Heat pump - normally controlled from the in home controller. 

There is an internet connection which I occasionally use remotely (it can do much of what can be done on the local controller) and I also use for monitoring.  This is not mission critical but potentially represents a security risk.

Solar PV - no control possible, not internet connected

Battery - none present

EV charger - Controlled by Octopus IOG but revertible to local control (of the nature plug in - car charges) through a bluetooth connection to the unit.

Car - Is internet connected, occasionally used to lock doors remotely when I have forgotten, and to check state of charge.  This is not mission critical but potentially represents a security risk.

CCTV - internet connected and only used that way.

I suspect I should get the various devices onto a network where they cant see other devices in the house.  

@majordennisbloodnok This looks like a future career for you! Could you put together a simplified package that would enable potential users to just tick their required IOT services and all the background grunt work is magically performed in the background resulting in a foolproof control system that functions without an internet connection once set up???!!!😳 Well Major, that should keep you out of mischief for a couple of days…. 😉 Toodles.

To paraphrase a well-known adage, @toodles…

”Simple, local, fully-functioned - pick any two”

That is the challenge currently, with a scarcity of willingness amongst manufacturers to design kit that plays nice with others.

For me, Home Assistant is, unsurprisingly, my get out of jail free card. My Mitsi Ecodan, my Growatt inverter and battery, my CCTV cameras and DVR, my robot vacuum, all my smart switches and all my network infrastructure devices can be controlled just as well if not better across the local network. I haven’t tested to make sure but I am reasonably confident the same is true of my Zappi EV wallbox, although if not then I can still use buttons and display on the actual unit to get the car charging. I also think but am not certain that the same holds true for the robot lawnmower.

In other words, it is definitely a local solution and definitely fully featured. However, whilst I wouldn’t say Home Assistant is prohibitively complex I certainly couldn’t call it simple in the sense you meant.

Ours is similar to James, but with a few optional tweaks on Home Assistant that rely on home internet. 

We can just repoint our internet hub to repeat the signal from a hotspot (instead of the ISP hub), so it is unlikely it would be down for very long. 

Heat pump - controlled from the in home controller. In effect, we do not change much there anyway. 

Solis Inverter - same as above and the programming is fixed - we do not use the AI features. 

Battery - fully controlled by the inverter. 

EV charger - Controlled by Octopus IOG but "local" control possible. Anyway, the system connects to the internet via 4G (I think). Could be impacted if we cannot use any phones to connect to their cloud. 

Lights, plugs and sensors - most are used via the internet (a few local with local wifi, zigbee, a few matter or thread, some zwave), but nothing really critical there. Worst case, light switches will override it. 

Car - Is internet connected. An encrypted and ISO complaint API is used, I have little concern about anyone being able to break into it. 

TVs - some use the internet.. 

home phone - VOIP relies on internet...

We have a few tweaks like the car battery level is replicated to the car charger using home assistant, battery export tweaked based on temperature, etc. But if the internet is not working, it will work with the previous day's settings. 

Our stuff as far as I know (not having perhaps tested it as much as I should)

- Main inverter and batteries - no internet connection, local control, can even be operated from the LCD panel on the front, will switch over off grid if power fails. Generator input could in theory be wired for dire emergencies but isn't currently.

- Secondary sets of inverter and batteries - bluetooth control, can be controlled by the panel on the front but painful

- Heatpumps - all local control

- Appliances - not allowed anywhere near networks

- Transport - can all run off solar easily

- Gas boiler backup will just work

So I think we'd lose streaming services to computers, telephone and the doorbell, which is on my list to replace with a proper one. For comms we've still got radio even then, and if mobile stays up then the backup internet is an old Three internet box they sold me on a lifetime price guarantee and probably dearly wish I'd give up 8)

It's worth mentioning here that the scenario you have described, @editor, sits squarely and entirely within chapter 12 ("Frankenstein builds a smart home") of your latest book. However, whilst your main point in the book was about expensive kit not collaborating with other expensive kit, perhaps there needs to be an addendum in the next edition to cover expensive kit being designed to have a reliance on talking back to its maker.

The manufacturer wanting to make the customer reliant on them past the point of purchase is at the heart of the issue but there are two distinct and important knock-on effects stemming from it. Lack of collaboration between "smart" devices is one, reliance on the Internet (and the continued existence and support of the manufacturer) is another. Home Assistant may well not be the answer for the masses but it does rather pointedly demonstrate that such an answer for the masses is perfectly feasible and practical. Manufacturers, consider that a gauntlet thrown down.

