This is the forum archive of Homey. For more information about Homey, visit the Official Homey website.
The Homey Community has been moved to https://community.athom.com.
This forum is now read-only for archive purposes.
The Homey Community has been moved to https://community.athom.com.
This forum is now read-only for archive purposes.
How stable is Homey?
ad6922
Member
I've had a homey directly from the crowdfunding round. At that time the homey was very unstable. Lots of issues and crashes.That's why i sold it at the time.
As i found it an interesting concept, i am still interested.
I wonder what the status is now.
Is it passed the phase where you have to reset everything once in a while and is it now a robust product or are there still a lot of flaws and is it not for the general public?
As i found it an interesting concept, i am still interested.
I wonder what the status is now.
Is it passed the phase where you have to reset everything once in a while and is it now a robust product or are there still a lot of flaws and is it not for the general public?
Comments
Have seen some memory leaks lately (could be caused by community apps as well), but for me homey is running stable and only reboots on updates.
Where other users do expierience memory issues, and need to reboot every night.
I didn't using speech because things e.g. bulbs and blinds are handeld by Homey and Flows. Like Automation :-).
Till yet no reboot or ptp needed this month :-).
I'm waiting for ZigBee. At the moment Bulbs connected to Homey with a HueBridge. Not my favorite ;-).
I have a house full of Hue lights and the Hue bridge never failed me (with switches). However, the outside lights that are controlled by the homey (using the Hue app and bridge) did work for about two weeks and just stopped working. I had to reboot homey and it worked again.
What has been working was the lights in one room where I have two z-wave fibaro motion sensors and Hue lights. It did turn on the lights when motion was detected, but after some days, no luck. And even after a reboot, no luck.
So, now I need to buy a Hue motion sensor and let hue bridge control everything so I can unplug the homey.
On the System before Homey i didn't need a Bridge for the Bulbs but Z-Wave was updated till it died ;-).
Homey is my 4th (or 5th - did not remember) System and in comparison Homey did till yet the best and stable work. For me ;-).
I run 19 apps, 65 + devices and 18 flows. I reboot when we get an update so that is every 3-4 weeks.
All my Zwave devices are supported now, i have taken some community apps and ajusted them so they fit my need a little bit better. Now waiting for zigbee (plugwise) native support so i can put those plugs back to work.
No stability issues on homey's end here.
Only little thing that happens a few times a week are (3rd party) apps crashing. But they are restarted after 5 seconds by Candy and so far seem to have little or no impact on homey itself..
So, i'm happy i gave them half a year longer. Because last year i thought homey would never be able to replace my Vera.
I recently performed a factory reset because I moved to another apartment. I'm in the process of installing and re-pairing all the devices. The core platform seems very solid. I'm trying to get the full Homey experience with a minimal number of apps, using the core functionality as much as possible. So far, I only have a small issue signing in to the google music app and a few minor UI bugs which most people might not even encounter/notice.
Well, lets see if that could be the case. Z-wave wasn't working for me at all and Hue lights sometimes just stopped working and I had to reboot.
So, this is what I did:
I bought a Raspberry Pi 3 model B with a Z-wave Gen5 USB stick. I installed Raspbian with domoticz, learned a bit the system and now I have exact the same 'flows' as I had with homey. Everything is working, even Z-wave, motion sensors turning on the lights and turning it off after 5 minutes of no movement etc. I even have push messages to phone working in case of someone ringing the doorbel.
Now lets wait and see if this runs stable for weeks. If so, then we know for sure it is a homey problem and not the surroundings.
I have worked years with a solution like that, and ofcourse that runs stable. It excists way longer then Homey, has less signals (only z-wave and maybe wifi in your case), has 161(!) contributors and isn't as easy to setup as Homey is.
Homey has (in that little round ball) Zigbee, Z-wave, IR, 433, Bluetooth and WiFi...and it needs to send and receive on all of those signals. So you do need to count in some interference and less "range" with a Homey vs a dedicated signal like just one z-wave stick.
