Welcome! I'm Alan Byrne, the Home Automation Guy, and I'm here to show you what I've learned on my Home Automation journey, so that together we can make your home smarter.
My aim is to help make Home Assistant and smart homes accessible to everybody.
❤️ Found my videos useful and want to support the channel? I'd love a donation at paypal.me/homeautomationguy
The whole reorder system was the reason I avoided Harvey, I used a ultrasonic sensor to detect the distance to work out how much was remaining. I wasn't sure if the water softener weight would change depending on water, so I opted for monitoring the distance.
I don't think using weight is a good idea, I have one of this unit at home, and another type of failure this unit have is a internal pipe leak which will cause the unit water lever to go way higher then it should If that happened your weight senses will unable to detect any problem as the unit will be fill with water weight I have this problem on myself when my unit is just less then a year old and need to call for repair
Just buy passthrough keystone jacks and wire each end of the cable with a standard RJ45 plug. Much simpler. I assume you did not know these existed either. 😊
I have set up a similar system of scales to weigh solvent tanks. They monitor rinse solvent to alert staff when its nearing empty and requires a refill. Otherwise its a guess due to no display on the tanks.
My electricity retailer charges the wholesale energy rate to consumers, so the price (in Australia) changes every 30 minutes, often cheaper durign the day when a lot of solar is present. They do have a Home Assistant integration, and made some basic automations to alert me if electricty costs is below or above a certain level so I can look at when to put the washing machine on or something similar. I know the washing machien doesn't use a huge amoutn of power, but if I am home and costs are cheap, better to run it on cheaper, cleaner power than in the evening a lot of energy in Australia is still supplied by coal and is more expensive. Little things do make a difference.
Great video, I’m currently in the market for home blinds. Is there a particular style that lend themselves to smart controllers. Ie roller or slatted. Would one be easier on batteries than the other? Thanks
Roller blinds work well. I've heard there are solutions for slatted ones, but I think they need to sit externally to the blind so they look a bit lame. Somfy make some good solutions, as do Ikea.
Thanks for this. Great video. During your research were you able to find a more precise solution even if it were more involved or expensive? I've used threshold based solutions like this, and it covers almost all of my needs. However, there are a few applications where precise and consistent values would be super useful! Anyone have any suggestions on where to start?
I went through a phase of making my own sensors and getting them in ESPHome. I kind of gave up and went back to premade sensors as generally they look better, have battery options so cords are not running everywhere and just overall neater installs. Now that works with sensors you can buy off the shelf. Sometimes, like this weight sensor, you just can't buy one off the shelf so you have to DIY it and that is where the power of ESPHome or Tasmota (Depending what you like) come into their own.
@@HomeAutomationGuy I guess it depends on how long the batteries last. Sometimes hiding cables can be a pain, but I understand what your saying as well 🙂
@@EsotericArctos That's very true. I do use battery motion sensors in my hallways, because I can just blutack them to the ceiling and the batteries last two years in some cases!
The Octopus integration has sensors for current daily consumption in kWh and the cost so you don't need the Shelly clamp or HA doing any calculations on the current unit rate. Much simpler. * You may need the Octopus mini, which is free
@@HomeAutomationGuy Yeah, it's great. I've only really just got into Home Automation stuff. Like many people I had some basic kit, lights etc. and some simple setup on Google Home but got frustrated with how limited and unreliable it was (I don't think Google care about Home Automation whatsoever any more) and moved to a dedicated box with HA on it. Now I have automated climated, lights and a bunch of energy monitoring! I'm currently down the rabbit hole of wanting all my devices energy-plugged to fill in all that 'untracked consumption'. I picked up an Eve smart plug as it's seemingly the only Matter/Thread UK plug on the market with energy consumption. Not sure I can recommend it tbh. It's a nice device but it's quite bulky and can block adjacent sockets (why!??). At least the UK one does. Oh and it also cost £40. I'm hoping someone comes to market with a cheaper, slimmer alternative. Love the channel.
Could you make a similar video but then about smart relays? Your criteria are spot on, so if it could be about smart relays, I would be helped in the process a lot.
@@HomeAutomationGuyFair enough. I see Aqara and Sonoff have smart relays as well nowadays. Sonoff is on Zigbee but forces eWeLink onto you, whereas Shelly is on WiFi but has direct integration to HA. Any advice?
@@Tajik01 If you're using HA, and have strong wifi, I would suggest the Shelly ones. They've been so reliable in my house, and their open nature makes it really great to work with in HA.
This is brilliant and not something I had thought of! As you hinted at in the video, it should also allow you to track when / how often your softner runs a recharge cycle, which is also a useful thing to know. The tip about the ready made M5 Stack is also much appreciated!
