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Where to find Home Assistant help for free — forums, videos, podcasts and docs
Updated 13 October 2026
Most Home Assistant problems have been solved by someone already, and written up somewhere free. This page is a map of where. Try these first. If you can't find it, can't figure it out, or you'd just rather someone else did it, that's what our service is for, and it's at the bottom of this page.
The official places
- The documentation: home-assistant.io/docs. Every integration has its own page, and the page for the thing that's broken is the right place to start. Check the integration's page before you read anyone's forum post about it, because the forum post may be years old.
- The community forum: community.home-assistant.io. The biggest single source of answers. Search it before you post; the problem you have has very likely been asked. The Configuration category is where most "it stopped working" threads live.
- The official help page: home-assistant.io/help lists every official channel in one place.
- The blog: home-assistant.io/blog. Read the release notes for the month you updated to. The "breaking changes" section is where "it broke after the update" usually explains itself.
- The Discord chat: home-assistant.io/join-chat. Live chat with other users. Good for a quick "does this look right", less good for a long problem, because the conversation scrolls away.
- Reddit: the r/homeassistant community. Busy, friendly, and good for "is this a known problem this week" questions.
YouTube channels worth your time
These are channels that explain things properly rather than just showing a finished result. Watch one video from each and keep the ones whose style suits you.
- Home Assistant: the official channel. The monthly release videos are the quickest way to see what changed.
- Smart Home Junkie: clear, step-by-step tutorials on automations, dashboards and the basics done well.
- Everything Smart Home: practical builds and honest reviews, with the mistakes left in.
- BeardedTinker: long-form, detailed walkthroughs, especially on sensors and integrations.
- Smart Home Solver: comparisons and "which one should I buy" videos that save you money.
- mostlychris: beginner-friendly, patient explanations of one thing at a time.
- Slacker Labs: voice assistants, ESPHome gear and the newer features, explained as they land.
- digiblurDIY: hardware, flashing, and the hands-on end of things.
- The Hook Up: thorough testing of cameras, sensors and network gear.
- NotEnoughTech: tinkering projects and the odd rabbit hole, well documented.
Podcasts
- Home Assistant Podcast: the long-running podcast about Home Assistant itself, with release round-ups and interviews. Good for keeping up without reading everything.
- Self-Hosted: wider than Home Assistant, covering everything you might run on a home server. Useful once you've got more than one thing running.
Documentation for the gear around Home Assistant
A lot of what people call "a Home Assistant problem" is really a problem in one of the things it talks to. Each of these has its own docs and its own community.
- HACS, the community store for add-ons and cards: hacs.xyz. If a custom card or integration broke after an update, the HACS docs and the project's own GitHub page are where to look.
- ESPHome, for home-made sensors and the voice satellites: esphome.io. The docs are excellent, and every component has an example you can copy.
- Zigbee2MQTT, if your Zigbee devices go through it: zigbee2mqtt.io. The supported devices list tells you exactly what each device exposes.
- Frigate, for cameras and person detection: docs.frigate.video. Most camera problems are the camera's stream settings, and the docs cover them camera by camera.
- Awesome Home Assistant: github.com/frenck/awesome-home-assistant. A curated list of integrations, cards, blueprints and guides, kept by one of the core developers.
How to ask so you get an answer
People on these forums answer questions for nothing, in their own time. The ones that get answered quickly all look the same.
- Say what changed. "It stopped after the October update" or "I added a new Zigbee plug yesterday" is half the diagnosis.
- Paste the actual error, from Settings → System → Logs, in a code block. A screenshot of a screenshot gets skipped.
- Include your version, from Settings → About, and how you run it (Home Assistant OS, a container, a Pi, a PC).
- For an automation, paste the automation and say what the trace showed. Describing it in words means the first three replies will ask for the YAML anyway.
- Say what you've already tried. It stops people suggesting the thing you did first.
- Take a backup before you try anyone's suggestion. Settings → System → Backups. If you haven't got backups set up, do that first.
Be careful what you paste
Logs and configuration files can contain things you don't want public: your external address, long-lived tokens, camera stream passwords, your location. Read through before you post, and replace anything that looks like a key or an address.
Our own build guides
We also write up our own builds in full, mistakes included, at spannerandbyte.com: presence sensors, a voice assistant, an energy meter, cameras without a subscription, and more. They're not fixes for a broken setup; they're how we built things that work, with the lessons that cost us an evening.
When it's time to get someone else to do it
Some problems aren't worth another weekend. If you've been through the forum, tried the obvious, and it's still broken, or you'd simply rather hand it over, our fixed-price remote repair reads your whole setup, fixes what can safely be fixed, and leaves you a written report. There's no subscription and nothing is held between jobs. The home-assistant-help page explains what it does and what it costs.