Other then that, try to write some plugins for domoticz, openhab or home-assistant. It just isn't as easy as it is for Homey
I am confident that i can build a way more advanced system with any of the above named alternatives then i currently can with Homey. But i love the product, love the community and love that its build on NodeJS/Javascript. Thats worth something right
Everyone has his own preference, but it just can't be said that Homey isn't running stable. I do agree some community apps might be bad written and could create memory leaking (or even flows that loop when you don't notice), but you can't blaim that on Homey.
I only reboot on firmware updates, other then that (and since the z-wave rewrite) i never had issues.
To your statement about the communications, I have to correct you. Out of the box (30 Euro) the RPI supports WiFi, Bluetooth, LAN (Homey does not support LAN). With 50 Euros extra you have Z-wave. That leaves 433 and Zigbee. 433 is a bit more expensive for the RPI (about 100 Euros I think) and Zigbee, well, I have the Hue Bridge.
But you are right, homey does have more means of communications. But I have to pay for it even if I don't need it (433 is not even an option for me if it comes to reliable home automation)
And I didn't mention any prices before, because that wasn't the point. It was a point about stability. And yes, for me it is even cheaper to use domoticz on RPI, but I knew that on forehand. I bought homey for its potential and ease of use. Now that desktop support is going to be removed and the fact that it is still not stable, I am losing faith in the product (well, athom, because the idea still has potential)
edit:
oh and another thing: I can backup my system :-)
If something happens, I can restore it easily without doing everything over again. (even Z-wave devices can be backed up)
Since you are/were promoting open-source alternatives you should inform a bit more imho.
Where LAN isn't really interfering with other signals...and don't forget IR
Don't forgot domoticz isn't backing up z-wave by default, that needs a seperate back-up as well (from the open zwave thingy, at least it did in the past..).
To be honest, when you talk about prices...you actually shoudn't start on home-automation. Thats just an expensive hobby
I don't even think there has been a crashed Homey on the stable channel tho, so actually i don't care for back-ups
So, when you say: "It is working fine here". And with other system then homey it is working fine, What is the cause you think?
Look, I understand things take time to get it all stable. Don' get me wrong, I have been very patient. I loved the idea and that is the reason I bought it.
But it is the attitude of athom that I am getting tired of. The homey is not finished yet, I hope you can agree on that. IR is crap, ZigBee is not working yet and people have trouble with stability in general (or are you saying I am the onle one?)
And what are they doing? They focus on 'selling point stuff', like music. I know, maybe some people like it. But get the basic right first. And again got a newsletter with nice selling points of what could happen in the future. Yeah, athom, we know what the potentials are, but please deliver! At least deliver on promisses, but that is also a big problem for Athom. They promiss a lot, but just don't deliver.
@swttt, I know you love the system and that is OK. I am happy for you. But maybe you can be empathetic enough to see that some people can be frustrated by an unfinished and unstable system while athom just isn't focusing on these issues.
i am Lucky with homey so far but that is my own opinion
I moved from a HC2 a 700 euro unit to a more unstable unit and i cannot say that i was happy about homey when i got it ...bad performance and zwave was crap ... but the setup i got today was not possible on a HC2 ( wifi units , Milight, and soon IKEA lights ) and the support i get on the forum / slack / mail is super !
and like @phil_s says its your own choice !
Taking a beer and have nice weekend all !
I think the question how stable Homey really is is a very good question. I didn't realize that there were still users with stability issues and the cause is probably not as straight forward as one might guess. It could be the homey core, drivers, apps, 3rd party devices or the interaction between any of these components.
underground. It sounds like an good test and interesting comparison. I'm curious what the results are and how the user experience compares between the two. Keep us updated!
Of course it could be a hardware-issue but that seems unlikely given that it runs well for some time before processes are being killed.
Do you have some insight-graphs of processor-load etc? Also, did you look at the logs of apps, devices, flows etc to see if something stood out?
