Home Assistant beginners

[Semple]

I have just ordered 6 of these: Tuya 4 in 1 Zigbee 10G Mmwave Radar Motion Sensor Human Detector with Illuminance Temperature Humidity Sensors - so basically a sensor which monitors, motion, temperate, humidity and light levels.

I'd be cautious with too many sensors on a single device, especially with temperature as you might find it wildly inaccurate.

 

[Demon]

No, I'm with Octopus energy, and they directly support Home Assistant, when you have smart meters. However their standard setup only gives you data that is 24-26 hours behind. But they offer a "home mini" device, which is a little wifi dongle, you plug in, and it gives data instantly from your smart meters, Ocotpus offer them for free too which is nice.

Meet the Octopus Home Mini

The Octopus Home Mini is a brand new, cutting-edge bit of tech that makes understanding your energy usage easier than ever before.

octopus.energy

Todday I have the whole house setup via that, each of the other usage sensors are using Tapo smart plugs, I do need to also enable my POD-POINT EV charger to the dashboard too, so it shows what I use on the dash board when the car has been charged. This is currently on my main energy dashboard but not this one.

Having all these stats on hand is annoyingly addictive. I need to buy lots more smart plugs, oven, fridge-freezer, TVs, echo speakers, and many more.

I have just ordered 6 of these: Tuya 4 in 1 Zigbee 10G Mmwave Radar Motion Sensor Human Detector with Illuminance Temperature Humidity Sensors - so basically a sensor which monitors, motion, temperate, humidity and light levels.
I have also ordered the Sonoff Zigbee USB dongle, Zigbee tech is cool, no need for IP addresses for each device, and each Zigbee device gives it another mesh node.

Looking forward to sorting some automation out in the house with these.

LOL.. same here.. having just had solar/batteries installed, ironically I'm revisiting home assistant from an energy point of view, normally it's just a simple thing for automating a few things around the house, but I now want to know where my energy is going, so am instrumenting stuff up..
Luckily I'd already put smart sockets on main sockets, like the AV unit, so I know what that draws as an entirety which includes TV, Sat Receiver, Unifi UCG-F, incoming internet, sub-woofer, soundbar etc.. Same for my study, although I have an additional socket for my NAS that singles it out and since you can set an upstream device it knows to split that correctly..

I (like you) have a huge chunk of 'untracked consumption'.. so its now a matter of repurposing all the Xmas decoration smart plugs to everything and anything I can plug in..

 

[Subliminal Aura]

@Demon is that a HA extension to show energy flows or something else ?

 

[Demon]

@Demon is that a HA extension to show energy flows or something else ?

That's just the built in energy dashboard, when you configure it, you can add power draw entities towards the bottom of the config page and they pop up on the dashboard.


I've been building a solar 'baseline' based on my weather stations solar radiation value, the station is mount above the apex on the gable end, so above the panels.. AI helped with the Algo, but its been so stupid at times, you really have to lead it by the nose..

However, it's getting more accurate, my actual generation lags in low light a bit, and it does spike through cloud edge phenomena, but by and large it seems to be tracking the theory fairly well:

The two values (weather station and powerwall 3 reported generation) are slightly out of sync, but like for like within .2kw generally and I've just upped the efficiency value to a theoretical maximum of 95% efficient from panel, through the cabling and losses in the MPPT to the report value..

 

[Ace Modder]

This was my power use yesterday, quite good info. I need to add my TV in the living room, my oven, my airfryer & Toaster, maybe even the fridge-freezer and the bedroom TV. Think that will be 99% of stuff.

Wish Philips hue bulbs had the ability to output energy use too, that way I could monitor them as a whole too.

 

[Semple]

Have you had a look at the powercalc addon?

 

[Subliminal Aura]

That's just the built in energy dashboard, when you configure it,

Ahh the important bit 'when you configure it'

I've not messed around with it so guess I'm just a default player , this is what I see

 

[Ace Modder]

yes thats the screen. This is mine.

 

[Demon]

I've refined my solar model, it's just including anistropic cloud weighting: It's still not perfect, as in reality its 24C and the panels will be much hotter, so that inefficiency is not factored in properly yet.

Certainly it's given me confidence the newly installed array(s) are working as expected..

 

[Ace Modder]

I've been busy this evening.

I programmed this to read my water meter radio signal. After flashing the ESP32 and banging my head against a wall trying to get it to read the radio signal from my meter. I finally found out that my particular meter will be setup to only reply to radio signal requests between 9am and 5pm. I was trying at 8pm... The water board do this to save battery life.

So tomorrow I need to try again.

 

[Subliminal Aura]

Very nice.... Custom firmware or can you get away with esphome?

Can you share details of the frequency of the water signal?

 

[Semple]

Could you do OCR to read it?