Great idea as always, thank you! One improvement though. I don't see a reason why to calibrate it to measure weight of everything put onto it. If you put the water softener without any salt on it, you'd get 0 when the softener has no salt. With your current set up, you get weight of the softener, which the doesn't make sense in automations (like why is there the magic number 34kg as empty...). Then you can proceed and put a known weight on it to have the second value. But I'd recommend just fill it up to max, and calibrate that reading to 100. That way, you don't get weight, but percentage of your "filling". The same could be used for humidifiers etc.
Thanks for the shoutout! However i dont deserve the credit, i totally stole the idea from some other project and adapted it to work on esphome. Just a thought, but did you try reverse engineering the built in sensor on your salt softner? That would be a fun project in the future.
I see few suggestions of using distance sensors, and it looks reasonable at first sight. Ultrasonic or even laser range sensor definetely could show you actual height of the salt blocks. But when I think more about it more solutions come up to me. For example, you can use door closing sensor and put magnet on the top of the salt block while another part of sensor could be placed on the requiring alert level. Or you can construct some sort of mechanical trigger, for example just two electric contacts that circuit by something located on the top of salt blocks. When salt block gets lower cover on the top of it comes down and connects two contacts alerting you by ESP Home. Or you can use light crossing sensor instead of mechanical. Just put light emitter and reciever on opposite sides of the box at required level Yes, SmartHome is very interesting not only in programming but in engeneering as well. Especially if you have your own house instead of rent appartment)
I have been reverse engineering the Mobile App and am able to log in successfully login and pull the values from the cloud servers. The next step is to make a custom_component for home assistant, but this wont be easy for me.
Now, I don't have a water softener and I doubt I would ever need that specific device, but this video is all about how you make use of HA to make your home smarter.
Thanks Alan. I use a conditional badge on my dashboard for my dog's water bowl status. Using visibility, it only displays when it's below a certain level. I use a Yolink water sensor to monitor it. I need to create a template helper binary sensor entity to display the status in a friendlier format. It currently displays as either Wet or Dry but I'd prefer Full or Refill. A tip for displaying badges, in addition to the icon, you can display both the name and the state within the same badge. That way, you get a header (name) and its current state but the badge remains the same size, taking up less space on your dashboard. I use conditional badges for mail & package deliveries, Gate open/closed, recycle & trash bin reminders (night before and day of).
I use an Aqara motion sensor. I have placed this horizontally about 10 cm above my bed, about 40 cm to the side (mine is attached to a speaker). The motion sensor is facing upwards, mostly facing the wall. Only when I get up out of bed, it triggers the motion sensor.
Did something similar with my water softener, except using an ultrasonic sensor measuring the distance from the top. We use salt pellets, never seen them as bricks like that before! I have sensors configured for cm used, cm remaining, and % remaining. Then I put a gauge card up on the dashboard to show the remaining percent and two sensor cards for used/remaining cm which show the trend over time.
Instead of using weight, you could attach an ultrasonic sensor to the top of the lid of the salt section and use distance as a source of measurement instead of weight, similar to an ultrasonic water level indicator
@PiyushNikam This is what the manufacturer provides already(Called iLid), but runs their proprietary software. It runs on a button battery and connects to wifi to send measurements a couple of times a day.
Great Explanation, Congrats Perhaps you can make a content about local and remote access to Z2M from HA (and talk about new panel integration for that) My 5 cents ...
Never heard of this dynamic scene Mode - will make my life a great lot easier (used to store the active Szene/settings manual with variables and stuff) What happens if you change your Szene while this (policemode) Animation is active
I don't understand the point of this. Getting an expensive switch with an also expensive bulb. You could just permanently wire the light to mains instead, so the smart bulb always gets power, and then just use a wireless switch. I believe there are wireless switch holders which can be installed into an ordinary light switch wall hole.
You should definitely do the updated video tutorial with Bermuda because I bought some esp devices but am totally lost and failing to finish this tutorial 😂 also, some more guidance on how to do this with iPhones too would be great. I know I know, as soon as our iPhones die we will switch to android
My home server is built on top of an Intel Atom with a 15 watt TDP. So add a few drives etc and I'm still a long way from a couple hundred watts, even including networking. Performance is just fine, too. The server is actually in my office - it draws so little power I can cool the whole thing with a single 15 cm Noctua fan. Electricity is expensive these days.
I'm on a Skyconnect and just moved to Z2M for the expanded capabilities... I mean, I did it today and things work great but I still placed an order for one of these now. Better safe than sorry.
Thanks for making these Alan. Since you published these, has anything changed with regard to support for H256? I’ve just ordered some new cameras (before watching this series) and I’m worried they won’t work with HA & Frigate. Has anyone else got new cameras with the new compression working correctly?
Hi , great videos thanks but I still have a problem . I have been running my automation on a echo dot . Just added a zigbee hub and a few transducers connected to the hub are working fine . But I want to add the transducers into alexa routines but the alexa can't see them . The hub is connected using smart life . Any suggestions ? Thanks . Ken
