Home Assistant : Q&A, Tips & Tricks, Your Configs

hilt_ctn said:
Her idea was the note on the kettle serves as reminder to check the home dash before turning it on. On the dash, there's a big bright blue shower head that only displays when the geyser is on. I mean...it's BIG, it's BLUE ! The home dash also displays other bits like the garage is open, the mains have dropped, the garden service is coming etc.

Your use of WLED is similar to what I had in mind. I have something similar in place that indicates if my car is in the garage or not. We have a single garage with a car port in tandem. My car goes in the garage. So I set this up so that she can park to the side if she gets home before me, or under car port if I'm already home.
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Is the dashboard near the kettle?
 
I had a minor heart attack moment this morning. ChatGPT was helping me clean up my server last night and this morning after a server reboot, HA was nowhere to be found... Mild panic... But fortunately ChatGPT was able to right its wrong pretty quickly. So in short, here's my takeaway - never run docker image prune -a on a Home Assistant OS / Supervised system. It breaks the Supervisor, because HA uses orphaned tags internally.
 
_Jakes_ said:
But how is she going to know the geyser is on?

I'm using a wled strip in my office that will blink or change colour based on certain events. I.e it will turn blue for 5 seconds and then back to white when the camera detects someone in the driveway. If my aquarium pump is not running or leak is detected one of the leds will blink red untill I clear the issue.

I find using phone for notifications are useless because I ignore my phone most of the time.
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Good Question. It doesn't. 99% of the time I am not drawing more than 5000w without the geyser. If I draw more than 5000 without the geyser the inverter will trip. The Sunsynk/Deye inverters does allow double the draw for something like 10s. My automation used to check if it is more than 5000 for 5 seconds but I found that inverter still tripped if the monitoring is a bit delayed.
 
hilt_ctn said:
Something humorous

A while back, I had our geyser moved to the essentials circuit of the house. The sub-distribution box up the road kept blowing up what felt like every 3 months and I was tired of cold showers.

We have a 5kW inverter. So when geyser draws juice ( in a particular time slot ), there's not a lot of headroom for other high current devices to operate at the same time, something we were happy to manage if it meant warm showers. This is never a problem outside of school holidays as it happens in the middle of the day. But in school holidays, my Mrs. is home....and she's a fanatical tea drinker. So ! Twice last holidays she tripped the inverter breaker by attempting to boil the kettle while the geyser was on ( along with other regular devices like routers etc. ) despite there being a big ol' icon on our home dash that signals the geyser is on !

These holidays, I was going to make a plan with " Automate all of the things !! " in mind So, feeding my addiction for ESPHome, I was going to put together an ESP with an LED / Neopixel ring light to shine down a nice bright RED light on the kettle when the geyser is on. You wouldn't see a cable, the exposed LEDs, or even plug. Just a glorious red glow. Elegant, sophisticated, and techy...."Genius" I thought. I explained my plan to her with glee. Then I came home yesterday and found this :cautious:

View attachment 1869813
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I have a colour changing bulb at the kettle which goes red if the power usage is to hight to use the kettle.

Then I also have a automation which switch the geyser etc. off and back on after a while.

EDIT: I also use Solar Assistant and if use is too high an automation to check what can be switched off before the inverter trips.
 
For me, with Solar Assistant so near instantaneous readings in HA. If the load is too high, warning messages on the speakers in the house (every miunte0 and then it starts turning off things like what you guys are doing. Similar rules for when there is NO GRID detected, but not enough solar power and someone tries to turn on the kettle - it's turned off in a second with a message on the speakers - if there is enough PV - go on.

Though now that I got a 9.3kWp worth of panels, the automation is triggering a bit too often about high load. Unsure why? Does PV generation / charging the battery, get included in the workloads via the inverter. I have a sunsynk 8KVA and my automations start the warnings when we breach 7KVa of usage.

Need to be back at home to troubleshoot this one.
 
hilt_ctn said:
These holidays, I was going to make a plan with " Automate all of the things !! " in mind
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My 2c, my setup has been this from the start, my average draw on my inverter is 1kw at most times, except when we "heat anything" thus my geyser has been on my non essential circuit from the start.

