Living room temperature and humidity are from a mi Aquara sensor. It uses zigbee, and I’m getting this data into Home Assistant with a zigbee2mqtt bridge.
The living room electric radiator is connected to a Shelly 1 smart switch (I’m updating that to a Shelly 1 PM soon).
The desk lamp is connected to a Shelly EM based relay - it is what we are using for immersion switches for the PowerShaper service so I keep one on my desk for testing. I don’t have an immersion switch so a lamp will have to do for now!
DR event in progress is just an indicator to say if a PowerShaper demand response event is in progress or not.
The low carbon electricity card uses the custom component I wrote last year to indicate if the electricity in my area is low carbon or not. I’m not using this for any automations.
On the “Nerdy Stuff” page I have a few things that I don’t want to see every day, but find kind of interesting:
The Octopus Agile electricity tariff in my area is provided by the Octopus Agile Home Assistant component. I’m not on the agile tariff yet but interested in changing.
The Speedtest.net integration is there because I was having issues with my internet connection a few months ago and wanted to track the speeds I was getting.
Finally, the Pi-Hole card shows how many ads I have blocked using Pi-Hole which is also installed on the Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant.
My Home Assistant is installed on a Raspberry Pi 3+ using Balena - it’s not the simplest way to get up and running, but lets me use technologies and techniques that are useful for Carbon Coop work on the PowerShaper HEMS.
I have had a Pi sitting around for a while now. It kept me entertained during lockdown, but I never found an ongoing use for it.
With my energy supplier (Tonik) going bust I hope it will be an opportunity to finally get a smart meter with a new supplier and then I might get Home Assistant up and running and see if it something which is actually useful to me.
How do you rate the Aqara sensors? Because I am also interested in something like that.
I’ve also got two Zigbee sensors still in their boxes. And a Zigbee dongle (turns out to be a Silicon Labs Telegesis) from the smart meters training I went on. I found some stuff about interfacing with Zigbee dongles online but my brain bolted when I tried to understand it.
Hey Peter,
Super excited you’ve got the zigbee2mqtt working, could really reduce the costs of rolling out to more households. In terms of the accuracy of the sensors, they’re rated at -/+ 0.3 degrees & 3% humidity, I ran four of them in my living room for 10 days in the same position and they were within that range (0.6 degrees) of each other. The general consensus is they’re as accurate as any off the shelf sensor, clearly not as accurate as something lab calibrated, but fine for our purposes.
Matt
While using the main (supervised) install of Home Assistant is certainly easier, I think what you’ve done to integrate features into a HEMS style system is a better footing long term. It’ll pay dividends if the developers are using the same interface as the users. Eating our own dogfood as they say… struggling to admit I need to move mine over.
The work shown here looks pretty impressive, but I can’t help but feel that this is an untamed frontier for the uninitiated! I have not yet got a smart meter but hope to acquire one soon. I have an eclectic mix of cheap monitors that have seen me through my renovation project. Temperature readings have low variation < 0.5℃ but humidity readings can vary > 10% between monitors especially under “normal conditions” (probably got what I paid for). The spread of readings is narrower in high humidity conditions and response times also vary. Upgrade to the home assistant will be a project for the near future.
A little bit on home heating monitoring, which has taken on more relevancy now the house is occupied 24/7.
Below is data from the OpenTherm gateway which monitors not just on/off state of heating and hot water, but flow and return temperatures, relative boiler modulation and alerts to any problems.
The hope is that combining this with the energy usage data from the Carbon Coop hub, the temp/humidity data from each room compared to weather data to get a better idea of current performance and to track the impact of future measures.
Nice graphs folks. I’ve got Home Assistant running on a RPi 3. Collecting data on heating and energy. I’ll try to get some screen shots and share asap. Been trying to get my displays to fit an iPad screen, the layout gets a bit unruley or maybe it’s just my approach. I spent some time getting Influxdb and Grafana working as it seems a nicer display than the Home Assistant raw panels. As mine is a bit of a mess it is definitely a work in progress. (No smart meter, Bulb customer)
robin
update sorry, cant work out how to add images to a reply or put multiple images into one reply so I’ve had to put in a reply for each one.
Thanks for sharing Robin, that all looks really great. I would be interested in seeing your Grafana display as well, since I am just at the first stages of setting up my Home Assistant (although I don’t currently have any sensors for data).
I have added both of your images to your original post to keep it tidy (hope that is ok!). For the future you should be able to add multiple images using the little upload button in at the top of the editor, hope that helps.
I’m quite interested in using Home Assistant, but not sure where to start.
I have a raspberry pi with SD card preloaded with emoncms. I’m collecting temperature and humidity from two emonTH sensors feeding into emoncms, and electricity usage via an emonTx. I’m also collecting external temperature, humidity and other data from darksky, which gets into emoncms via NodeRed. I tried and failed to get Hive data into emoncms via NodeRed, and that was even before Hive recently ‘upgraded’ the api interface:(
And although I can still log into NodeRed from my windows laptop, I can no longer ssh into the pi directly, using putty.
I’m not really interested in controlling/automating anything, other than possibly using opentherm in the future, but I do want to monitor and log as much as I can to do with comfort and energy usage in my home I’d like to get at least two more temperature and humidity sensors for upper floors.
So maybe now is the time to buy some more kit, and get Home Assistant installed on it, but what should I get? Probably a second pi, but are there plug and play sensors available, and what other bits and pieces would I need? I have a feeling @matt might have shared a shopping list in EcoHomeLab a while ago, but not managed to find it today.
Also would I be able to pull the existing emoncms feeds into Home Assistant? I think the latest Hive interface module is working now, so would def want to use that.
Hi Mark, Thanks for tidying that up. It was the upload button that I used, but I couldn’t get it to work as you described. I’m assuming ‘user error’ and will try again with next images. I’ll load the Grafana images when I’ve done a bit of a rework, not too happy with my efforts at present.
In case anybody wants to know, the temperature graphs are using the dual-guage card which you can find in HACS. I got it working pretty easy.
I’m also trying to get the power-distribution card working to no avail. If anybody has succeeded I’d love to know.
I’m not using node-red at all in case anyone asks, just Hass, Influxdb and grafana.
I too am starting from monitoring things. I may automate some things later but currently trying to collect data and report so I can see what happens. We have solar PV so spotting we are sending excess gen to grid means we put the washing machine on. I want it nice and easy to see so it can sit on an old iPad in the kitchen and whole family has access to see what is happening and take action as appropriate.
I’d like to run pi hole alongside home assistant, so would be interested in having a look at your balena project if you wouldn’t mind sharing? Is it using Docker?
