Home Assistant beginners

Tablets are smaller than I'd like and have issues with batteries and 100% uptimes that i'd rather not deal with if I don't have to.

I can appreciate size issue but having run tablets with batteries and some with them removed it hasn’t made any real difference as nothing has exploded or bulged. I also tried one on controlled range charging to compare.

I do run one larger fixed screen from HA but its still an Android tablet just much larger and designed more for commercial display. Any small PC or Pi can work well with a monitor but tablets integrate easily for sound or motion activated screens.
 
What setups are people using to monitor PV?
Do you have any photos etc...?
My elec box is outside, can it all be done wirelessly, or do I have to get cables through the wall?
Super new to this.
 
Unless they can be configured to "not come on following power-cut" - garbage, avoid. :D
Fair! Had a power cut yesterday and it woke my old man up when 4 million lumens turned on - lol

I think I'll just go for Tradfri ones, they seem decent and reasonably priced. Annoying that the RGB ones are out of stock, but they are for the front of the house so I guess the white ones will do.
 
Fair! Had a power cut yesterday and it woke my old man up when 4 million lumens turned on - lol

I think I'll just go for Tradfri ones, they seem decent and reasonably priced. Annoying that the RGB ones are out of stock, but they are for the front of the house so I guess the white ones will do.
I've found all of my multicoloured ones are on warm white anyway. In the house the ambilight ones are critical imo.
 
What setups are people using to monitor PV?
Do you have any photos etc...?
My elec box is outside, can it all be done wirelessly, or do I have to get cables through the wall?
Super new to this.

How you do it will depend on what your inverter has both in terms of connectivity and what HomeAssistant plugins are available to you. How do you monitor it at the moment? If you have some sort of app already then you're probably going to find it quite easy. What brand of inverter is it?
 
How you do it will depend on what your inverter has both in terms of connectivity and what HomeAssistant plugins are available to you. How do you monitor it at the moment? If you have some sort of app already then you're probably going to find it quite easy. What brand of inverter is it?

Solar edge wave inverter, monitor via their app but it's only what's generated. Nothing for import/export.

I do have an owl intuition thing, that does import and export and generation, but don't use it currently, due to subscription charge.
I don't think it's super accurate, as it doesn't monitor line voltage.
 
Solar edge wave inverter, monitor via their app but it's only what's generated. Nothing for import/export.

I do have an owl intuition thing, that does import and export and generation, but don't use it currently, due to subscription charge.
I don't think it's super accurate, as it doesn't monitor line voltage.


That will be a good place to start for getting your solar data into HA, albeit only every 15 minutes. There might well be a local modbus-based way of getting more frequent/live updates but I'd suggest starting to crawl before trying to sprint if you're new to this. There might be people here with SolarEdge who can help you on that front, I don't know specific people though.

For power metering for import/export, I use an Emporia Vue Gen 2 as I wanted to monitor every circuit in my house but you needn't go that far. Currently I'm on the shipped Emporia software but I intend to flash it with ESPHome in future. There are other options like the Shelly energy monitoring products (eg https://shellystore.co.uk/product/shelly-em-50a/) as long as you're not importing more than 50A. They do a 120A version as well if you are. I've not used those Shelly EM units myself but I have plenty of other Shelly stuff and it seems good to me so far.

Once you have the solar data coming in and the energy monitoring stuff for import/export it should just be a case of putting it all into the Energy page in HA and you'll start gathering/graphing the data :)
 
Just installed this on a TrueNAS Scale box (Terramaster F4-424pro) and quite enjoying it. Synced up a lot of various devices (Tapo power plugs, Xiaomi Vacuum, Hive inc door sensors/bulbs etc - no camera feeds though - boo to Hive for closed sourced!).
 
Just installed this on a TrueNAS Scale box (Terramaster F4-424pro) and quite enjoying it. Synced up a lot of various devices (Tapo power plugs, Xiaomi Vacuum, Hive inc door sensors/bulbs etc - no camera feeds though - boo to Hive for closed sourced!).

The Hive is garbage anyway, mine always would run the boiler frequently at short intervals (calling for heat for a few minutes and turning off to keep temps near bang on 21). I use HA to control the heating via the hive thermostat now which is resulting in slightly larger temp swings +/-0.2c instead of +/-0.1c but less cycling and constant longer low flow temp burns
 
The Hive is garbage anyway, mine always would run the boiler frequently at short intervals (calling for heat for a few minutes and turning off to keep temps near bang on 21). I use HA to control the heating via the hive thermostat now which is resulting in slightly larger temp swings +/-0.2c instead of +/-0.1c but less cycling and constant longer low flow temp burns
Yes - this is why I'm enjoying HA :-)
 
Is anyone aware of some good beginners guides?

I have zero programming ability and HA is beating me somewhat. Ive managed to set up the HA Green, added the automatically discovered items (Sonos, Ring Doorbell, weather). I've also managed to connect to some stuff manually (integrated a shared google calendar via API, Hive Thermostat, Octopus data from the smart meter), got HACs installed etc. But the fine tuning is beyond me.

For example, the Sonos cards show up one for every device, which is 5 seperate cards for 5 seperate Sonos speakers. I cant work out how to combine them, or how to google that.

Another example, ive flicked through the wiki for installing a better looking dashboard and it tells me to add lines to the YAML, but one of the YAMLs doesnt exist and the other, i dont really understand where to add the line. I just put it in randomly but things dont appear to change.

Additionaly for the Google Calendar it shows up, but only on a tiny card. I cant see how to make it bigger on a seperate page on the dashboard. If i add it to a second page, its still tiny.

The biggest one is bluetooth. The list of compatible devices is a bunch of generic chinese adapters, none of which show actual model numbers on Amazon etc. I bought one randomly by Ugreen that looks similar to some in the list. It appears to be "installed" fine on HA, but cannot discover my Govee lights and i have no idea if its the adapter or the lights or something else

I understand that im pretty useless but hours and hours trying to find an actual "plug in the box then do this" guide brings up nothing. Most advice is to just figure stuff out, but im here clicking enable and disable on stuff and i have no idea what it does :|

Anyway, any resources are appreciated.
 
Anyone able to help with a really basic automation. It used to work, but for some reason is no longer switching off after 18 hours


Here's the automation. Basically switch on at 6am, wait 18hrs and then turn off
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Here's the automation log from yesterday where it correctly switches on at 6am, but the no further steps
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Here's the log of the plug device. Showing me manually switching off around 8pm last night when i noticed it was still turned on. Unsure why the log doesn't show any extra history
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Gremlins! You could try 17 hours 59 minutes and see if that works. Time based automations, especially those that slip into the next day, are the ones that have caused me most issues over the years
 
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