What hardware do you use? And how were you able to get hold of something that doesn't talk to the cloud? There's nothing like that in the shops here.
The trick is, before you buy anything, look it up on Home Assistant. If its "class" is "local push", you're golden:
https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th...
The other big problem with smart home is that every company wants to own the ecosystem. The technical term for that is “greedy bastards”. It’s not cloud; it’s cloud lock-in that’s the problem as I see it. This is the source not only of reliability problems but also of compatibility and interoperability problems.
When I started on my IoT journey I adopted a hard requirement that everything must “fail normal” - I don’t want a call in the middle of the night for tech support while I’m traveling on business, because my family can’t turn on the lights. Everything in my house fails normal- if the cloud or the internet goes away, the house becomes a dumb house and you can still turn on/off anything with a switch.
Nah, standards assist everyone. Thus Matter[0] is becoming a thing. It will be supported by pretty much everyone (Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung SmartThings and the Zigbee Alliance).
"Fail normal" is a good thing to keep in mind nevertheless.
And I have about 20 ZWave devices. They've been super reliable, but, it's a small house, so I can't speak for what would happen if I quadrupled. My Caseta stuff has been just as reliable.
I had everything on HA, but at the time they were changing _everything_ way too quickly for me. After the last time I'd lost my entire Zwave network setup, I figured it was a great time to try something now.
So, now it's a single ~1k line javascript file that handles all my automation, built atop zwave2mqtt (hoping to move to zwavejs soon - maybe over the holiday). It's simple, solid, and very easy to maintain.
I could use a UI, and occasionally dream of building one, but honestly I generally forget the place is automated. It all just sorta works.
No idea when I'll find the time, but if you want to email me (check my profile), I'll reach out when I find the chance to do so.
It has some warts, but my automation would not be viable without it. I specially like the NodeRED integration - even if I think that NodeRED is quite quirky and %#@!% sometimes, it's still neat to be able to write automations without programming much. I do plenty of that on my day job. Also a great visual aid to explain to non-technical people.
I use Sonoff plugs, the first thing I do when I get one is solder headers on them and reflash their firmware - hey presto, no cloud
HomeKit stuff can be controlled remotely, but it doesn't "talk to the cloud" as much as IFTTT or Samsung SmartThings based stuff.
After you hit a wall with the Hue native automations + HomeKit, Home Assistant is pretty much the only relevant shop in town, maybe enhanced with NodeRED.
The setup is very cool. I say "Hey Siri, good morning" before I get out of bed, and the lights turn on. Siri also understands more complicated requests like "set the center light to cyan" or "set all the lights to 50%." I also save configurations ("Scenes") and Siri can apply them by name.
Importantly the fixture has a physical switch and the bulbs reset to ordinary white after powering off, so the bulbs fail like an escalator if the WiFi is down.
No relation to any of these products, just a happy customer.