this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Smart Homes

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For the discussion of smart homes, home automation and the like. Because of the instance it will tend to have a more UK flavour but everyone is welcome.

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As we're trending, I thought I'd lean into it and see what everyone is using.

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[–] JohnSmith 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Here are the main components of my system, which has become a bit of a collection over the years:

  • Home Assistant on RPi
  • zwave USB stick
  • a number of lights, switches and multi sensors on the zwave network
  • A cluster of four RPis for various scheduled and transient tasks (data ETL, solar energy forecast model training and forecast generation, house battery and EV charge planning and execution, scraping and processing council bin collection schedule)
  • two RPis handling motorised curtains and cooling fans in home cinema
  • three ESP2866s running ESPHome controlling relays for switching sauna, floor heating and water immersion heating on/off
  • ten ESP32s running WLED controlling LED strips inside and out
[–] Mex 3 points 1 year ago

I had so many issues with tasmota on esp8266s that I moved away from WiFi as far as I could. the devices i kept and moved to ESPHome have been much more stable.

[–] Emperor 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You are doing a lot of interesting things there - are you using some of the RPis with your solar panels? Not having any, it's not an angle I'd investigated but it's a potentially interesting one.

[–] JohnSmith 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m using the RPis in a few roles in relation to the solar panels. I collect daily solar production data from the inverter. The data is energy produced per hour. I also collect from Met Office model weather forecast data for our home location. This data is also per hour and I’m using 10+ parameters the forecast model provides. I learn every night a GP Regression model from the solar and weather forecast data. Learning every night ensures I always use the lates data available in the model. The GPR model allows me to estimate solar production tomorrow given a Met Office model forecast. I then use this estimate in various ways in decision-making, for example how much to use cheap electricity overnight to charge house and car batteries, i.e. how much headroom to leave in the batteries so that I’m unlikely to waste excess solar energy.

[–] Emperor 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fascinating. I suppose one day they'll offer something like this as a ready-rolled package as it's useful to know here in the UK where the sunlight can be pretty variable.

[–] JohnSmith 2 points 1 year ago

For a very brief moment I considered turning my experience in home energy management into a business. Then I woke up and realised I’d be facing either house retrofitting or new build business, and all the companies involved in those. Nope.