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My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

jorisroovers.com

141–150 of 205 posts

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#141

I want SO BADLY to convert my switches to smart switches, but it feels impossible to find what i need. Good luck searching on Amazon, too. Search for Zigbee, and it will return page after page of zwave, proprietary, and other listings. It's impossible to wade through. I've tried and given up multiple times. This is what i need that is evidently so difficult to find: 1. Zigbee 2. 3-way 3. Dimmable 4. Beige (almond?) C…

I found the same thing. I was searching for air quality/CO2 monitors. It seemed that decent ones werent with zigbee.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, a lot of that came down to making sure every automation I add is usable with the least amount of mental effort. For the longest time I didn't automate much at all and often questioned whether I needed all this or not, then we had a baby. Now we have a button in his nursery that will dim the lights, start playing white noise on a Google Home speaker, mark the start of a new nap on our Babybuddy instance, then…

There’s no law of nature that says you need to track your kids sleep and upload it to a could service.

It looks like it's self-hosted: https://github.com/babybuddy/babybuddy

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#143
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree with this, although I'm also a fan of home automation. I want all my switches to continue to work (they do), no internet connection between me and my automated devices, no complicated "scenes", and I don't want to mess around with some UI every day. Setup, sure, but that's it. So in the end I have lights that turn on in any room we're in and turn themselves off some time after we've left. My porch l…

How do you do motion detection and presence in your setup? How do you make sure the lights doesn't turn off if you're just sitting in the room?

Long timers.

I'd love to have some sort of presence detection that will work with multiple people (including a child) without embedding a chip into our necks, but haven't found anything that seems reliable, yet. Room assistant sounds pretty cool, but I haven't had the time to play with it - and I'm not "installing" bluetooth on my toddler.

Early on I had 5-15 minute timers in most rooms, but my wife and I have ended up sitting in a dark bathroom, or worse cooking in a dark kitchen - flailing our arms to get the lights back on far too many times.

So, I made the timers in most rooms 30 minutes (20 in the bathroom, 5 in closets). That worked well everywhere but the kitchen; I added a second motion sensor there, and it pretty much always gets it right now.

Once in a while the light will shut off in the living room when we're still and zoned out on our phones or a movie, but that's rare enough that it's not a big deal. Also we get to laugh at ourselves for being perfectly still for an entire half hour.

--- Edit ---

I imagine presence detection is significantly easier with one occupant, and I've daydreamed about setting up a "one-person-home" mode that just turns on the light in whatever room last detected someone and off everywhere else. But honestly everything works so well as-is, that I don't think it's really worth the effort.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#144

All this smarthome stuff like an enormous amount of work. What are any actual concrete benefits over doing things the dumb way? I can't think of anything significant, certainly nothing to justify the cost (not just money, also time, embodied energy etc). Though I have 0 experience with this stuff, so I am asking a genuine question.

We use a traditional system at our first home, but at the family holiday home in the remote countryside, smart home stuff makes a lot of sense:

- burglary alarm

- smoke alarm

- no guests? all lights off

- minimal heat in winter to prevent freezing pipes

- preheat home and boiler before arrival

- ...

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You joke, but we both know that automatic lamp timers have existed for decades. I like home automation stuff as much as the next person but this is a disingenuous argument.

I went from those to a basic HomeAssistant setup, and really enjoy the fact that my light timers can be "30 minutes before sunset" instead of a fixed time that needs to be adjusted throughout the year. On the other hand, the fact that everything stops working if wifi goes down is a real bummer. I can't for the life of me understand why these "smart" plugs don't just use powerline ethernet. I guess I should just be th…

You should be using Z-wave instead of Wi-Fi for anything that you can, but in reality how often does your actual Wi-Fi network go down? HA runs locally, so it's not like you need Internet access. Unless your smart plugs are actually controlled over the Internet, in which case you should throw them away immediately and buy something better.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#146
post #23

When you sell a house like this... what do you leave behind and what do you take? This has increasingly been on my mind. I've no desire to sell soon, but there's a Nest doorbell that is wired in, so it stays. A Nest thermostat, which I could remove but when I got the boiler I chose to not have the control panel extra with timer as I knew I had Nest. Then the lighting, the motion sensors... should I take the few thous…

I've experimented around with HA and some other options for my home. We bought our home just a few years ago, and not likely to move soon, but I thought about perhaps registering an email for the house, and using that for accounts that I wouldn't consider taking with me. Selling the house would consist of clearing out most (perhaps all) email from the inbox, clearing the trash, changing the password for the email account and then handing it over to the new owner. Then they just have to go through the 'forgot password' routine to create new passwords for accounts linked to it. Anything I plan to take with me would need to be disassociated from that account first, of course.

This is just a thought at this point, frankly, so there are obviously some gaps that need to be worked out.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#147
post #76

I simply flick a switch to turn on lights. Opening shades is no problem for me, a physically fit human.

How often do you adjust the color temperature and lumens of your light bulbs to optimize for circadian rhythm? I can see why you're so physically fit if you're going around to all your light switches and making these adjustments all the time ;).

I don't care to.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a lot of issues with battery powered z-wave devices not waking up. Also, IIRC there is a bug in the zwave-js github issue tracker about the 700 series Z-sticks dropping commands. Sometimes I need to reboot for outgoing packets to reach devices from the Z-stick.

I have this bug too. It happened with the old zwave plugin as well, my Aeotec stick just stops delivering packets if it gets bumped and I have to restart the whole system.

One of the recommendations I read on some github issues was to put the z-stick on a USB extension cable to rule out interference from other ports. I was skeptical of this but it did seem to improve my experience.

I still get the issue that makes it need to reboot every now and then however. Edit: https://github.com/zwave-js/node-zwave-js/issues/3906 -- apparently there is a firmware fix for this now? Will try out later.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#149
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the community maintains it, why hasn't the community removed the phone-home surveillance in the iOS client? This is something I only see in packages maintained by a central authority that wants to consume the data from the community, at the expense of end user privacy.

I'm the maintainer of the iOS/macOS app these days. I'm not paid by Nabu Casa and I do it in my free time (if anything, Nabu Casa has avoided doing things which may inadvertently monetize my work to not my benefit, which I appreciate). There's no analytics nor reporting in the app. I've been slowly removing[0] things that talk to servers other than your Home Assistant server, but your private information's never left…

The app privacy label on the iOS App Store directly contradicts your claims.

Is it out of date?

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#150

I use Home Assistant in my new house, and it kind of works. But the amount of effort needed to control a cheap wifi on/off plug did not impress me positively. It is basically one bit of information, but it goes through who knows how many layers of software and configurations. Took me a couple of hours to make it work.. I also use the standard thermostat component, which is basic beyond belief. The kind of control tha…

I used HomeAssistant for over five years and pretty much hated every minute of it due to the amount of effort you describe. Setup, upgrades and maintenance were always a major pain. Features were introduced, rearchitected, and dropped without any consideration whether users 1) Wanted them in the first place 2) Whether it would be a burden to change things. 3) For dropped features, whether anyone would miss it.

It's just a very poorly ran and guided open source project. I ended up buying a Hubitat last year and it's required a lot less effort to run.

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