October marks three years since I started using Home Assistant. I think it’s fair to say that it’s made a big difference in how I manage having a smart home.
As I write this, I have 55 integrations set up with Home Assistant. These are a mixture of official, built-in integrations, but also those that I have installed from HACS. However, over time, there are some integrations that I’ve installed and later removed, and so this is a blog post about those that I’ve stopped using – and why.
AdGuard Home
I still use AdGuard Home as a network-level ad blocker, and it runs as a Home Assistant app. However, I’ve disabled the integration, simply because I wasn’t using it. I didn’t need the extra entities taking up space in my Home Assistant database.
DuckDNS
I used to use DuckDNS as part of enabling remote access the Home Assistant. I don’t anymore, and instead I use Homeway which is more secure. So the integration isn’t necessary.
When I first started using Home Assistant, DuckDNS had to be set up using YAML, but it can now be configured using the Home Assistant web interface.
Forecast.Solar
This integration calculates a forecast of how much power your solar panels could generate. I instead use the Solcast integration from HACS; I don’t know whether one is better than the other, but Solcast works for me.
Generic Thermostat
I wrote about using Generic Thermostat in 2024, to have a fan come on automatically when it got too hot. I don’t use it anymore, now that we have a proper air conditioning unit.
Google Wi-Fi
I got rid of the Google Wi-Fi integration when we changed to a different ISP and got a new Fritz!Box router, which made our Google Wi-Fi devices redundant. This is a very old integration that still requires users to set up via YAML – it hasn’t been brought into the Home Assistant user interface yet.
Home Connect
This is the smart home platform for devices from Bosch, Neff and Siemens, and I used it for our smart Bosch dishwasher.
We still have the dishwasher, but I’ve replaced this with Home Assistant Local from HACS. This downloads your device’s profile from the Home Connect portal (obtained using a custom app) and then all communication between Home Assistant and your device happens locally, rather than via the Home Connect web service. Hopefully this means that, should Bosch ever shut Home Connect down or end support for older devices, the smart features of our dishwasher will continue to work.
Mealie
I wrote about Mealie earlier this year, as a self-hosted recipe manager. As it is, I’ve stopped using Mealie and gone back to using Mela, which I find works better for me. The idea of using Mealie is that it’s cross-platform, rather than just for Apple devices like Mela is, however, my wife actually prefers just having printed copies of recipes in a folder. And printing recipes is a lot easier from Mela than it is from Mealie.
Met Office
Home Assistant comes with a weather integration pre-installed, from the Norwegian Met Office. I used the UK Met Office integration for a while, but decided just to stick with the standard one. I don’t need more than one weather integration, and the Met Office app on my phone covers notifications for weather warnings.
Nest Protect
This is a HACS integration for use with the Nest Protect smart smoke and carbon monoxide alarm. Alas, it hasn’t worked for several months – every time Home Assistant restarts, it needs re-authenticating. In any case, our Nest Protect needs replacing before the end of July 2027 as it’ll cease to work, so a task for me next year will be to find a good replacement smoke and carbon monoxide alarm. Hopefully one that works with Matter, and doesn’t rely on a cloud service to function.
Nextcloud
I used to use Nextcloud for enabling remote file access to my Raspberry Pi. I don’t anymore – the Docker image running Nextcloud would lock up after running for a few weeks and I couldn’t get on top of why. When this happened, this integration also broke, so eventually I got rid of it.
NYT Games
I originally set this up to make sure that I completed Wordle every day, but I didn’t find it very useful. As it is, I’m reasonably good at remembering to complete Wordle each day so it’s not really necessary.
Pushover
Pushover is a web service that lets you send push notifications. I used it many years ago and still had an account, and so I added it to Home Assistant as I went through a phase of ‘must add everything I have an account for’ early on. I never used it, as the Home Assistant mobile app can send notifications.
SolaX Power
I wrote about this one a couple of years ago, when the firmware in my SolaX inverter was updated and it no longer exposed a REST API that this integration needed. Instead, I now use the SolaX Inverter Modbus integration from HACS.
Tasmota
Last year, I migrated my smart home devices that were running Tasmota to ESPHome, and so I no longer had any need for the Tasmota integration. It was also one of the integrations that was most slowing down Home Assistant on start-up.
Tomorrow.io
Tomorrow.io is another service that provides weather data via an API, and I wanted to use it to display information about the current pollen levels on my dashboard. However, the API seemed flaky and I couldn’t get it to work very well, so I ditched it.
