Collected posts on Practice — from our practice running fleets of Home Assistant instances.
Statutory liability under German law, manufacturer warranties and the real-world lifespan of KNX, Loxone, Shelly, ESP32 and Raspberry Pi. With sources, dissenting voices, and the gap that opens up between the statute book and the datasheet.
What should a Home Assistant maintenance contract cost? A €10 to €40 per month corridor derived from neighbouring trades, and the RMR maths behind it.
Make Home Assistant more reliable by wiring basic switching directly between devices: ESPHome on-chip automations, Zigbee binding, Z-Wave. HA stays the brain.
A quick visual walk through HA Fleet Manager: the whole fleet at a glance, one installation in detail, remote updates, and warnings about risky versions. No long essay, just four pictures.
Home Assistant remote maintenance without VPN: no open port, no full-LAN access. Why both are wrong and what time-boxed, client-granted access looks like.
Managing multiple Home Assistant instances for clients with remote_homeassistant, an MQTT bridge or a VPN hits a wall. Why fleet management is its own category.
No vendor behind you, forever at the customer site, updates that wreck everything — the three big fears about going pro with Home Assistant. Why WordPress carried exactly the same fears and still spawned an entire service industry.
Behind Carrier-Grade NAT your public IPv4 is gone and port forwarding silently dies. How to spot CGNAT and still reach Home Assistant.
In German-speaking Europe "Home Assistant integrator" is barely an established profession — and that is exactly the opportunity. Who looks after HA for a living, what they do day to day, the tools they reach for, how they get paid.
Home Assistant ties together cameras, door locks, heating, presence data — sometimes medical devices. What the customer actually gets when the house isn't piped into the cloud, and why solo integrators have an argument here that big platforms structurally can't answer.
A fictional shift in the life of a solo integrator: three Z2M crashes after a silent add-on update, and the forty minutes between the first symptom and a quiet fix.