Ignoring all the other fancy control stuff for automation I have relating to my geyser, i have enough experience to know sometimes things go wrong, and there is nothing wrong with an analog solution. Home assistant is updating, or is down or your wifi AP dies. It all happens.

I have a 10A CBI ECU fitted on my geyser circuit, when the household draw exceeds 10A, ie the kettle is turned on, the power to the geyser is turned off.

These devices have been along for many years, as there is one installed in the childhood home i grew up in.
Back then the geyser and stove werent allowed to run at the same time. but the same principle applies. One load(geyser power) is controlled by another(in my case the balance of my non essential circuit) once the power draw drops below 10A, it allows power to go to the geyser again

CBI ECU
 
hilt_ctn said:
Something humorous

A while back, I had our geyser moved to the essentials circuit of the house. The sub-distribution box up the road kept blowing up what felt like every 3 months and I was tired of cold showers.

We have a 5kW inverter. So when geyser draws juice ( in a particular time slot ), there's not a lot of headroom for other high current devices to operate at the same time, something we were happy to manage if it meant warm showers. This is never a problem outside of school holidays as it happens in the middle of the day. But in school holidays, my Mrs. is home....and she's a fanatical tea drinker. So ! Twice last holidays she tripped the inverter breaker by attempting to boil the kettle while the geyser was on ( along with other regular devices like routers etc. ) despite there being a big ol' icon on our home dash that signals the geyser is on !

These holidays, I was going to make a plan with " Automate all of the things !! " in mind. So, feeding my addiction for ESPHome, I was going to put together an ESP with an LED / Neopixel ring light to shine down a nice bright RED light on the kettle when the geyser is on. You wouldn't see a cable, the exposed LEDs, or even plug. Just a glorious red glow. Elegant, sophisticated, and techy...."Genius" I thought. I explained my plan to her with glee. Then I came home yesterday and found this :cautious:

View attachment 1869813
Click to expand...
Why not just disable the kettle plug if the geyser is on?
 
ItherNiT said:
Why not just disable the kettle plug if the geyser is on?
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The kettle is plugged into a regular dumb double socket, the kettle into one socket and a filter coffee maker into the second. So that nixes the likes of CBI Astute Smart Plug which is single socket only. I could make a plan with a Shelly as I can actually split this particular double. Buuuut it's always super tight in a small space with those.

Sticky-outy smart plugs are uhhh...frowned upon :s It truly would be the easiest option. Maybe I should pick one up from Smartpad and shove it in anyway and see how far I get. Then I don't get build anything :crying: I need to tinker ! There must be tinkering !!
 
This doesn't make sense to me, I must have something set up incorrectly, batteries are being charged by solar but HA counts the solar generated and battery recharge power together as consumption?

1765950404529.png
 
Neuk_ said:
This doesn't make sense to me, I must have something set up incorrectly, batteries are being charged by solar but HA counts the solar generated and battery recharge power together as consumption?

View attachment 1871673
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The energy dashboard is expecting the battery charge/discharge power value to the inverse of how you have it now.

I also had to change this when I configured the power reading by creating a new template sensor which just flipped the negative.

If you read the description text it tells you how it expects it:

Pick a sensor which measures the electricity flowing into and out of the battery in either of GW, kW, mW, MW, TW, W. Positive values indicate discharging the battery, negative values indicate charging the battery.
Click to expand...
 
DrJohnZoidberg said:
The energy dashboard is expecting the battery charge/discharge power value to the inverse of how you have it now.

I also had to change this when I configured the power reading by creating a new template sensor which just flipped the negative.

If you read the description text it tells you how it expects it:
Click to expand...

Thanks, I was busy looking in to this, I'll have to sort it out when we are back from holiday next week.
 
Does anyone know if there is a "replacement" google photo integration? I have a couple of "smart" photo frames that used to cycle photos - now its static - want to make it smart again with the least amount of effort for new photos.
 
