Home Assistant Show and Tell

Hi Matt - I’d be up for piloting some sensors too.

This is my current attempt at monitoring power flows and temperatures in our house using Grafana as a single dashboard. Plan is to have it fit a screen of an iPad. Got a way to go yet but thought I’d share the WIP. Getting rid of the bits around the side is proving time consuming. Also if I try to integrate it into HASS the numbers go wrong. Whilst the dashboard is a five second refresh the graphs are for different lengths of time. I’m sure I read a solution to this somewhere. I think the five gauges are not showing the current status. I need to recheck all the inputs. But hopefully this give the idea of my plan. Note to self: read the documentation more!

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I have been playing with the very nice Scheduling custom component available for Home Assistant - is anyone using this, and would they recommend?

Thinking of adding it to the HEMS installation at some point.


Yes, I’d be interested in piloting home environmental sensors too!

Me too, for piloting environmental sensors (in Leicestershire) if not too late/ distant. I am now on PowerShaper (by remote install), so have its HEMS and a Shelly EM for our immersion heater. I hope to monitor T and RH in about 8 places below a suspended wooden floor in particular, where I am sealing and insulating the perimeter thus bringing it into the conditioned space of the house. Thus un-fussy (un-boxed) and wired but reliable sensors would be ideal down there, as they will be hidden and inaccessible once the boards are back down, and I can feed telephone wires to them for power, as there will be no access to them for battery replacement. I am wondering whether I can I feed their data to the HEMS, and which would be best sensors to go for. Someone at EcoHome lab mentioned Sonoffs as wired sensors, and I wonder what else I’d need to budget for and buy to set this up, if it can be done.

Hi - anyone got any ideas how to get Home Assistant to be able to alert me via SMS when a temperature sensor gets below a certain level? Got a problem with heating in a building and don’t have remote access to it, so need something to tell me the heating is on the blink!
Actually, if it could just email me that would be OK to (as I can run the email through an SMS gateway)

What you want should be possible are you using a HEMS, or a generic Home Assistant for this? Have you already got the temperature data coming into the Home Assistant?

If you are using the HEMS and have the temperature data already the best way to do this is probably using the IFTTT integration to trigger an action.

If you have a standard Home Assistant install it should be possible to do a more manual set-up where you trigger an SMS message through an API command. In the past I have used Twilio for similar API -> SMS services and found it to be pretty simple to get to grips with, it has a decent free trial, but then is pay-as-you-go at $0.04 a text.

It might be worth starting a new topic on this if you want to get more help/info on this issue, as I suspect there are other members with a similar setup.

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You could also try using the Home Assistant companion app for android or iphone - you can setup notification automations. They will work out of the box if your mobile is on the same local network as your pi - if not you would need to have home assistant accessible from the web (eg. using home assistant cloud).

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Hi All.
I followed Matt Fawcett’s blog and got a Pi, HA and Aqara sensors set up at home and using pre-flashed Zigbee hub and repeater from ebay. Also have an API feed from my SolarEdge - although when it occasionally misses a day I don’t know how to reload the missing data.
Next thing I want to do is get a sparky to install my Shelley EM on the consumer unit. so I can get real solar consumption data - but lockdown not helping with that.
Without any prior experience this was all pretty time consuming for me. I’d love to do more but as soon as you point me to a Github page (e.g. for the Octopus agile data feed) I’m totally lost and would need a step by step tutorial for idiots to get going with it.
I’d post a screenshot from my grafana dashboard but unfortunately the RaspPi went belly up so I have lost all my data. I need to invest some time in understanding cloud access and cloud backups.
I’m hoping to get a Sunamp heat store and another aspiration for my set up is to control how much I top up the Sunamp using Agile night rates in consideration of how much solar PV will be diverted to the Sunamp the following day. Solcast provides a free API link to their super granular forecast customised to your PV array, which uses machine learning to improve its accuracy. So ideally if the following day is expected to be sunny I’ll only recharge overnight enough to cover my morning shower and use solar to top up whats needed for washing up, toddler bathtime and my wife’s evening shower.
Grand plans but not enough time!
Thanks for all the support provided through this community!
Chris

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Hi Chris, and welcome to the Carbon Co-op community forum!

Thanks for sharing your experience with Home Assistant and the Aqara sensors. I am glad to hear that you were able to get everything working following @matt’s blog. It is unfortunate that the Pi ended up going kaput. Hopefully that won’t put you off from giving it another go.

I would definitely be interested in hearing how you get on with your future plans, so please make sure to share any developments.

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A blinding flash of insight: there are two Matt Fs on the coop staff! I had been conflating you. Much will now become clearer I suspect.

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You aren’t the only person to have been confused by this! I am not sure what we could do to make it clearer, but for the record Matt Fawcett (matt[at]carbon.coop - @matt) has been involved in Carbon Co-op for many years now, and I, Matt Franklin (matt.franklin[at]carbon.coop) just started working on membership and some of the energy systems projects in July!

We are open to suggestions on how to avoid confusion!

Matt (Franklin)

No problem. If you could just change your respective surnames to Matt MembEnergy and Matt TechEnergy that would be great :grin:

Paul

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For those interested in this thread the EcoHomeLab meet-up next Thursday may well be of interest and relevant EcoHome Lab: Using sensor data to calculate energy performance | Meetup

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I’ve just read @matt’s blog post and been on a buying spree - 8 sensors, a Zigbee sniffer thing and some new SD cards for a few spare Raspberry Pis I’ve got hanging around. Thanks @matt for linking to each product, it’s a bit overwhelming otherwise. Very helpful!

One question: can I install InfluxDB / Grafana on the HEMS provided by Powershaper or should/must I do it on a separate Pi?

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Good Luck - I had lots of fun setting Home Assistant and a load of temp / monitor sensors up, also some smart switches. NB: If it says anywhere “you might need to…” then it means “you MUST…” :wink:

A beginners question I suspect: I am a Powershaper participant, so have Home Assistant on my Home Energy Management System (HEMS) box which is part of the Powershaper setup. And rightly or wrongly I have found and have downloaded the Home Assistant App onto my mobile, in case I can use that. But when I connect my mobile to the HEMS wireless network and then open the App, it says it can’t find Home Assistant. An option for Manual Configuration appears (in fact I can’t now get rid of that when I open the App). It asks for my “Home Assistant URL, of the format HTTP://homeassistant.local:8123 - that is, containing a scheme/protocol, hostname and port”. Can anyone suggest what this URL should be I wonder, or else what I need to do to enable the App automatically to find my Home Assistant?

I think for your system it will be:
http://192.168.1.112 - assuming you are connected to your home WiFi network (not the carbon-coop-hems WiFi)

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@zapaman Dom - How did you get the Forecast.Solar integration installed into your Home Assistant? or does it need to be added by @Ben or one of his team?