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RegioHomeBook an audit

Technology

This page is not marketing. It is what actually runs in a RegioHome system, with the components and protocols named.

The architecture of a RegioHome systemThree layers: the clients (wall tablet, phone, remote access over VPN), the Home Assistant server running on Proxmox inside the house, and the devices it talks to directly — solar over Modbus, climate control on the local network, network gear and cameras.CLIENTSWall tabletPhoneRemote accessencrypted VPNTHE SERVER IN THE HOUSEHome Assistant on ProxmoxDashboards · automations · backupsDEVICESSolarModbusClimate controlTCPNetworkAPICamerasRTSP

Stack

Home Assistant
The core of the system: entities, automations, dashboards, REST and WebSocket APIs.
Proxmox VE
The virtualisation underneath. Home Assistant runs as a virtual machine alongside the household's other services, with a snapshot before every larger change.
Modbus
The solar inverter and the battery. Production, state of charge, import and export, EMS mode — read directly, with no cloud in between.
Zigbee · Z-Wave · Matter
Wireless sensors and actuators: presence, opening, temperature, humidity. Their own networks, independent of Wi-Fi.
ESPHome
Our own firmware for devices where the factory module is untrustworthy or demands a cloud. The configuration is a file in git, like everything else.
MQTT
The message bus between components. All of the traffic stays on the local network.
KNX gateway
If the house already has a KNX bus, we connect it. We do not replace what works.

Why local control

A system that depends on a server abroad stops in three different ways: when your internet goes down, when their server goes down, and when the manufacturer decides your model is no longer worth maintaining. The first is annoying; the third is permanent.

Here the logic runs in the house. If the link drops you lose remote access and notifications — that is all. Schedules, scenes and temperature control carry on, because they never needed the internet to run in the first place.

There is a practical side effect too: latency. A switch whose signal travels through a data centre answers in a few hundred milliseconds. One that stops in the next room answers immediately, and you feel the difference every time you turn on a light.

Security

We open no port to the internet. That is not a preference but a rule we do not bend: every forwarded port is a door someone will try, and consumer smart devices are notoriously badly defended.

Remote access runs over an encrypted private network. Your phone is on the house network from anywhere in the world, but from the outside nothing is visible — there is no service to connect to unless you are already inside.

Camera footage is recorded locally and does not leave the building. Not to the manufacturer, and not to us. If you want to watch remotely, you watch over that same private network.

The network is segmented: smart devices sit apart from your computers and phones. A compromised device does not reach the rest of the house.

Backup and restore

The configuration is backed up automatically, and the copies land on a second device in the house — not only on the server that might be the thing that fails.

Beneath Home Assistant, Proxmox snapshots the virtual machine. An update that goes badly is rolled back in minutes rather than debugged for hours.

Energy statistics are backed up separately. They are the data that cannot be reconstructed: lose two years of solar production and there is nowhere to get it back from.

The worst case — the server dies outright — means new hardware, a restore from backup, and a working system the same day. We have rehearsed this, not merely planned it.

Configuration as code

Dashboards, integrations and automations are text files, versioned in git. Every change has an author, a date and a reason, and any of them can be rolled back.

That is the practical difference between a designed system and one assembled by clicking through a interface. A system made of clicks exists only in the head of the person who made it; one described in code can be read, compared and reproduced.

At handover you get all of it: the repository, the documentation, the device list and the restore procedure. If you want to work with someone else tomorrow, they have somewhere to start — which is also our answer to “what if you disappear?”.