this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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"no smart home crap" Yeah... That's just a choice. I have two homegrown smarthome solutions that are amazing and complex without creating security holes.
Boom. Exactly. Self hosted solutions are amazing. We have choices about this stuff.
You can tell it’s an IT guy’s home assistant if there’s no hardware that requires someone else’s cloud.
My home automation philosophy is that everything in the house should work with or without internet. It’s going well so far.
I'll add that things should also fail gracefully. If something breaks, they should all revert back to working like the dumb equivalent. Dumb switches, dumb thermostat, etc.
This is the Way.
Good recommendation for light bulbs?
Zigbee bulbs, third reality and sengeled (sp?) are most of what I have attached to my home assistant. Stay away from the WiFi shit tho
do not
Don't do the lightbulbs (unless you rent). Do the power to the sockets.
Smart lightbulbs are a fucking rort
One benefit of smart lightbulbs is being able to control the colour temperature
Which is great if you do that on the reg
I use that feature every day and in multiple rooms.
Like the other user mentioned: depends on your setup.
I have recessed lighting throughout my house, so swapping to bulbs for all of them would have been an expensive pain. So I opted for smart switches. I got innovelli reds, because they were the best there was at the time. You can get them with any protocol you want (zigbee/zwave/wifi)
With a smart switch, you can control lots of lights with only one device. Originally I just added Shelly relays behind each switch, but I wanted the dimming capability of the innoveli.
If you do still want bulbs, nothing beats hue. But they are by far the most expensive.
As an alternative, we have found bulbs that can run tasmota with the MQTT integration to be perhaps the most reliable part of our smart home (as long as the hardware already had a descent CRI). I've heard good things about ESP home too, but we have not tried it.
If someone has some light bulbs that are laggy (due to cloud integrations) or a pain to use due to software, its worth checking out of tasmota or esp home can be installed on them to locally pair with something like home assistant. It turned a regretful purchase into a nice addition.
With that said, we don't buy connected devices any longer without checking internet and cloud requirements first.
I love my lutron Caseta gear. Integrates with home assistant and reverts to dumb. Expensive ass dimmer though, and they run on a proprietary hub.
It depends on the rest of your setup, but I recommend going with zigbee or matter/thread for the connectivity. I definitely wouldn't put any "smart" devices on my general purpose wifi. That stuff is never going to be secure. Also, consider if smart switches would work for you instead. That way you don't have to pay the premium when a bulb burns out.
Yeah I'm stuck between those two options however it's for much later down the road in my case. House needs a renovation but finances don't allow just yet.
I have a mix of TP Link wifi globes, IKEA ZigBee and Hue Zigbee throughout the house. Zigbee are controlled by a SLZB 06 and ZHA / MQTT. By far the Hue are the best I've tested and have been in service for around 10 years.
Home Assistant and local, cloud-free protocols and devices are great
I have an apartment and it is dumb