 

[Subliminal Aura]

Oh wait.... I see 433mhz?

 

[Ace Modder]

yes 433.8 is the meter. the coding I flashed was as follows. I used the ESP Home Device Builder to write the YAML code to flash it.

esphome:
  name: water-meter
  friendly_name: Water Meter

esp32:
  variant: esp32
  flash_size: 4MB
  framework:
    type: arduino

logger:

api:
  encryption:
    key: "****************************************"

ota:
  - platform: esphome

wifi:
  ssid: "*****"
  password: ************
  ap:
    ssid: Water Meter Fallback Hotspot
    password: ************

captive_portal:
spi:
  id: main_bus
  clk_pin: GPIO18
  mosi_pin: GPIO23
  miso_pin: GPIO19

external_components:
  - source:
      type: git
      url: https://github.com/genestealer/everblu-meters-esp8266-improved
      ref: main
      path: ESPHOME-release
    components: [everblu_meter]
    refresh: 1d

time:
  - platform: homeassistant
    id: ha_time

everblu_meter:
  id: water_meter_radio
  spi_id: main_bus

  meter_code: "17-*********-011"
  meter_type: water

  cs_pin: GPIO5
  gdo0_pin: GPIO4
  gdo2_pin: GPIO2

  time_id: ha_time
  debug_cc1101: true

  request_reading_button:
    name: "Read Meter Now"

  deep_scan_button:
    name: "Deep Frequency Scan"

  reset_frequency_button:
    name: "Reset Frequency Offset"

  stop_reading_button:
    name: "Stop Reading"

  volume:
    name: "Water Volume"

  counter:
    name: "Read Counter"

  battery:
    name: "Meter Battery"

  rssi:
    name: "Meter RSSI"

  rssi_percentage:
    name: "RSSI Percentage"

  lqi:
    name: "LQI"

  lqi_percentage:
    name: "LQI Percentage"

  status:
    name: "Meter Status"

  error:
    name: "Last Error"

  radio_state:
    name: "CC1101 State"

  timestamp:
    name: "Last Reading Time"

  active_reading:
    name: "Reading Active"

  radio_connected:
    name: "CC1101 Connected"

 

[Ace Modder]

Could you do OCR to read it?

I guess if you have a compatible 433mhz radio receiver, then don't see why not.

Once I test it tomorrow during the day hours, and it picks up a signal and logs it in home assist I can then start designing a little box to 3dprint so its enclosed. The other thing I tried tonight was connect the ESP to a power bank, but that doesn't work, because the ESP power draw is so little when initialising the power bank doesnt enable the power draw, so it doesn't work. Had to connect it in a mains socket USB instead.

 

[Subliminal Aura]

Yup I use rtl433 so theoretically could pick this signal up but will probably pick up the neighbours too

There's a thread here too

Reading Gas/Power/Water meters with rtl_433

All of the utilities that come into my house are (assumedly) using smart meters, and I want to get them pulled into my HA. I have never seen anyone out reading the meter, my water meter readout is in my basement, and nobody has come to read that. So, my assumption is that it's done over a...

community.home-assistant.io

Thanks @Ace Modder

 

[Ace Modder]

Yup I use rtl433 so theoretically could pick this signal up but will probably pick up the neighbours too

There's a thread here too

Reading Gas/Power/Water meters with rtl_433

All of the utilities that come into my house are (assumedly) using smart meters, and I want to get them pulled into my HA. I have never seen anyone out reading the meter, my water meter readout is in my basement, and nobody has come to read that. So, my assumption is that it's done over a...

community.home-assistant.io

Thanks @Ace Modder

You have to get your meter serial number and add it to the yaml coding at least for the ESP32 route. That way it's not picking up other meters.

So the main reason I'm hell bent on getting a log for water usage is because I found out my toilet was leaking water 24/7 into the bowl from the cistern, for god knows how long, but the average daily water use last water bill was 842 litres of water PER day! (3 bed house with only me, my wife and our adult son) As you can image, it's rather excessive - it actually took a while to realise there was a gentle yet silent continual stream of water leaking into the bowl for the toilet. Got that fixed now anyway. But want a means to be able to monitor it.

 

[Ace Modder]

The wireless radio is called CC1101, I got it from ali-express and paid £1.69 for it (and £1.20 shipping). I have a draw full of ESP32s so for less than the price of a coffee it's a nice little mini project.

They are £8-£10 on Amazon, so if anybody wants to do it, just grab an aliexpress one, it only took 8 days to arrive.

 

[Subliminal Aura]

OK I've put my rtl-sdr stick into wide scanning mode, lets see what it picks up tomorrow

 

[Ace Modder]

there we go....

The weekly and monthly sensors show 0 still, as I set them up after the last meter reading was taken, the Today sensor I created befoe the latest reading. But eventually they will correct.