Balcony power plant We already use very little electricity, our annual requirement is around 1500 kWh, but I wanted to play around with photovoltaics and also generate my own electricity.As we want to replace our old gas heating system with a heat pump, we will soon be installing a large PV system on our roof. … Read more
Sending mails with Home Assistant is quite easy, but there is no integration, the configuration has to be done in the configuration.yaml itself. Since the access to the mail provider is in plain text in configuration.yaml, I have outsourced the configuration to a separate yaml file. This does not increase security, but I can exclude … Read more
After using a fairly simple solution in the first post on the subject, I now have a sensor in use that automatically detects when the window is open and then turns the heating down. This completely automates the control system. I took my very simple door/window sensor and integrated it into my Home Assistant. This … Read more
First of all, a clear warning: only qualified personnel, an electrician, may and should intervene in the electrical installation of a house. Mistakes here can be fatal and can even lead to a fire. Damage caused by unauthorized intervention in the electrical installation also means that no insurance will cover the damage. So this is … Read more
After I was quite happy with my smart heating control system, my partner asked me what I should do when I open the window in the bathroom after showering. Since I still had a Sonoff Button lying around, I put it on the window in the bathroom and wrote two automations that take over the … Read more
I bought the Shelly 3 EM to measure my electricity consumption.Please note that installation may only be carried out by qualified personnel, i.e. an electrician. It takes very little effort to install the Shelly in the meter cabinet. It is mounted on a top-hat rail in the meter or distribution box, requires a 240V connection … Read more
In order to check whether our house was suitable for a heat pump, I needed to know the preheating temperature and set it so that it did not exceed 40°C. I already have an ESP with a 4-channel relay board in the boiler room and had experience with the Dallas temperature sensor. So I connected … Read more
I wanted to create a mobile dashboard that shows the essential elements on the first page and sub-views on which details can then be controlled. The links to the sub-views are at the top of the start page, realized by a horizontal stack card with entity cards. Some of the icons are interactive, the light … Read more
Here is part two of my journey to smart heating control. First of all, I created some helpers: The selection of the scene then controls the heating control sequence.E.g. Tue & Thu in Cologne, then everything goes to day temperature at 6:00am, but Tue & Thu the heating switches to night temperature during office hours … Read more
We have a gas heating system in the basement, a fairly old one. In the living room there was a bimetal thermostat to control it and there were normal thermostats on the radiators. I already had Comet Dect radiator thermostats from my old apartment, which I could control via the Fritzbox. These are replicas of … Read more
