I think you need to ask yourself a few questions: is why do you want this? What things do you want to accomplish and how do you see them improving your life? Is the benefit that you gain worth the expense in money and time that it will take to set these things up?

One of the things I made 'smart' early on was my garage door. I live in an older house with a tuck-under garage and I had woken up one too many times to find someone had left the garage door open all night. I was tired of constantly going up and down the stairs at the end of the night to make sure everything was closed up and I just wanted a simple way to check, and to close (or open) the garage door if necessary. After the garage door I decided to put sensors on all the doors. Now I didn't have to run around checking all the doors after everybody went to bed, or if I wanted to turn the a/c on. Next came lights in high-traffic areas, the ones that would get left on all night if I didn't follow behind everyone turning them off.

In creating all of these wonderful automations where lights would come on magically whenever someone would enter a room I created another problem. Eventually, something important will fail, and the system will break down, and suddenly you realize you have an implicit, unspoken SLA with your partner. I had created an entire household that seemingly couldn't figure out what to do with themselves in a darkened room if a careless Home Assistant update broke the whole thing. You have to set realistic expectations for these things because no matter how reliable your setup is, one day something is going to fail and you're going to need to troubleshoot why.

I have provided only a handful of examples but each one served a need that I had at the time in a very busy household with small children and not enough hours in a day. For me, I believe the benefit I received was worth the expense and the hassle of automating these things in my home. If I had to do it all over again today I believe the benefit would be even greater - or, at least, the hassle would have been far less - everything is so much easier now especially with what Home Assistant has become.

Ultimately, you are the only one who can decide if the expense and effort are worth it for yourself.

It's convenient but it's less secure and less reliable. Imagine being locked out of your house because the Internet is down.

The only smart objects I have are some light bulbs. I think, some processes are good to automate and put software in control of, and some things I want to have explicit control over (I.E. Door locks, Safe locks, AC settings, Heating). Technology can break in fantastical ways, but a lock should just freaking work.

As someone who has spent many years working on my smart home, I suggest, as do others, KEEP IT LOCAL.

Using home assistant since 2017. As you add stuff there's more synergy, like a network effect. I have automations and services that:

• Adjust the bathroom floor thermostat according to the prevailing hourly energy price

• Adjust the colour temperature of lighting during the day so blue light is reduced in the evening, allowing natural melatonin production to function

• Announce on a local speaker when our child gets to school in the morning using their phone location

• Operates festive lighting in the winter with reference to sunset and sunrise

• Turns off all lights when leaving; or sometimes if I'm feeling more paranoid

• Replays lighting patterns from a previous week to simulate* occupation

• Sends me an alert if motion is detected and nobody's home

• Turns off the picture on the TV if nobody's in front of it for a while using a 60GHz radar sensor

as well as a few other things. I don't want a smart home that's just remote operation with a phone. I want to use capabilities to automate things so I don't need to be concerned about them.