• 4 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Depending on your level of technical skill and willingness to risk crack things open, you can flash most Tasmota type devices with esphome and hard code it to be always on. This would go along way to eliminating software as the problem. I have done this with meters attached to my washing machine and dishwasher.

    Also, the boards are also relatively simple and it is likely (although there are lots of variants) that you could remove the relay completely and bridge across the terminals. I wouldn’t plug my electric car into it (10A sustained) but you could put a led lamp through it without without much risk.

    Disclaimer - I am a hobbyist, not an electrician. YMMV, keep a fire extinguisher nearby, yadda yadda


  • Bluesheep@lemmy.worldtohomeassistant@lemmy.worldmmm
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    10 months ago

    I recognise this problem, I had it for cameras detecting people, and that being annoying when I work in the garden.

    The automation itself is surfaced as a switch so you can turn it off without trying to change your in automation logic to test for states.

    Then, if you are like me, you’ll realise you forget to turn it back on! I created an automation that triggers when the automation is turned off and turns it back on after 2 hours (no way I’m gardening for longer than that).

    Lastly, because it was annoying to have to open the app, I made the notification have an action button to turn off the notification automation, so that when I start gardening and my phone pings, I can turn it off without farting about too much.











  • I’ve got a decent number of local manual controls, but not all of them. For example, some of my wall switches operate the relay because they are just turning on and off the power. Others I have disabled the relay on because the lights themselves are WW/CW tuneable and HA controls the colour during the day.

    I’m wondering about having another look at zigbee groups and commands for the simpler automations in the house. I avoided these because they aren’t really visible to HA and I didn’t like having two automation ‘languages’ at the same time.

    Overall, how long do you think you could cope without your HA platform before it becomes an issue?


  • I was thinking about matter yesterday, I like the idea of being able to have multiple controllers. My house is half wifi devices and half zigbee. I’d been favouring zigbee recently because I don’t want to swamp my network with device packets, but maybe that needs a rethink. At the very least my wifi devices all have esp home configs that could be configured to fall back to defaults.




  • I like this, but I don’t like that rooms are cold unless I hang out in them. I live in an old stone house and I’d rather have a room schedule than a room presence sensor.

    I’ve done something similar. I use the excellent scheduler from Niels Faber. I have room radiator TRVs. I have a helper entity that counts the number of radiators that have an open valve, and an automation that triggers when this changes to/from zero. This automation adjusts the central nest thermostat, converting it to more or less a posh switch.

    My radiator valves use Better Thermostat and external temperature sensors, and the whole thing keeps my house warm in every room. I need to write a GH blog post about it, but happy to answer questions/share bits of config