To Cloud or Not To Cloud

Before getting into Home Assistant, I was like most of the household automation folks out in the real world: different products from different vendors, none of which talk very well to each other unless you have a "voice assistant" like Alexa, Home Kit, Google, or the like. I suppose if you live in an urban or suburban area with pretty good internet, that's probably not a huge problem. However - I live in the sticks. Way out in the sticks. My internet comes from Starlink, and I consider myself lucky if I can get through a full day without seeing some sort of intermittent slowdown or disruption. If I don't like it, my option is standard DSL, which is kind of like watching the fields sprout.

My voice assistant of choice is Amazon Alexa. It normally, usually, works without any issues. Once in a while, though, it'll have a hiccup - either on its own or with help from Starlink. Everything I did up to this point was 100% dependent on having a connection to the cloud.

Enter Home Assistant

With a little bit of planning and sometimes a little bit of extra work, you can design an entire HA environment that requires no connection to the internet at all. It is entirely possible that everything in your HA environment could be controlled by your HA server and nothing else.

But to do that, you're going to need to really think about your current and future devices.

Some "smart" devices out there simply do not play with HA at all. Others kinda/sorta play with HA but they need a little coercion. And of course, some play very nicely, like the vendor wanted to make sure good APIs were available and cooperation between their products and HA was important.

Let me give you a prime example:

Google and Google Nest products.

Google and Google Nest products do not play nicely with HA without some poking and prodding, and even then (like with the Nest smoke detectors) they will be very, very, VERY finicky. And, you're going to need a connection to the internet to make them work.

You can tell the difference by looking at the card in your "Integrations" area (under "Setup").

Here's my Google Nest integration, which handles my Nest doorbell cam:

You can see the little white cloud in the upper right. That means that this integration must have connectivity to the internet to work correctly. 

By contrast, here is the integration for my router:

No cloud on this one, so even if I lose internet connectivity, this integration will still work fine.

In the end, it's going to come down to your preference. Some users absolutely refuse to install any integrations that require the cloud. Others (me included) accept cloud connectivity requirements grudgingly. I'd rather NOT have to depend on that, but for the integrations that require it, I'll accept it.

For now.

Sometimes, you can find integrations that require the cloud, and then find that the community has developed a better integration that doesn't need the cloud at all. Like this one:

There is a box in the upper right, which indicates that I'm using a custom integration. There's an "official" Meross integration, but it requires the cloud - and if you make too many calls on the Meross API, they will cut you off. (Ask me how I know.) The HA community developed an integration that doesn't require the cloud, and I'm using that now quite successfully and happily.

My point here is that even for the integrations that require the cloud, there might be integrations out there that remove that requirement. You'll just need to do some searching.

And, I would highly recommend that you do some searching for integrations before you purchase a new smart device. Make sure that it will talk to HA before you get it and install it. That'll save you some headaches (and maybe some salty language, if you're like me) later on.

Until my next post - rock on.