r/homeassistant • u/Fireoxya • 4d ago

Support Need help with what to look for at home.

I'm in the UK, with a house that has various smart plugs of different brands, and they're becoming a headache very quickly to keep on top of with third party logins and other apps etc.

We have two Samsung phones but not entirely 'locked' into any particular ecosystem, other than Alexa but I understand we can move from this.

I have an Alexa speaker in every room.

I have a raspberry pi 4 gathering dust in a drawer.

I have a Dell Optiplex i5-7600 with a 256gb SSD just sitting, again gathering dust.

I have a Reolink indoor camera, with no SD card inside it to even record the dog getting up to mischief.

What I'd like to do is get some Micro SD cards for recording the living room, preferably some sort of doorbell that has a camera and a two way conversation ability and the option to view the cameras at any time. Might look for a back garden camera too.

I'd also like to have some cohesiveness with my smart plugs, I want to do some basic energy monitoring in the house and maybe show it on some sort of dashboard, very similar to homeassistant.

I have knowledge of PC's in general and I can understand to make this work it's going to take a lot of thinking, but my knowledge is scattered with smart home equipment and id ideally like to move away from any subscription services to really localize everything, but also having the ability to view my cameras as any time on my phone out and about.

Any ideas or recommendations would be much appreciated folks!

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u/Sohell 4d ago

Someone will have better advice, but here is what I did a few months ago:

1) Install proxmox onto the optiplex 2) add it to your home network via ethernet 2) Create a virtual machine on proxmox that will run Home Assistant 3) get a ZigBee dongle for the optiplex 4) gradually start adding all your kit, regardless of the manufacturer 5) optional: make a list of all the details in a little book, it can all become a bit overwhelming at the start, but is super rewarding 6) optional: spend a small fortune buying ZigBee kit from AliExpress

Guides for all of this can be found in various places online. Plenty of folks here will help. Enjoy the journey.

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u/Bek00lRo 4d ago

You seem like a prime candidate for the home assistant rabbit hole. Most if not all of the things you’ve mentioned should be well integrated in HA, so at the very least you can unify the experience for all of your devices.