Had something wierd happen overnight . My Home Assistant VM (running AdGuard as secondary DNS too) froze - it's been doing this rather regularly recently. Somehow, the PiHole Docker on the NAS also seemed to die so this morning - I had 'no internet' but it was actually up and fine. This is because all my devices use the PiHole and AdGuard as their DNS

Anyhoo .. manage to sort that out and most of my Tuya Devices (connected to Tuya Cloud) - for the smart plugs still reported offline it was a simple case of turning them off and on and they would work. for some that I could not reach - turning off the breakers and on , got them to connect. Thankfully, the CBI Astutes in the roof for the geysers didn't have this problem.

However, a CBI smart socket in the kitchen continues to report offline. I didn't see the power button for the plug and mistakenly pressed the wifi button for 5 seconds thinking it would turn it off. I had put into pairing mode.

Step 1:
  • I tried to pair it - while the original device was still in the app - nothing worked despite mutiple attempts
  • So, I removed the device from the Tuya App (home assistant immediately threw up errors - missing entities)
  • tried to pair it again - but it refuses to pair - it looks like it does something but the pairing process never completes.

WiFi is 2.4/5Ghz for the iOT LAN -> I hardcoded to 2.4 and still no change.
I notice in Unifi it is still connected - and I can ping it!

Step 2 - since it seems to be connecting to wifi , maybe a new wifi network will cause it to reset or something
  1. Create a new TEMP SSID 2.4 Ghz Only.
  2. Connect my phone to new SSID WiFi and try to pair the smart socket again using the temp wifi SSID - still nothing . You see one second when it 'connects' or something and then it continues flashing. Pair process never completes
  3. In UniFi - the device is now connected to the new Temp SSID so something is happening
Now I am lost. I don't know what to do to completely reset this device ?t appears from googling the only way to reset is via Tuya cloud - but I removed the device from my account when I was trying to re-pair.

I really am hoping I don't need to replace the whole socket. The reason it was installed there was to ensure those heavy draw appliances don't run when the house is on battery and there is no grid power
 
Second point:

My HA VM is becoming erratic. Sometimes for now reason it just freezes - I know this when we can't connect via the HA app. When I do the ACPI shutdown, immediately during the process of shutdown , the web console becomes available again.

I don't think the PC it is running on is the cause even though it is a 10 year old i5/16GB Win10 HP SFF PC. The PC, besides HA running via Virtual Box, there is also Unifi controller and a PLEX server. Except for HA, none of them have performance issues if I could say that.

What should my next steps be?
1. Rebuild the VM and restore the backup? Will it make a difference?

2. Buy a new current generation NUC , which would give more horsepower for PLEX transcoding, amongst other things . On this NUC - what OS do you recommend I install? ProxMox , Free NAS or other? I want to get out of Windows Updates monthly ****ing up my life, but I do want to be able to backup my HA and other stuff to OneDrive as I can currently do on the PC. I am not so good with Linux but can figure it out.
 
TedLasso said:
Second point:

My HA VM is becoming erratic. Sometimes for now reason it just freezes - I know this when we can't connect via the HA app. When I do the ACPI shutdown, immediately during the process of shutdown , the web console becomes available again.

I don't think the PC it is running on is the cause even though it is a 10 year old i5/16GB Win10 HP SFF PC. The PC, besides HA running via Virtual Box, there is also Unifi controller and a PLEX server. Except for HA, none of them have performance issues if I could say that.

What should my next steps be?
1. Rebuild the VM and restore the backup? Will it make a difference?

2. Buy a new current generation NUC , which would give more horsepower for PLEX transcoding, amongst other things . On this NUC - what OS do you recommend I install? ProxMox , Free NAS or other? I want to get out of Windows Updates monthly ****ing up my life, but I do want to be able to backup my HA and other stuff to OneDrive as I can currently do on the PC. I am not so good with Linux but can figure it out.
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I've had some good purchase from Proxmox as a hypervisor - maybe give that a shot. Backup your HA and then spin up a new VM on Proxmox using the helper scripts then see if that stays more stable. My HA VM is my most stable VM proxmox deployment - some of my PiHoles crash on the weekly
 
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