Feedback

I've been a new HA user for about 6 months, moving from a HomeKit/Homebridge/Ring environment to try to be exclusively HA. I have managed to create quite a mess (somehow) that I'm trying to dig my way out of. The reason for this critique is that I find the HA documentation rather useless. It tells how to do things, it tries to explain things, but it fails. It does NOT explain what NOT to do, what to watch out for, (e.g. "copy" v.s. "duplicate" in a dashboard), and (most importantly) suggestions for naming conventions. Definitive definitions of terminology is sorely lacking. It's so easy to create a mess and not realize it until it's too late. And by this time, your documentation is too little, too late.

The common refrain in techno-circles is "You can do anything with HA!", but everyone fails to mention that "You SHOULDN'T do just anything with HA, you should only do X, Y, or Z, and in specific ways, with specific naming conventions, or you will get yourself into trouble." Where is your "best practices" document on how to safely set up an HA system? The basic problem is that you guys know too much. You need to find someone who doesn't know anything about HA and test your docs against them.

I've only got 96 devices and 1023 entities. It shouldn't be this easy to create a mess, because I've got a lot more to add. And I happen to think that naming conventions in an installation like this are critical to getting it to work. And it STILL broke.

I've got 4 HomeKit Ecobee thermostats in my house, but 2 of them somehow have the same set of entities in them. And one thermostat's entities seem to have disappeared. This shouldn't happen. Do you have a "consistency check" for your database?

URL

https://www.home-assistant.io/dashboards/

Version

2025.4.2

Additional information

No response