As I'm currently doing a re-wire, it's a great opportunity for me to put some metering in the house.
I'm single-phase, but I plan to monitor multiple sections of the house, which are each wired for 100A independently.

I'm currently eyeing up either the Shelly Pro 3EM – 120A or the 50A.
As it will fit nicely in the consumer unit, and supports Ethernet.

I previously looked at the Aeotec clamp devices, but they seem to be difficult to find with multiple 100A connectors.

Emporia Vue was also a consideration, but I'm always a little hesitant to buy products that require custom firmware to even work properly, when others are available. And I'd also like to avoid using 2.4Ghz wifi for connectivity.

I'd love to hear any experiences people have had with similar devices, good or bad. And how the integration with HA went.

I am using the teslemetry integration to dynamically adjust my charging amps to match the surplus production from my solar panels. I have an automation that checks surplus production every 2min and adjust amps only if needed.

But teslemetry seems to trigger the wake up command every single time I want to send a command to my car, regardless of the cars sleep state. This means that teslemetry is burning through my command credits in an absurdly short amount of time as every wake command costs a ridiculously 20 credits.

How can I stop teslemetry from triggering these expensive and utterly unnecessary wake up commands?

Can someone please paste the configuration yaml for an M5Stack Atom Echo that is currently working as a voice assistant satellite for Home Assistant using open wake word? (remember to redact your private data)

I installed a bunch of these Echos following these instructions back when they were first introduced. They have tiny little speakers which are essentially useless, but I routed the output sound to a media player in the same room. At that time the only option was to use open-wake-word - Nabu Casa even provided instructions and virtual-gpu resources to train your own wakeword, which I did.

The Echos worked great with my own custom wakeword for a long time!

Then sometime within the past year they stopped working. Their "wake word" entity is unavailable. I know Home Assistant came out with micro-wake-word, but I wasn't aware they ended (or broke) the open-wake-word functionality. I'd love to get my Echos working again - I'd prefer to use open-wake-word, but if the only way they're going to work now is with a pre-set wakeword, that's better than no voice assist at all!

Thanks for any help you can provide.

A few years ago a friend gave me an "Urban Shop" glitter lamp as a gift. It was a neat twist on a lava lamp that used LEDs and glitter with a motor that spun the fluid using a magnetic string bar.

While it was a great vibe, it used three AA batteries and the stirring would cycle on and off regularly causing the noise to start and stop, which I found more distracting than just leaving it on.

I found that the on-off switch was actual an on-on switch without a second connection, so I took an old USB cable and hardwired the second switch terminal so that I could power it from a power supply or batteries.

This was a drastic improvement to me, but I didn't like the cord always being attached and the motor cycling was still annoying. Eventually, the lamp ended up on a shelf for a later date.

Today, I pulled the lamp down because I finally tried ESPHome because I keep hearing about it in other people's projects and wanted to finally try the full smart conversion of this lamp. After several hours of trying to reuse the existing surface-mount LEDs and wiring, I gutted the whole damn thing and installed my own 5mm LEDs, rewired the motor, and added a button for controls and wired everything into a Raspberry Pi Pico W I had bought years ago.

Now I have a lamp that can be controlled locally from the button, can be reprogrammed from my computer without moving the lamp, can be controlled from Home Assistant, and performs exactly how I want.

What I want to achieve:

I'm subscribed to Home Assistant Cloud, and I want better location history but integrated to Home Assistant.

What I've tried:

I've tried to setup the server integration, I have traccar running successfully, but I don't know how to reach traccar without exposing it to the internet too, is that even possible? I know there's a script that feeds a HA device's location to Traccar, but I would prefer to use the official integration if possible.

Questions

Can I avoid exposing Traccar server to the internet without using a VPN?

I've got a non-smart washer, but after a recent power outage I noticed that it resumes the wash cycle at it's current point when power is cut then restored.

Enter an IKEA smart button and smart plug.

I load the washer, get it started then press the button to kill power and enable an automation (currently on have 4 am and 3 pm).

At 4am or 3pm, the automation turns the power back on and disables itself.

Next step is monitoring the smart plug power monitoring to send a notification when the washer finishes.

So I have my AC connected to a smart plug and I'm trying to figure out what would be the best way to go about automating it.

Currently, I have it set to run every hour on the hour for 20 minutes if the time is between noon and 8 p.m. Which covers the hottest part of the day.

However, what I could do is have it run every other hour instead and have a couple of night runs along with the daytime runs.

Doing it that way would eliminate most of the 16-hour period currently that exists between the ending of one day and the beginning of the next.

Edit: Also, is there an easy way to automate every other hour using the time pattern or would I manually have to set up triggers for 2am, 4am, 6am, 8am, 10am, etc. using the fixed values?

Edit 2: looks like i can use "/2" to accomplish that

This morning my kid asked the voice assistant to "Turn off the computers in this house".

I heard it, thought well that's a strange request but seems harmless because how is home assistant gonna turn off computers.

Me a little while later, "why is shit broken? What's happening!"

Turns out dumb me had adguard exposed to the voice assistant, it switched off all the adguard settings including the DNS rewriting that is the cornerstone of many of my self-hosted services.

I've since revoked that access.

I would like to use device names such as "NBR-NW1 (John's AC)" which is shorthand for "North Bedroom North Wall1 (John's AC)". However, it appears as though when I ask the assistant to "turn on John's AC", it does not match it to anything.

I'm tinkering with our ventilation over-pressure function in combination with an inline fan I run when 3D printing or soldering, to get the fumes and particulates out while simultaneously not creating a massive vacuum inside. The plan is to control it with MQTT from HA to a PLC that controls the ventilation via RS-485.

