6 Home Assistant integrations that made dumb appliances in my house smart for free

Published Nov 12, 2026, 1:00 PM EST Richard is the PC Hardware Lead at XDA and has been covering the technology industry for almost two decades. He's been building PCs since young, and when not creating content, you can often find him inside a chassis somewhere. Smart appliances are everywhere these days. We have smart TVs, smart washers, smart fridges, and even smart door locks. You can open up your fridge, see what's just about to expire, and check the latest products through targeted advertising. How brilliant is that? Not at all, and I agree, which is why I much prefer to use something like Home Assistant to make "dumb" appliances smart with an integration and a few sensors. It's easy, free (for the integrations), and doesn't take much time at all. Generic Thermostat Make all of your dumb radiators smart This is probably my favorite integration before I decided to go it alone and handle everything with a few scripts. Generic Thermostat is a must-have integration if you have electric radiators. These could be wall-mounted units or portable oil-filled rads, but the results are the same. Generic Thermostat takes control of these devices and uses available thermometer sensors to adjust power draw and heat output, maintaining comfortable temperatures. Electric radiators can sometimes have thermostatic controls and rather sophisticated internal parts, including open window detection, but an integration such as this can take your heating setup to the next level. It was brilliant until I decided to use more basic controls and timers to take advantage of our off-peak pricing and solar output with battery storage. The next step for us is to install HVAC with split airconditioning units, so it has become a little redundant. ESPHome Create some seriously cool automations You've likely read about the trusty ESP32 microcontroller right here on XDA. It's a brilliant bit of kit that takes what the Raspberry Pi was designed to do (get more people into tech and coding) and turns it up to 11. Instead of having all the makings of a PC wrapped up inside a single-board computer form factor, an ESP32 is a microcontroller. It's much more basic, but draws considerably less power, allowing it to be powered by a single battery pack. This allows for it to be used for cool projects such as smart home sensors. Instead of buying a pack of four door sensors for $40, why not make your own for much less? the same goes for humidity sensors, smart home displays, and more. The only limitation is imagination and everything can be configured and managed through ESPHome, which can be installed on top of Home Assistant in a few seconds. I've loved using ESPHome and it allowed me to create some cool devices to add features to "dumb" stuff. Ping (ICMP) Are you online? Are you home? Not every device can communicate well enough to shout when something's up or not quite working, but almost everything will fail to relay when the connection has dropped. This isn't anything to do with the devices themselves. It's simply a limitation of the link between two devices dropping faster than anything can locally detect, which is where Ping comes in. Just like pinging something from the terminal, this handy integration can allow for health checks to be added. A cool way to use this integration is for precense detection. As well as checking if a device is online, we can have Home Assistant use that information for automations and other features when a client comes back online. This can be useful for mobile devices, alerting Home Assistant when you're home, which can also be used for an integrated alarm system or something else to run when you return back home. It's not just about checking if something is up on the LAN. Powercalc Estimating how much power dumb devices use One thing dumb devices don't really handle too well is power usage. Smart plugs is one way to get an accurate reading on how much something is using, but Powercalc is another answer to this. With this integration installed for Home Assistant, the power consumption can be estimated for lights, fans, smart speakers, and other devices. For instance, light usage is calculated by looking at brightness, color temperature, and saturation. Powercalc also creates cost sensors to track spending, utility meters to break usage down by day, week or month, and group sensors to combine devices, rooms or your whole home into a single total. Wake on LAN Turn everything on without pressing a button Wake on LAN (WoL) is something you've likely seen before, in a BIOS/UEFI somewhere or when messing around with the admin panel of a network device. It's incredibly handy when dealing with hardware that may be difficult to reach or need starting manually when power drops off. That's where WoL comes into play. Instead of having to physically press a button or few, WoL can automatically turn hardware on when it's detected on the network. If you have a few Proxmox nodes that need to be fired up after a power cut, WoL can do this automatically. The same goes for all other devices that support the feature and it can all be handled through Home Assistant. This makes it possible for you to automatically turn the entire home lab back on by just booting a single system. Better still, the HA box can be connected to an unnterruptable power supply (UPS) so it's never down and WoL can simply bring the rest back online. SNMP Pulling OPNsense data OPNsense collects and shows a fair amount of data, which can be checked through the web admin interface. But Home Assistant can also tap into the software to pull everything across. This can then be displayed in cards and dashboards or even used for automations, which can bring the LAN together. At times, the network can almost feel disconnected from the rest of the home. That's why I appreciated SNMP within Home Assistant, which brings together everything. Home Asisstant is incredibly versatile You've seen us (mainly myself and Adam Conway) bang on about the Open Home Foundation, Home Assistant, and everything the platform can do, but it's for good reason. Smart homes can be extremely convoluted. There are options everywhere, but many of these are walled gardens, overpriced, or difficult to set up and use. That's why we advocate for Home Assistant. It's free, open, and can do much more than most smart home ecosystems. Home Assistant OS Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, web iOS compatible Yes Android compatible Yes