I gave Home Assistant these three obscure integrations, and they made my smart home setup even more versatile

Published Oct 31, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT Ayush Pande is a PC hardware and gaming writer. When he's not working on a new article, you can find him with his head stuck inside a PC or tinkering with a server operating system. Besides computing, his interests include spending hours in long RPGs, yelling at his friends in co-op games, and practicing guitar. Between its solid compatibility with IoT products, fully customizable dashboards, trigger-action automation rules, Home Assistant is a beast of a platform for managing smart devices. But what makes Home Assistant even more versatile is the sheer support for third-party tools – and I’m not just talking about the plethora of services on its app store, either. By default, Home Assistant features integrations for Jellyfin, Ollama, and all sorts of wacky tools, and with Open Home Foundation officially bringing its Community Store into its smart platform as the Marketplace, you’ve got even more fun community offerings to tinker with. But for folks who don’t want to sift through thousands of integrations, I’ve got a couple of recommendations that truly elevated my HASS setup’s utility to the next level. The Proxmox VE integration lets me control my home lab nodes from HASS Its TrueNAS counterpart does the same for my storage server I’ve been a fan of Proxmox ever since I used it to revive an old machine, and since my PVE nodes house all my self-hosting tools, coding experiments, and DIY projects, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I rely on them for all my workloads. Although Proxmox has an intuitive web UI, I can’t quite use it to set automated rules for managing different virtual guests. Or even pair the underlying nodes with my UPS units, ESP32 network tools, or other devices in my arsenal. Fortunately, I chanced upon the unofficial Proxmox VE integration for Home Assistant a while ago, and it was a game-changer for my home lab management tasks. You see, this integration imports practically every aspect of my Proxmox nodes into HASS as conventional entities. On the monitoring front, this helped me create entire dashboards for the host metrics, storage pool details, and virtual guest resource consumption stats with my Proxmox servers. With some Bubble Card and other UI elements, I even managed to integrate simple power off, suspend, resume, and snapshot controls for my army of LXCs and VMs on my custom dashboards. And then there are all the automation workflows I use for my virtual guests and host machines. For example, I’ve created some trigger-action rules that automatically spin up closely-associated virtual guests every time I start one of them. Likewise, I’ve got smart plugs connected to most of my PVE workstations, and I’ve created rules to close certain resource-hogging VMs if the idle wattage stays above a certain threshold. Since I’ve got both my UPS devices and Proxmox servers connected to Home Assistant, I was also able to automate graceful shutdown sequences for my PVE hubs when the UPS batteries dip below the 30% mark during an outage. In fact, I’ve even got a similar TrueNAS integration hooked up to my HASS hub. So far, I’ve only been using it for a custom dashboard that displays my NAS statistics and to trigger simple UPS actions when I’ve connected one to my storage server. But unlike PVE experiments, I do take extra precautions to avoid creating automation pipelines that might render my NAS irrecoverable. Home Agent lets me pair llama.cpp models with Home Assistant But Extended OpenAI Conversation works just as well During my days as a fledgling AI enthusiast, Ollama used to power my local LLMs. Since Home Assistant has a built-in integration for Ollama, I never had issues pairing it with my self-hosted LLMs. However, once I moved on to llama.cpp, I could no longer rely on the Ollama integration and had to look into alternatives for this lightweight inference engine. These days, I’ve been using the Home Agent integration to run my llama.cpp models as conversational models on HASS. To be more specific, I use a Gemma-4-E4B (Q4_K_M) to ping my Home Assistant server for simple queries. Heck, since Gemma-4-E4B includes image analysis capabilities, I’ve even configured it to generate short summaries of my security cameras’ footage when Frigate spots suspicious objects in the streams. But aside from Home Agent, I’ve also worked with Extended OpenAI Conversations in the past, and it’s another neat tool for bringing AI models (including those running on external servers) into Home Assistant. Powercalc estimates the power consumption metrics for all my smart gizmos And this includes devices without power-monitoring provisions Switching gears from my self-hosted apps to something that helps me save money, Powercalc is a surprisingly handy integration. For one, it combines the energy consumption metrics of my smart gizmos and generates detailed reports on the estimated power bills I’d incur by using them. It can also create utility meters featuring neatly-arranged power consumption metrics of my IoT paraphernalia during a specific timeframe. But the real star of the show is its ability to correctly estimate the energy statistics of devices that can't measure their power consumption values. You see, Powercalc uses an extensive device profile containing real-world measurements of hundreds of “dumb” devices, and it can even take the brightness, spinning frequency, and other specific attributes of different gizmos into consideration when gauging their power metrics. But there are just as many cool integrations for Home Assistant If you’re still on the hunt for obscure integrations, I’ve got a couple of other recommendations. The unofficial Elegoo integration helped me pair my Centauri Carbon 3D printers with HASS, and it’s what I use to receive notifications about my printing jobs. Adaptive Lighting, on the other hand, is great for automating the color temperature and brightness of my smart bulbs depending on the sun’s position. Bubble Card isn’t really an integration, per se, and is instead more of a UI-enhancing tool. But seeing as how this Marketplace utility lets me create minimalist pop-ups for the tiny dashboards on my smartphone-turned-smart panels, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I use it as much as conventional Home Assistant integrations. Home Assistant OS Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, web iOS compatible Yes Android compatible Yes