iiiiiiitttttttttttt

Someone that has a homeassistant server absolutely automates their devices.

Tons of my house is automated, and everything I have can still be used without an Internet connection.

Like I said, none of my smart devices have an Internet connection unless I explicitly allow them to have one, and Homeassistant is hosted on my own hardware.

It's all about having multiple ways to control things, smart and dumb. For example, in my house:

• When I turn off the hallway lights at night, it turns all the lights off in the house. They're still controllable by physical switch, and that one light I turn off is just a trigger for that automation

• I have a ton of windows, most of which face east. This is wonderful in winter, but turns my house into an oven early in the morning on a sunny summer day. I also like my privacy at night. So I have an automation to open the motorized shades at sunrise (fully on a cold/cloudy day, otherwise only partially) and close them at sunset. But there's still a little button on the shades if I need to open or close one (rare)

• My wife would always forget to turn on the bathroom fan when she showered, so the bedroom turned into a sauna. So naturally I got a humidity monitor and made an automation to turn that fan on when it gets too humid (and another to kill that fan when it's run for 10 minutes)

All of this runs on Home Assistant, which is on a Raspberry Pi I have at home. The only connection to the outside world is my weather checks

Automation doesn't mean it has to have zero human interaction to work, just that things happen automatically somehow. My oven automatically maintains a temperature, but that doesn't mean I didn't set that temperature first

Like if the central server goes down, you just can't turn on the lights

I can walk over to the switch and turn my lights on fine without internet, which in the rural area I live, happens quite often. The same with my thermostat, no net? Change it at the thermostat. The only thing I am missing when the net goes out is my schedules.

Like others in the thread my smart devices only talk to locally hosted home assistant. I use a few automations to make things easier. My favourite is being able to run open garage door while approaching my house. It opens the garage door and unlocks the door from the garage to the house. I could manually do these steps but it is nice to be able to carry whatever directly from the car to the house without needing to unlock the door.

The other nice one is automating the holiday lights. I would forget to turn them on or off regularly. Since adding the automation they turned on every evening and off around bedtime every night. I have used one of those light sensor units in the past, but it would often get covered in snow and stop working until I remembered to brush it off.

This is why in my setup I only install or use things that also work as usual (manual usual) when the control system is unreachable, but when it is reachable the thing is automated.

Along with blocking all external traffic unless there's a specific reason for temporarily allowing said traffic.