How to Make Your Home Smart, Local, and Easy
Smart Home Automation Guides, Experiences, and AI Tools for Non-Techies — Without Subscriptions
What Smart Home Secrets will you discover?
Setup Guides
Step-by-step walkthroughs for automations, integrations, and devices. Written so you can actually follow along or request a guide to Home Assistant
Ideas & Inspiration
Creative ways to connect devices, platforms, and services. New ideas for enthusiasts, clear starting points for beginners and complex guides for the Pros
AI in the Smart Home
Voice assistants, Claude integrations, local AI agents, and YAML templates to help you be on the cutting edge of home automation. Voice Assist pipelines you will want
Built by someone who actually lives with it
I’m Brad — an IT professional with over 15 years in infrastructure and cybersecurity, and a home automation obsessive who has been building, breaking, and rebuilding smart home systems since 2013. My setup runs Home Assistant with 2,600+ connected entities, 200+ automations, and fully local voice control — no cloud dependencies, no subscriptions, no vendor lock-in. Everything on this site comes directly from my own home and my own hard-won experience.
What makes Home Assistant the right platform isn’t just the 3,000+ integrations or the extraordinary open-source community behind it — it’s the philosophy. Your data stays local. Your automations run whether the internet is up or not. And with HACS unlocking thousands of community-built extensions, the platform grows exactly as fast as your ambitions do. I built Smart Home Secrets to share what actually works, so you can skip the decade of trial and error and start where I am now via this blog.
Latest from the blog
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How I Turned a TRMNL Into a Fully Local Home Assistant Display: No Cloud Required
The TRMNL display ships with firmware that tries to phone home the moment it boots. You don’t need a TRMNL account to use the hardware. Here’s how I bypassed the cloud entirely, flashed ESPHome over a 9-second window, and built a fully local weather and calendar dashboard, with two layout options you can choose from.
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Blueprint #8: Tesla and Home Energy Monitoring in Home Assistant
Whole-home energy monitoring and Tesla integration cover two of the most impactful things you can add to Home Assistant. This Blueprint walks through the Aeotec Gen 5 setup, Tesla Fleet API configuration, Tesla Wall Connector integration, and the automations that tie it all together, including a charging complete notification that calculates real cost using your…
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Fine-Tuning Your Home Assistant Conversation Agent Pre-Prompt: Why Clarity Beats Length
You wrote a clear rule. The agent ignored it. Before you blame the LLM, check whether Home Assistant intercepted the command before Claude ever saw it. This is the meta-article behind my local voice series: what I learned about writing a conversation agent pre-prompt that actually behaves, plus the full annotated prompt I run today.
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My Home Assistant Custom Dashboards Are on GitHub: Free to Download
Google Home and Amazon Echo give you an app and a speaker. Home Assistant gives you whatever you build. I’ve put my full custom dashboard YAML files on GitHub. Two dashboards, nine views, sanitized for public use and commented so you know exactly what to change. Here’s what’s inside and how to get started.
My Home Assistant Setup
Running on Proxmox and Z-Wave, connected through UniFi networking, heard on Sonos and displayed on Immich. Driven by Tesla and a Claude powered voice assistant. The full stack is documented with help from Artificial Intelligence
Want a guide on something specific?
If you are struggling with cloud dependancy like Google Nest or Amazon Alexa or just need some help getting started and cannot see what you need here, message me!