I run Home Assistant on a self-hosted server as the hub for home automation. It started with solar: after installing a SunPower solar (photovoltaic, PV) system I wanted to monitor production locally without depending on SunPower’s cloud app, so I set up Home Assistant to pull data directly from the PVS gateway on my home network. From there it grew to lights, climate, media, and utility monitoring. The whole system follows one rule: if the internet goes down, everything still works.
Architecture
The stack is layered: physical devices talk over radio protocols, protocol bridges translate those signals to MQTT, and Home Assistant consumes the events to run automations and dashboards, all on local hardware. Tap any component for details.
Design principles
Local-first
No automation depends on an external cloud. Lights, climate, and energy monitoring keep working if the internet goes down.
Graceful degradation
Every automation has a safe fallback when a sensor goes offline. The system fails open for comfort and closed for safety.
Zero-training UI
Anyone in the house can use the dashboards without knowing anything about Home Assistant.
Open source
The SunPower PV integration is adapted from ha-esunpower. I contributed a fix for a memory-leak crash that happened when the PVS gateway’s serial number was an IP address:
- ha-esunpower #64: fix memory leak when
pvs_serialis an IP address