Hey there, I have an Ecowitt system. I use it to tell me when to close the curtains based on sunlight, use it to tell me when to open or close the windows, and I also have some of their soil moisture sensors in my garden to tell me when to water. I plan on expanding that last one to an automatic irrigation system!
The one catch is that you'll want to lock it down on Ecowitt's site, otherwise other people can see your sensors.
I'd like to hear more about those moisture sensors if you'd be willing to share
How many do you have? (If multiple) do you space them out around your yard? Do you find it to be accurate enough? Do you have experience with other systems to compare it to?
Sorry for the 20 questions. I've lived in a condo my entire adult life but I'm buying a house soon and lawncare scares me lol
Honestly moisture sensors would be nice to have later, but you don't need to start with that. A smart irrigation timer from companies like Rachio will be just fine for the begining. It adjust the watering schedule based on current weather conditions so you don't have to make manual changes from season to season.
I use the Ecowitt moisture sensors for potted plants. Given their size, I wouldn’t recommend using them for your lawn because you have to be sure to not hit them when mowing.
Automated irrigation systems are reasonably consistent. I moved from my lawnless apartment to a house with a backyard of grass. I left out a few empty containers across the lawn, waited for the first watering cycle, and adjusted the timings based on the distribution.
As someone who moved from condo life into having a significant amount of deck plants, you just need an irrigation system and it doesn't need to be smart.
I use the b-hyve as a water timer, it's on my WiFi and tied into home assistant but it's fully self sufficient on its own. It's only job is to turn on the water. It is smart enough to not do it when it's rained recently.
The water runs to some fat black pipe that runs around my deck, with smaller hoses plugged into it that go into the plant pots. In the pots are either drip emitters, or what's better is an emitter hose that releases water every few inches. This is called drip irrigation and outdoor pots have holes in the bottom, so you can't really over water. Mine runs for 20 minutes every morning at 6am and everything thrives.
Lawn care you'll need some sprinklers or something, but before you invest make sure you look up your local regulations for water restrictions. Where I live you can't water a lawn during peak summer, at all. Drip irrigation is always allowed because it's very water efficient.
Sure! I have three, in different spots in different gardens. I do find them to be pretty darn accurate, especially if you calibrate them like the instructions say. I don't have anything to compare them to, but their data makes pretty graphs in home assistant and their backend.
When I press the button I want all of the blinds to raise/lower at the same speed.
Not even my ikea ones that are all the same size / model rise exactly the same as the start signal from Zigbee sometimes gets to one before another. They go up at around the same rate but start a little off from each other.
My favorite method is buying a cheap $1/year domain, and connect using cloudflared. There are tons of guides for this on YouTube, everything smart home link here!
Surprised no one mentioned the native option of paying for the native Nabu Casa tunnel, you also get some other benefits. It is by far the easiest option but not free. It does however support Home Assistant development.
Personally I just expose my instance behind Opnsense with an SSL cert, and some web application firewall rules using nginx but that is a more technical configuration.
I have A LOT of automations. Some of my favorites are:
Automatically set "house state" (morning, day, evening, night, not home, etc.") based on alarm state, time of day, last movement, etc - this state controls a lot of other automations
Push message to my phone if outside camera detect a person when house state is "night" or "not home" (using Frigate for object detection)
Automatically turn off lights at night or when not home. Automatically set lights to right level when home
Push message when window has been open for more than 20 minutes.
Push message if windows or doors are open when leaving the house or at night
Push message with "morning update" and "evening update". Including today's weather, if I should sell some stocks as price has reached threshold, etc.
Basically, I no longer has to remember to turn on of off lights and if I forget something important in the house (such as an open window or turning on the alarm), it reminds me to do so (if it can't do it itself)
In Progress, needs tweaking:
Making sure our AC only turns on when it can efficiently cool the house. Useful when we dip into the 50's for lows while it's 70's+ during the day. Basically switch the thermostat to heat only to avoid the AC coming on.
In the planning stage:
Presence sensing in our bathroom to turn the light on for my dad in the middle of the night. Can't use PIR motion detection as my dad moves very slow these days and actually defeats the PIR sensor in our hallway night light. I'm thinking mmWave is the way to go. Might try presence sensing when someone is on the toilet, turn the fan on, again, because sometimes he forgets.
Just getting started really with automations right now.