I love computers, I use them all the time, which is why I don't rely on "cloud" stuff. The "cloud" is just someone else's computer -- but I have a computer that I love and use all the time, so why would I need someone else's computer? My home is pretty resilient to the internet going down, but also benefits from being connected to the internet for convenience.

• Heat Pump: all controlled locally. It's done over wifi but without internet access required. If that breaks, the manual control unit still works. If that breaks, I believe the heat pump itself still has the weather compensation curve programmed into it, so would just be on/off via the thermostat. If that breaks I can probably figure out how to override it and keep it on 24/7...
• Solar panels: don't need internet, the inverter just inverts and pushes the electrons into the consumer unit
• Battery: all locally controlled over wifi, doesn't need internet but I can monitor/change remotely via the internet. If that breaks, the inverter has the timer schedule stored on it. No way to override without figuring out the RS485 or whatever it is.
• EV: I use the internet to turn it on and off, sure, and Octopus Intelligent Go currently schedules the charging times. If internet breaks though I just do it manually from the MyEnergi charger box. The box itself has controls for timed charging. It defaults to charging from solar so that would be fine in the summer too.
• Home alarm: I can control over the internet but the box itself works offline obviously.
• Home security cameras: Again I can view over the internet but all work offline and store to a physical hard drive in the house.
• TVs and other "smart" stuff that really has no business being smart: not connected to the wifi

I think the difference between "it is more convenient to use if you connect it to the internet" and "it will not work unless it is connected to the internet" is a vast, treacherous ocean and I stand on firm ground on the former side.

@majordennisbloodnok, you’re right and there is something rather darkly comic about writing that... the chapter explored the absurdity of buying individually sophisticated devices and becoming their unpaid systems administrator, but the past couple of days have exposed another layer of dependence, with our local networks still running while some of the everyday controls we normally use have effectively become useless because the internet connection is missing.

Your point is valid because getting devices to cooperate and retaining control of them without an internet connection are separate requirements, and solving one does not automatically solve the other. As you say, there is also a much longer-term question here about what happens when the manufacturer withdraws support, closes a service or disappears altogether, because the useful life of equipment we install in our homes ought to extend beyond somebody’s enthusiasm for maintaining its accompanying app. And we're seeing more of that from smaller players that enter the market and then collapse and withdraw. 

I agree with your point about Home Assistant, and the caveat about its suitability for the masses is exactly where the responsibility needs to come back to manufacturers, because expecting the homeowner to assemble and maintain the solution simply recreates the unpaid IT department described in the book. We should be able to expect straightforward local controls that let anyone in the household operate the essentials, with clear explanations of what continues working when connectivity disappears and how to override whatever was previously configured through an app.

On the money, @editor.

Until manufacturers stop acting like petulant spoilt children, wanting to be in charge and not wanting to share, I will continue to do my best to help people pick up Home Assistant. It isn't intrinsically complex to use; it just becomes so because of the sheer range of different integration methods it has to support. The irony is that if all smart devices adopted a common set of interoperability standards, Home Assistant would almost automatically become very close to the ideal @toodles laid out a few posts ago.

Once the manufacturers do, however, start to grow up, people will be far less likely to need my help. For their sake, I can't wait.

Another angle to this is how vulnerable it leaves you to hackers.

I have a GivEnergy battery. The company, somewhat infamously, is now defunct. Their inverters, however, still phone home to GivEnergy's servers.

Those servers run PHP. PHP has a massive security flaw that essentially allows hackers to do whatever they want with the server: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmly0lg3w5x2o . The fix has been released, but it requires server admins to apply the patch manually. It's not clear if whoever still operates GivEnergy's cloud servers will do that.

Consequently, a lot of consumers will now have inverters who are connected to a cloud that could have been hacked. Since those servers control the inverter's firmware/software updates, the hackers could force upload malicious software to your inverter at home.

The mitigation from an end user perspective is to change your router settings to block the inverter from connecting to the internet. You can still allow it to connect to your wifi, and thus be controlled locally, but not remotely via the cloud.

However, most users will not know anything about this. They won't know about the vulnerability in PHP. They won't know that GivEnergy's servers are affected and might be compromised indefinitely. They won't know that their inverters contact those servers and may be affected too. They won't know if their inverters have had malicious code uploaded to them by GivEnergy's servers. And they won't know how to change their router settings to block their inverter from connecting to the internet.

It's pretty scary tbh.

@scrchngwsl 

It can be a bit worse. 

Much software these days is developed so quickly that sometimes security is an optional upgrade. One that has not been budgeted for...