• 7 Posts
  • 244 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I’ll write a quick gist for anyone coming along:

    One gas boiler in the house, each room has a smart TRV.
    PIR sensor to set room presence, each window has an opening mag sensor. HASS has a general presence sensor set.

    Each room’s temperature is targeted based on presence and window status:
    For each room, if person is home at all, and has been in the room for 5 mins, and the window is closed, TRV to 19, boiler on if <19.
    If the room presence is negative and the window is closed, drop TRV target to 16.
    If the window is open, drop the TRV target to 7.

    There is a little more detail that that in the article, but that’s the basics.



  • I can only speak from a UK perspective, but most home ADSL/VDSL/Fibre providers don’t have limits, other than “if your usage is tanking the network, we’ll ask you to knock it off” type clauses.

    Most providers are also signed up to an agreement that if your speed drops 50% below the agreed speed on the package on average, they’ll either give you refunds, or let you out of the contract.

    The only ones that throttle are the bargain basement operators aimed at people who don’t care, and one otherwise very competent provider that for some unexplainable reason only gives 1TB by default, charging an extra £10 for 10TB.

    And I guess there is also a pricing step up to guaranteed bandwidth. For business use, they tend to be things like 1gbits headline, 500mbit guaranteed burst, 100mbit guaranteed sustained.






  • z-wave may be easier than expected, as I think the devices stay linked to the hardware dongle used. (This is just from memory, mind!). But if you need to change the dongle, perhaps less fun.

    imo, it will be a bit of pain to get everything inside HA, but once it’s done, you’ll be inside a platform that is pretty open, and commonly used, with lots of other people (hopefully) posting up solutions to problems before you encounter them!
    And because it’s software that will run on pretty much anything, you have the reassurance that even if something crazy happened, you could just reinstall an old version.

    If it were me, I’d clear an entire weekend day, power off the old kit, and work away at getting HA controlling everything.






  • A low-wiring way to do it would be to replace the bulbs with hue/similar bulbs, then just put a battery powered button in the location you want to have the controls. £10-ish for each button, plus however much the bulbs are.

    Then just have the button set to toggle the lights on/off (you can also call different presets like dim etc by pressing and holding).
    Then hass just directly sends the on/off commands to the bulbs.