Internet Of Things / IoT / Connected Home / Smart Houses

& @aggi, thanks guys, will give these a go!

I've got some Aqara sensors that work really well indoors but don't seem terribly weatherproof... anyone know of any good outdoor ones?

Thinking of crossing a line I never thought I would and getting a Nest Audio, my phone's probably doing a pretty good job of spying on me anyway, so I might as well go all-in.

Can anyone comment on the audio quality?

I do actually have some pretty descreet and ok sounding panel speakers that I might like to use but it doesn't look like any of the Nest options have a stereo out or the ability to power external speakers. Is there anything else I should be looking at that fits the bill of integrating with google and powering external speakers?

Edit: I guess adding a small bluetooth receiver/amp is going to be the easiest way

Actually does anyone have a nest mini or nest audio they want to sell me?

Has anyone found a smart solution for monitoring energy usage? I can’t have a smart meter (poor mobile signal), so looking for things I can use myself, was looking at smart sockets with energy monitoring built in, has anyone tried these?

@Sam_w What meters do you have? (Do you have gas too or just electricity?)

Some meters have a little LED that blinks for every thousandth of a unit used, which gives good enough accuracy for home monitoring.

For more detailed info you can get a bit of kit like an Emporia Smart Home monitoring kit that clamps around the individual circuits and then reports stuff via wifi.

(I've no experience of either, but I'd be interested in something like the latter if/when I ever get round to having the flat rewired.)

Something like https://openenergymonitor.org

I got a Shelly em I haven’t yet built up the courage to wire into my fuse board

The long discontinued Chromecast audio was the best option for me "hey Google, play this on that device" they're all listening so I've accepted that.
I use my nest mini all the time. It's ok but the sound quality is really only comparable to a small FM radio set, I imagine the bigger audio is still closer to that than a full stereo rig.

I did this. Works great with home assistant.

Was also nervous working in my consumer unit but survived the ordeal.

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Do you still have these?

I like the idea of this. What wiring is needed, and what are you using to store the data?

No, sold on ebay in the end.

Nice! Did you just take a live off an existing rcd? And neutral into the neutral rail? Any pics of it in situ?

I have a Kasa-TP LInk monitoring socket. It's OK for an overall picture but doesn't have much detail (current use, 7 day average and 30 day average) with no option to download the detail.

In theory you can link it to Home Assistant which now has energy monitoring stuff but for some reason I've never bothered investigating it doesn't appear when I try and set it up.

It's quite a deep rabbit hole: https://blog.networkprofile.org/power-monitoring-setup-iotawatt-grafana/

The IoTaWatt thing looks quite similar to the Emporia Vue stuff I mentioned above.

Yes, that's it, more or less.

Hooking in the live to the MCB was a little tricky. All of mine are already split 3 ways 😕

The unit itself just about fits inside the consumer unit without touching anything naughty but the clamp did not so that sits outside on the line between the meter and the CU. As a result I have an extra wire leaving the CU which is a bit shite.

Otherwise, all good. 👍

Sorry, no pics. I'd have to flip the mains breaker to get the cover off again.

Mine are all split 3 ways already too. What did you do in the end? Would like to avoid adding a new one if I can.

Honeywell Home doing a fine job of providing support on their UK website. Here it is.

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I just added a fourth to one of them. It was mad fiddly getting them all to stay put. Got there eventually.

What are you guys hosting homeassistant on these days?

I’ve got it running in proxmox on an old enterprise grade desktop pc I got for free from my in-laws office, and it’s absolutely rock solid, but it was never intended to be a long term solution as it’s bulky and probably more power hungry than it needs to be just to host HA.

I had it set up on a raspberry pi 3b+ in our old house and it was very unreliable, so I’m slightly scarred from that experience. Is the 4 much more reliable? Or any other single board/micro computers worth considering?

I have it on an old laptop (running on a virtual box, managed by vagrant as a system service, accessed by either SSH or remote desktop).

So much more reliable than a pi, and with the benefit of a built in UPS.

I have it on a Pi (3B+ I think) and it happily runs for months at a time.

I don't interact with it that much, it's used for various triggers, but rare I have an issue.

Docker on unRAID on a HP Microserver. Very low power usage.

Like @TW says an old laptop is a good shout as a low power server.

PSA / Rant...

I've got a Samsung washer and a dryer. They're in the garage and they have a super useful app for controlling them that does stuff like sync the programmes (so the tumble dryer automatically has the right settings based on the wash etc) and, most importantly pings our phones when the washes / dryer programmes are finished.

This week, the app updated and it's now calling back to Samsun advertising servers at least once a day.

I run NextDNS on my phone which means that I need to disable it, any allow it to phone home, in order to check the status of the machines. So far, it doesn't seem to affect notifications but fuck anything that needs to phone an ad server to operate white goods.

Just thought I'd put this out there in case that's an issue for anyone considering one of these...