Discovering Home Assistant

Podcaster Dave Slusher joins Phil and Rohan to share hard-won smart home lessons: building a reliable mesh, solving a 100m mailbox sensor with Z-Wave Long Range and the ZWA2, and retiring MyQ with RATGDO + ESPHome. We also cover using an e‑ink terminal as a Home Assistant dashboard.

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https://hasspodcast.io/ha208

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Chapters

00:00:00 Welcome

00:01:23 Guest intro: Dave Slusher’s podcasting origin story

00:04:59 Discovering Home Assistant 

00:07:20 Hardware journey: Raspberry Pi 3/4, SD crashes, backups, staying on Pi

00:09:40 ZWA2 portable capability

00:11:10 Zigbee mesh realities

00:13:56 The mailbox quest

00:19:16 Power monitoring the lawnmower + adding Z‑Wave plug to the mesh

00:20:31 Beating peak electricity pricing with calendar‑driven automations

00:24:50 Buying for Home Assistant

00:31:26 Audi e‑tron HACS

00:33:00 ‘Terminal’ e‑ink display

00:41:11 Fun APIs: Domino’s throwback and accidental developer‑friendly brands

00:44:25 Update strategy + restoring from backups when an upgrade breaks boot

00:46:26 Entity naming conventions, device vs entity IDs, and maintainability

00:49:18 The router kill‑switch: renaming a plug and unintended automations

00:52:19 Ping watchdog automation for internet recovery (8.8.8.8)

00:54:58 Labels, documentation, and making a smart home family‑friendly

01:00:00 Selling a smart home: what stays, what goes, and account handoffs

01:02:16 First device nostalgia: Sonoff relay, app sprawl, and converging on HA

01:07:52 Next projects: buying with purpose, reliability over novelty

01:10:00 Mac mini (Linux Mint) homelab, Synology vs Docker, consolidating services

01:12:18 Package tracking with 17Track, long strings, and dashboard rendering

This episode was made possible thanks to our sponsors

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Hosts

Phil Hawthorne

Website

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Twitter: @philhawthorne

Bluesky: @philhawthorne.com

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Rohan Karamandi

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Twitter: @rohank9

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