When was the last time you did a full reset on your Homey. In the end the configuration-files are just flat-files afaik (though a transit to sql was planned and might be on 1,3.x already?). If there's, for some unknown reason but let's say Heisenberg also has to dip in, an error in one of your internal config-files this could cause havoc.
I had the (extra) apps: Philips Hue, Fibaro, Countdown, Better Logic, Http request flow chards, Sun Events
I had 2 z-wave sensors (one z-wave plus and one z-wave fibaro motion sensor)
I had 1 fibaro z-wave wall switch
Philips Hue lights (about 20 lights and 8 switches, including tab)
I had two flows for the lights outside to be turned on after sunset and turned off at some time in the night.
I had about 4 flows to get light automatically on when motion was detected and kept on for at least 5 minutes when no potion was detected.
1 flow that was triggered when the (mobotix) doorbel was pushed (by http request) that would send a push message to 2 phones.
I had version 1.3.2 that was installed by Athom themselfs.
I did a reset (including z-wave)
The problems I had were with both (and only devices I had). I had problems reading the sensors. They worked in the beginning, but after a while, it didn't detect motion (could read temperature). Hue lights could not be switched. The latter was resolved after reboot of homey (reboot needed about every 2 or 3 weeks), but the sensor problems could not be solved (not after removing and adding them again. Tried everything)
With domoticz, I had to remove the z-wave devices from Homey and added them to the USB stick (which is the z-wave controller). Plugged in Raspberry Pi and the devices were there and all was working fine. So, the sensors were OK.
I am a consumer. To be honest, I don't care if it is a hardware or software problem, because neither are looked into and getting solved. because, other people say "It works fine here, it must be something on your side".
I am a software developer and we at work use this line to joke. If a coworker says "this doesn't work", we say as a joke "It works on my PC". But here people are seriously saying that. Yes, I believe you, if you say it is working for you. But that doesn't help me at all and further more, People are running away from the issues that are certainly there. That is what is frustrating. Oh, homey is great, it works here and if it isn't working for you, then you must be doing something wrong.
All I can say is that I now have the exact same flows/situation/control with domoticz as I had with homey and all is working fine. Nothing has changed in the house, only homey is replaced by a RPI with domoticz.
And I cannot emphasize enough that I love the idea of homey. But it isn't a consumer product yet. And once I need to hobby anyway, I might as well get a hobby system (RPI), so I have better hardware and an open system.
All is running fine on the Raspberry PI with domoticz for a week now.
I wanted to write a review to compare the two systems, but to be honest; with every day the RPI/Domoticz running fine and reading about the possibilities, I rather spent time on the stable system instead of the (for me) unstable homey system.
The review won't be good for the product homey. So, homey fan boys should be glad.
I came to the conclusion not to write a comparison review yesterday. My girlfriend and her co-workers were talking about home automation and she told them about RPI and homey. She said that they can buy the homey, but right away the co-workers said that homey was crappy and are not interested (they were thinking to buy Alexa). So, they knew homey and I guess the word about its state is out.
My homey is unplugged. Who knows after some years I plug it back in to see what has become of the software. But for now I will just check this forum once in a while.
It made massive steps, at this point im using Http requests, klik-aan klik-uit (433 mhz) , z-wave, Philips hue, IR, Speech controle, Homey app, allot of automated flows, push notifications through push-over on a daily basis and its working fawless.
1 thing i did notice is the "buienradar app" making allot of requests from the buienradar server, and homey used to disconnect from wifi allot, i uninstalled the app and all is good now, dont have to reboot homey anymore couse of a wifi loss.
My 2 cents.
But what does this really say? This means buying a homey is a 300 Euro gamble. If you are lucky it works, if you are out of luck you have bought an expensive led ring for 300 Euro.
The whole problem is stated within your reply: if people report problems, homey fan boys immediatly reply that everything is fine. Nothing get solved by Athom. At least, I don't see it. After such a long time still crap and they are working on nice selling point stuff instead of dealing with problems some people have with that thing.
I will never suggest someone to buy a homey.
Just shared my experience.