A few months ago I started using Home Assistant for my room. Adding lights, fans, sensors, and other things via esp8266 modules. I can turn things on and off with location tracking of my phone. I have temp sensors in the kitchen and living room to track that and figure the difference from my room and the rest of the house.

home assistant

It’s running on a proxmox server in a VM using this helper script. It has a couple virtual cores, 4gb of ram, 32gb disk.

UPDATE 2025/07/14⌗

I’ve moved HA to a raspberry pi in order to reduce my energy consumption and unltimately the heat output of my computers. From like 100+ watts down to 5-10 on a Pi 4 and setup 5 other Pis for various things. All together, plus networking and a digital clock, it sits around 52W according to my UPS. Half the usage and less waste heat.

It’s purpose…⌗

I have a variety of home made controls for it and a smattering of smart plugs. A couple sets of room lights that provide enough to see but not blind you. 3 fans on smart plugs. It controls power to my external backup drives for the NAS plus a hdd dock. I use location data and a schedule to turn off what I call an Accessory Power Strip and my Fosi Audio amp. There’s a small zigbee network consisting of some temp sensors in a couple rooms with smart plugs as signal routers for that network. Plus some other things I can’t think of.