I’ve been using Home Assistant for about seven years now, starting back when I was living in a small apartment. At the time, my setup was modest: I

How I Use Home Assistant in 2025

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Style Pass

2025-01-22 18:00:09

I’ve been using Home Assistant for about seven years now, starting back when I was living in a small apartment. At the time, my setup was modest: I used the IKEA Smart Hub (when it first launched) to tie together all my apartment’s lights. As I got more comfortable with automations, I also began building custom hardware like temperature and humidity sensors.

However, once I started adding more complexity (more devices, more automations), I realized that running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi just wasn’t viable anymore. This was before Home Assistant offered their own hardware (which I haven’t tried, so I can’t say much about it). But for me, the main issue was the database. By default, Home Assistant uses SQLite, and when you have a ton of sensor data flowing in, SQLite can start choking.

My solution was to move everything to a VM on my home server. I also migrated Home Assistant’s main database to MySQL, and for longer-term metrics and historical data, I set up an InfluxDB server. (I’ve documented the details of my home server build in another blog post.)