Home Assistant is an open source platform for Home Automation. Once you start playing around with it, you can’t stop.
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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
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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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.
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Home Assistant
Home Assistant: Integrals and Utility Meters
I’m finding the Home Assistant Energy Dashboard to be pretty but not very useful. The main problem is that the data is very coarse grained. The dashboard is driven by Home Assistant’s statistics system and requires metered entities. That is, sensors that track total amounts of energy (kWh), that increase over time.
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Home Assistant
Home Assistant: Helpers, Templates and Solar Forecasts
Last time, I took you through setting up a Home Assistant Green, installing HACS, adding custom integrations and then creating an automation to disable discharge of my home battery while my EV is charging.
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Gear
Home Assistant
Home Assistant
Home Assistant has been on my radar for a while. I’ve always liked the idea of having a small local server running 24x7 that I could use to “automate stuff”. Two things put me off doing anything about it. There was low level anxiety over picking the right hardware and OS to run it on, but more importantly there was the lack of anything that really needed automating.