Last weekend I joined the global series of Home Assistant Community Day meetups. Hosted locally here in Surrey, UK (thank you to Ian Gibbs for organising), the meetup brought together like-minded enthusiasts to share ideas, solutions, and stories of success and failure in the home automation space. As I sat there listening to people discuss the challenges and successes of their home automation journeys, I was reminded of the early days of HomeCamp, many, many years ago, in the earliest days of home automation.
It was a great gathering, and there was a real community feel. There was some great collaborative problem solving, figuring out how to overcome technical challenges and sharing experiences with different solutions. The meetups were run via the lu.ma event platform, and this was my first experience with it – it handled everything very smoothly, including some very slick reminders, even sending a map.
The Home Assistant community has a refreshingly grassroots spirit. It’s not just about the technoloy, it’s about people working together to solve problems and learn from one another. The open exchange of ideas, the willingness to experiment, and the sheer enthusiasm for making our homes more intelligent and sustainable makes it a community I’ve enjoyed being part of for many years. I came away feeling inspired, and also reasonably good about the level I’ve managed to reduce our household energy use to. After many improvments and itterations, our current set up produces about two to three times as much electricity as it consumes in the summer months. It is only a net consumer from the grid for a few weeks in the depths of winter.
Everything from energy efficient silent pumps, to room by room temperature control has made the house more enjoyable to live in, as well as significantly more energy efficient. Home assistant is a great platform for easily managing automated devices, and more than that, it has gathered a community that are great at sharing their expertise, and building some very innovative solutions along the way. It has been the centre of my home automation set up for a number of years, the current set up runs on a Raspberry Pi, consuming just a few watts of power.
It was great to have some face to face interaction, and to get to know some local fellow home automation enthusiasts. You can’t beat a great community!
