Josh Leeth / Random Ramblings

I’ve written before about my network, and how it’s gloriously over-built for what a normal person actually needs. Home Assistant is the same story, except Home Assistant didn’t show up over-built. It got there one chapter at a time, and looking back the chapters tell a better story than the setup does. So that’s what I want to do here. Walk the journey. Because the thing running my house today is not the thing I started with, and the gap between the two is the whole point.

It started where everybody’s starts. Lights and switches.

That’s the toy phase, and I’m not going to pretend it was anything more than that. A light comes on at sunset. A switch you can hit from your phone instead of the wall. You show your wife, she nods politely, and then you both go back to using the wall switch like a normal person. Right? That’s where most people stop. They automate a lamp, decide the juice isn’t worth the squeeze, and the whole thing becomes a party trick they never use. I almost did the same thing.

But then it moved. That’s chapter two, and chapter two is where it got its hooks in me. We started building with custom relays and sensors. Not “turn on a light,” but “watch the garage door, and if it’s been open too long with nobody around, do something about it.” Sensors on things that mattered. Relays wired into the garage so the house could actually act, not just report. And lights that came on automatically because the house knew someone was there, not because someone remembered to flip a switch.

That’s the moment it stopped being a gadget. Because see, a light you turn on from your phone is a convenience. A garage door that closes itself because you forgot is the house covering for you. Those are different things. One is a toy. The other one is the house starting to carry a little of the load, and once it started carrying the load I wanted it carrying more.

And then came the data. This is the real prize. If you take one thing from this whole post, take this part, because this is where the journey stops being about convenience and becomes about actually understanding the building you live in.

I put in IotaWatt for whole-home power monitoring. Then I started layering in Zooz switches that report power draw on top of that. And all of a sudden I wasn’t guessing anymore. I had a complete picture of energy usage across the entire house, circuit by circuit, device by device. What’s on. What’s drawing. What’s drawing when it shouldn’t be. Be honest with yourself for a second, because most people have no idea what’s happening behind their own walls. Their power bill shows up, they wince, they pay it. I can look at a graph and tell you exactly what cost me that money and when.

And here’s the thing I keep coming back to. At that point it’s not a smart home anymore. It’s a building management system. A real one. The kind of thing a commercial building has a whole vendor contract for, running in my house on a Raspberry Pi and some open source software. That’s not hyperbole. When you have live power monitoring, environmental sensors, presence, and control all feeding one system, that is a BMS, full stop.

So I started using it like one. I leverage power usage to trigger alerts. If something is drawing power in a pattern it shouldn’t, I hear about it. And I run temperature probes to catch appliance failures before they become disasters. A freezer creeping up in temperature is a $400 pile of ruined food if you find out three days late. It’s nothing if the house tells you the same afternoon. A device pulling power at three in the morning when the house is asleep is either a problem or the first sign of one, and I’d rather know. That’s the difference between a house that’s fun and a house that’s actually watching your back.

Think about what that actually buys you. Not “the lights are neat.” I mean the water heater that’s about to go, the freezer that’s failing, the circuit that’s pulling more than it did last month. The house catches the things you’d otherwise find out about the hard way, in the morning, from a puddle, or from a bill. That’s the payoff for years of tinkering, and it’s worth every hour.

Which brings me to the newest chapter. AI.

Here’s the honest truth about a system that grows over years like mine did. It accumulates debt. Configuration debt, the same way a codebase does. Automations you wrote three years ago that half work. Naming conventions you changed your mind about twice. Dashboards you bolted more onto every time you added a device, until they were a wall of cards that looked impressive and told you nothing. I’d open mine, feel vaguely proud of how much was on there, and then never actually use it. A dashboard you don’t use is just a screensaver with extra steps.

So I brought in an AI assistant to help, and I’ll be straight with you, I didn’t expect much at first. I figured I’d get generic advice and a copy of somebody else’s setup off a forum. But see, what it actually did was help me refine. It went through years of accumulated configuration and helped me clean it up. The dead automations, the half-finished ideas, the debt that had been quietly making the whole system more fragile than it needed to be. We rebuilt the dashboards around how I actually use the house, mobile-first, one column, solid blocks of color for each room the way you’d see in an IKEA catalog, tap a room and drop into just that space. We tightened the automations. We paid down years of debt so the thing could keep running without me holding my breath every time I touched it.

And that last part is the part that matters most. It’s not that the AI did something I couldn’t do. It’s that it helped me do the tedious, unglamorous maintenance I never make time for, so a system that had been slowly getting harder to maintain got easier instead. A system that big, running that much of your house, either gets maintained or it eventually bites you. This chapter is the one that keeps all the earlier chapters running.

I keep a separate sandbox dashboard for exactly this kind of work, so I can break things without breaking the version my family relies on. That’s saved me more than once. We’d try a layout, I’d look at it on my actual phone instead of a desktop where everything looks fine, and half the time it needed another pass. Try it, look at it in the real place I use it, fix what’s wrong. That loop is the whole game, and having something on the other end that could make the change, explain what it did, and take the note when I said “no, tighter” made the loop fast enough that I actually kept going.

Now here’s the part I keep turning over, because it’s not all pure enthusiasm and I’m not going to pretend it is. There’s something genuinely strange about handing pieces of your house to something else and asking it to help run them. Think about it. The house watches us. Where we are, when we come and go, what we’re using and when, whether the doors are shut. That’s the deal you make when you build something like this, and I made it a long time ago because the payoff is real. But adding an assistant into that loop, something that can see the same data and act on it, made me sit with that trade in a way I hadn’t for years.

My answer, for now, is the same instinct that’s kept my network standing. Keep it scoped, keep it reversible, keep myself in the loop for anything that matters. The assistant works in a sandbox where it can’t hurt the version my family depends on. It backs things up before it changes them. It tells me what it’s about to do instead of just doing it. That’s not paranoia. It’s the same discipline I’d apply to any system with the keys to something I care about. Trust, but keep the receipts.

So that’s the journey. Lights and switches. Then relays and sensors, the house starting to act. Then the data, the whole thing becoming a real building management system that watches the house the way I never could. And now AI, helping me pay down years of debt so all of it keeps running clean. Each chapter made the last one worth more.

As usual, this is over-built for what a normal person needs. As usual, I love it. And as usual, this is just the beginning, because the next chapter is already forming and I’ll write it up when it does.