmox VM — not a container, not the Core install on a Raspberry Pi — because I want the supervisor stack, automatic backups, and add-on store as first-class features.
The flagship workload isn't lights and switches. It's a Sleep Lab: a multi-sensor rig in my bedroom that monitors temperature, humidity, and air quality during a sleep session, controls a humidifier via a smart plug, snapshots my Withings sleep score after wake, and generates an AI briefing twice a day. Lights and presence sensors are there too, but they're the supporting cast.
Why I run it
Two reasons.
First, the obvious one: I want a real home automation platform that I own. HA's integration list is enormous, it speaks Matter and Zigbee and Thread and Bluetooth and Z-Wave all in one pane, and the automation engine is more capable than anything any single vendor ships with their app.
Second, the less obvious one: I sleep badly when the room conditions drift, and I wanted to measure that, not guess. The Sleep Lab grew out of "I'll just plot temp over time" into a small system that actually tunes the room overnight and then tells me how the night went in the morning. It's been the single most useful automation I've ever built — partly because of what it does, partly because building it forced me to learn HA's deep features (template sensors, statistics platform, generic_hygrostat, multi-step conditional automations with fallbacks) properly.
How I use it
Day to day:
- A single
input_boolean.sleep_modemaster switch starts and ends a session. Flipping it on resets all the sticky min/max trackers and starts the humidifier control loop. Flipping it off freezes the session stats and schedules the morning briefing. - A
generic_hygrostatvirtual humidifier sits on top of the dumb smart plug, with a 40% RH target, a 10% dry-tolerance band, and a five-minute keep-alive. The humidifier brain is HA; the plug is just the actuator. - A "Pre-Sleep Strategy" automation fires at 2 AM. It pulls last night's score, the rolling 3-day and 7-day averages, the current room temp, the Montréal forecast, and feeds them to a local LLM. Out comes a three-sentence tactical briefing pushed to my phone.
- A "Morning Retrospective" automation fires when I flip sleep mode off. Same pattern, different prompt: session min/max/avg, sleep score, humidifier behaviour, outdoor low. Four-sentence verdict, peer-to-peer tone, pushed to my phone.
- Both AI automations try the local LLM first and fall back to Gemini if the local call returns nothing. The HA "Trace" tab shows which path ran.
Beyond the Sleep Lab there's a presence-triggered washroom light (dim red while sleep mode is on, low white otherwise — keeps night vision intact), the usual temp/humidity alerts, and Withings as a long-term data source for rolling averages.