Just a tip: You can also automate the bathroom fan with a timer to turn off after 30 min or whatever, since you want it to run for a bit but not all night.
when I hit the small button on my inovelli bedroom switch, it turns on my bedside tables, turns off all other lights, and closes my blinds
when it sees my living room and bedroom tv's on at the same time, it turns off my bedroom. My damn remote triggers both tv's power when I'm in the living room
flashing my kitchen lights if my deep freezer door is ajar
opening my blinds in the morning automatically, and closing them at dusk.
I've got Emby tied into HA and it auto dims the lights on playback/pause if it's dark with a toggle in HA to override.
A "night mode" button that starts my white noise MPD playlist in the bedroom and sets the speaker zone/volume, turns off all the lights/decorations, turns on one bulb in the living room overhead lights to 1% (just enough to navigate around furniture), and turns the bedroom lamps on to medium brightness with a 10 minute auto-off.
Overhead lights and lamps tied into a common dimmer and can select different modes (lamps only, overhead only, both, etc) and color temps. Overhead lights are set to be proportional to the lamps to keep the light levels even (unless overridden to "Chernobyl mode" which disables the overhead light limiter).
My "TV" is just a PC connected to a large dumb monitor upstairs and a projector downstairs. Wrote a MQTT agent in Python to control turning the screen on/off, volume, and other settings. This is to allow HA to turn the screen/projector on/off .
Have more, but those are the ones I'm using this moment.
Hey there, I've got the same Zigbee dongle in HA through Zigbee2mqtt and it runs flawlessly.
Zigbee by design is fully local and can't phone home, and everything that uses Zigbee will be able to pair directly with your dongle without using the Hue hub. Check Zigbee2mqtt docs to ensure compatibility of the items you're planning to buy, but almost all of them should work.
I've got Hue and Ikea bulbs along with other Zigbee switches working perfectly. If Hue is too pricey, check Ikea Tradfri or any other recommended by Zigbee2mqtt docs.
How's your RAM usage for HA? The pi I have is only 2gb, already runs pihole but I can buy another/run HA on my server, but if I don't need to, then I won't.
I ran HA on a pi 3 and then upgraded to a NUC with a Celeron using 4gb of RAM mostly because I used Plex at that time and needed better transcoding.
You can try running HAOS supervised on your Pi. Running supervised will let you run addons within HA such as pihole, Zigbee2mqtt, Mosquitto, Node-RED and others. After that, you can verify if you actually need to upgrade your hardware. You'll probably be fine with that amount of RAM.
When you switched from pi3 to NUC , did you notice any performance improvements? I'm asking because I run my setup on a rpi3 and it mostly works ok, but the latency is sometimes high, so I'm wondering if upgrading the host will improve things.
I didn't, but because the pi already worked fine and didn't have many addons running. I have since introduced tailscale, diyhue, frigate without a tpu, etc and the nuc has been rock solid (even with 4gb of RAM and a Celeron J3455).
I think it comes down to what addons you run and what type of storage you use (if you're using an SD card on your pi, you might want to boot from an SSD instead). Also if your zigbee dongle is old like the Nortek one, you might see improvements in responsiveness when upgrading to a zigbee 3.0 stick.
I have a newer ZigBee 3.0 dongle and run a few add-ons, but nothing big - z2m, nodered, mosquito is all I use. I will upgrade anyway, but I'm not in a hurry, it works fine, apart from an occasional delay in switching, which might be network related.
At night, my cat sometimes gets the zoomies, so I have a projector pointed at a wall with a motion sensor. When he goes on his tear through the house while we're sleeping, the projector turns on and plays a video of strings moving on the wall. This tires him out without him screaming at us to play with him. It turns off again after a few minutes with no motion.
The lights and Roku screens in my office are on a motion sensor, but are also linked with a seat sensor so they don't turn off when I'm at my desk. Sitting at the desk also sends a Wake on LAN packet to my computer. Sitting at my electronics workbench changes the lights to bright white with another seat sensor.
Lights (HA), desktop wallpaper (with Wallpaper Engine), and in-computer RGB (using OpenRGB) change from blue/pink during the day to dark red/orange at sunset so being in my office late doesn't mess with my sleep.
A macro button next to my keyboard disables my screens and turns on a fan pointed at my VR area for workouts.
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