Therefore I'm looking for a simple but clean looking smart plug that I can integrate with HA to let me know when the fan is on (pulling power, actual wattage is irrelevant) to automatically enable this function.

I know Sonoff makes some, but I always prefer personal advice over random search results.
Preferably Zigbee or WiFi (offline) as I don't have any Matter/Z-wave hub/dongle. Compact design and black would be nice, but not a must. Stability and ease of setup matters more than added functionality.

Does anyone have any personal experience to share?
I'm grateful if you do. Thanks!

I've got an extra tall living room, and without a 15' ladder there's no way I can actuate the pull down shades. I would be annoyed to have to climb up to change batteries a few times a year. What I would ideally want are some kind of window shade or blinds with a remote or HA controllable, and a little solar panel to collect the juicy rays of the sun.

I have found hard wired shades, battery powered shades with remotes, and zigbee etc shades, but not exactly what I'm looking for.

Any suggestions?

I don't actually HAVE any automation at home beyond some hated Alexas, but these shades would be a great place to start.

Thanks in advance.

I currently have a lot of my light automations setup by first having an automation that turns the light on at a certain time, then another that turns the light off at another time. This works, and it has for years, but I'm imagining there must be blueprints or other methods to do this on/ off behavior in a single automation rather than having them in pairs (this is not scaling very well).

Anyone have suggestions? The image is a blueprint I have for turning lights on/ off based on a time window which is very handy, and I'm hoping there's something similar out there for my needs.

It's already 25DegC in my home office.

The best cooling automation I have so far is to turn the fan on when it's 25 for >5mins.

Is there a nice zigbee / ESP32 evaporation cooler that I can enjoying setting up with HA?

Sorry if this goes against the community rules, I haven't included links or descriptions to anything just in case.

I have a few smart switches that I "tasmotified" and an air purifier that I re-flashed for ESPHome. I'm moving overseas and I feel like selling them on craigslist or facebook would be a pain if they end up in the hands of someone that's not into home automation.

I don't know if it would be ok to post them here or if someone knows of a more dedicated community where they would be a good fit. Would appreciate the help.

I realized I have some old hue bulbs laying around, and they're working well enough with my Zigbee controller (no bridge), but if I decide to scale up I definitely don't want to pay the Hue premium.

Anyone have a Zigbee bulb brand they recommend? I hear Third Reality is nice?

I got paranoid after seeing my windows and doors being open when I was not at home, turns out I was looking at a graph with time in UTC. 😃

I used to just update stuff when I could see an update was available. This changed dramatically when a few months ago, I updated Zigbee2mqtt to version 2 and my whole house stopped working. That marked the moment when the other inhabitants in my house decided that the home automation project had gone too far.

Since then, when I saw an update was available, I've waited - preferably until I had seen other people reporting that stuff still worked. But now I've realised, that if I wait too long with an update, another update just comes along...

Can I somehow configure HA to always automatically install e.g. update 2.1.3 once update 2.1.4 becomes available? Or is that a nogo too? I realise that the only sure-fire way to do this is with a staging environment, where everything is tested out before updating the production environment. But how many of us has that kind of a setup?

My 3rd Gen Rev A Apple TV (Model A1469) has been sitting around in a drawer for a long time and I was considering recycling it. But it works perfectly (minus the drawbacks of it having old technology) and I can’t stand the idea of wasting something useful. Is it possible to repurpose it for Home Assistant? I’m still working on getting started with HA - is it possible to use this to run the OS?

How else could I repurpose this? Has anyone else successfully done something like this?

Any help that explains like I’m 5 will also be especially appreciated since I am still learning these things 🙏🏻

Thanks!

Starting to think about setting up my home camera surveillance system and what to avoid making poor decisions, so need to tap into community experience ... you guys :-)

Frigate seems like the direction to take if I want to strike a good balance between cost, integration and reliability. Hardware is a key issues. I could install HA and Frigate on my VM running on my Truenas server but I feel I'm putting all my eggs in one basket so thinking of having a dedicated machine for HA + Frigate. The Frigate website advertises this little beasts with a Coral PCIe unit. That about 300€ if I'm lucky, but I could live with that.

For camera I definitely do not want chinese-call-home/cheap stuff. The Lorytas advertised on the Frigate website seem to be difficult to get hold of (are these not chinese btw?) in Europe so was wondering what other peoples experience is. Cameras need to be comparable to these Lorytas in terms of quality and functionality (no chinese, no call home, good image quality, good relibility, weather proof)

Keen to hear whether others have tried the hardware/setup recomended on the Frigate website and whether there are people out there that have actually got even better setups.

This guy is recommending that the Frigate unit is separate from the HA unit. I'm unlikely to have more than 5 cameras installed and it feels a bit overkill to have two separate machines?

I previously hacked together an Ikea sensor which worked well for the price, but was not weatherproof, and my solution caused the temperatures to be very inaccurate.

I'm looking for something that can be used offline (connects to HA via WiFi, Zigbee, etc but does not need WAN access) and is plug and play. I see some solutions like this, but am not sure if they will work in an 'offline' mode. Anyone have any suggestions? Something with wind speed, etc would be awesome.

cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/19637893

Wifi networks and home automation systems are expected to last 50+ years.

I was reading up on the life expectancy of different building materials when I came across this gem.

Screenshot is of page 122 https://www.portseattle.org/sites/default/files/2025-02/SEA-SIPP%20Technical%20Report%20Appendix%20C%20Life%20Expectancy%20of%20Building%20Materials.pdf

I guess the ethernet cables could last that long, but they rate house wiring to a lower lifetime. Ethernet cables are not "wireless", however.

The only other wireless systems I can think of are garage door openers, but they are definitely not expected to last 50 years.