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Gear
Home Assistant
Heat Pump Cold Weather Performance
We had a cold snap here in the UK. Over a few days, temperatures dropped from consistently over 10°C, to days at or below freezing. Perfect weather for dialing in a heat pump.
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Home Assistant
Home Assistant: Kiosk Mode and High Frequency Updates
We recently had a Vaillant heat pump and Heat Geek NanoStore installed. The NanoStore contains a small amount of hot water which should be just enough to meet demand until the heat pump can kick in and ramp up to full power. Currently the hot water runs out after five minutes while the heat pump takes ten minutes to reach full power.
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Gear
Heat Geek NanoStore
A few weeks ago I described our heat pump installation, which included a mystery hot water system. The mystery hot water system, as some of you already guessed, is a prototype Heat Geek NanoStore.
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Gear
Home Assistant
Open Energy Monitoring
I touched on Open Energy Monitoring briefly when talking about my heat pump install and Home Assistant integration. It’s worth a deeper dive.
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Home Assistant
Home Assistant Heat Pump: myVAILLANT, Emoncms and Met Office
Now that we have a heat pump up and running, the obvious next job is to get it hooked up to Home Assistant. Our heat pump is a Vaillant AroTHERM plus. A quick search of the Home Assistant Community Store turns up the myVAILLANT integration, which uses the same API as Vaillant’s myVAILLANT app.
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Gear
Vaillant aroTHERM plus 7kW Air Source Heat Pump
Like many houses in the UK, we rely on a gas combi boiler for heating and hot water. I know that continuing to burn gas is not sustainable in the long term. However, I couldn’t see the point in switching while the grid is still burning gas to generate electricity.
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Home Assistant
Home Assistant: Concurrency Model
I like to think of myself as a computer scientist. I want to know how things work. Then I want to understand why they work that way.
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Home Assistant
Home Assistant: Hypervolt Resilience, Configuration and Backups
The Hypervolt EV charger integration is an important dependency for the automations and dashboards that I’m running on Home Assistant. Now that I’m a few weeks in, I’ve noticed some edge cases where things are just not right.
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Home Assistant
Home Assistant: Octopus, Repairs and Blueprints
Last time, we touched briefly on how to extract electricity meter readings from the Home Assistant Octopus Energy integration. I think it’s worth doing a deeper dive.
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Home Assistant
Home Assistant: Dashboards, Statistics and Custom Cards
I now have useful data being collected and displayed on the Home Assistant built-in energy dashboard. Of course, it’s not being presented exactly as I would like and doesn’t include all the data sources I’d like. Time to dive into the wonderful world of custom dashboards.