GUIDE
Should You Put Smart Home Devices on a Separate VLAN? A UK Guide
Every smart home device on your network is, from a security standpoint, a small computer running…
Category
Guides & Tutorials
Step-by-step implementation guides, not buying advice. This is where we walk through actually setting things up — Home Assistant, automations, networking — with the exact steps and gotchas, written from doing it ourselves.
Start with Writing Your First Home Assistant Automation: A Step-by-Step UI Editor Guide
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GUIDE
Setting Up a Mosquitto MQTT Broker for Home Assistant
MQTT is the lightweight messaging protocol sitting quietly underneath a huge amount of the smart home…
GUIDE
Home Assistant Scenes, Scripts and Automations: What’s the Difference?
Home Assistant gives you three separate tools that all sound like they could do the same…
GUIDE
Setting Up Automations in the Apple Home App: A Complete UK Guide
The Apple Home app has quietly become a genuinely capable automation platform, not just a remote…
GUIDE
Homebridge: Bringing Non-HomeKit Devices into Apple Home
Apple’s smart home ecosystem is genuinely good once everything is in it - one app, real…
GUIDE
Backing Up and Restoring Home Assistant Properly
Setting up automatic Home Assistant backups, storing them off-device, and actually testing a restore before you…
GUIDE
Building a Presence-Detection Automation That Actually Works
Why a single phone location trigger isn't reliable enough, and how to combine geofencing, door sensors…
GUIDE
Building a Wall-Mounted Tablet Dashboard for Home Assistant
Turning an old Android tablet into a permanent, always-on Home Assistant control panel, including the setup…
GUIDE
Migrating to Home Assistant Without Losing Your Automations
A step-by-step approach to switching from a manufacturer app to Home Assistant gradually, keeping your existing…
GUIDE
Zigbee Interference and Dropped Devices: How to Actually Fix It
Why Zigbee devices drop off or respond slowly, and the small number of real causes -…