Man of Honour
Thank you this is really useful. A project to look at over the Christmas break.
Home Assistant beginners
- Thread starter katie279
- Start date
Thank you this is really useful. A project to look at over the Christmas break.
Associate
Hive devices are Zigbee. I have connected a Hive motion sensor directly to HA using Zigbee2MQTT before but I found them to be not the best. They do work but I found the reset time of the motion sensor back to no motion slow. You'd be better looking at a Sonoff or Aqara motion sensor.
...and although there's nothing bad about using USB Zigbee dongle coordinators, do also consider network connected Zigbee coordinators such as the smlight slzb-06 which has a PoE version as well.
This allows better placing of the device, avoids any USB pass through issues if virtualising and these have a nice web UI for updates and settings (way easier to flash than some USB dongles). Available from Aliexpress for £25 to £30 in about a week.
Soldato
As a newbie, if I wanted to start out monitoring some basics like power, temperature and humidty where is good to start?
I've got a few Tapo P110 plugs which report power use to the app. I've seen there's a Tapo gateway and temp/humidity sensor which I presume would all report into the Tapo app? I've also seen some Govee kit - the H5179 outdoor temperature unit would be good for keeping an eye on the temperature in the greenhouse.
Is there any benefit to running up a VM for Home Assist for requirements this simple?
I've got a few Tapo P110 plugs which report power use to the app. I've seen there's a Tapo gateway and temp/humidity sensor which I presume would all report into the Tapo app? I've also seen some Govee kit - the H5179 outdoor temperature unit would be good for keeping an eye on the temperature in the greenhouse.
Is there any benefit to running up a VM for Home Assist for requirements this simple?
No IMO, just use off the shelf stuff.
Home assistant only comes into its own once you start doing automations based on the data it’s bringing in.
Edit: for example, if my CCTV picks up a person in the back garden, it turns on all the outside lights at the rear of the house.
Home assistant only comes into its own once you start doing automations based on the data it’s bringing in.
Edit: for example, if my CCTV picks up a person in the back garden, it turns on all the outside lights at the rear of the house.
Last edited:
I use HA for a similar job. It runs on a mini pc I bought from the members market. I have my p110 plugs reporting consumption - live and for the day. And some govee thermometers that report humidity and temp.
The only glitch is they use Bluetooth - so distance to the HA device is important, otherwise you need to add esp32 modules.
Looks to be an inverter bug, resetting the device time via the giv portal seems to resolve.
See https://github.com/britkat1980/giv_tcp/issues/318
V3 is a separate addon, you should see 2.4.9 and 3.0.4 in the addons section.
V3 brings breaking changes so if any problems you can revert back to v2. I had some initial issues moving to V3, but all is well now.
GitHub - britkat1980/giv_tcp: TCP connection (from inverter) and MQTT implementation
TCP connection (from inverter) and MQTT implementation - britkat1980/giv_tcp
github.com
Associate
- Joined
- 4 Jul 2006
- Posts
- 2,110
GE folk faired better than the kstar folk.
Was a pretty eventful late night for a lot of folk lol
Was a pretty eventful late night for a lot of folk lol
Last edited:
Commissario
Right, I've now found an actual use for Home Assistant (possibly).
I've got a bunch of Tapo smart sockets, a mix of P110M and P110MA which I've configured in HA.
I'd like to be able to track and keep a daily record of the amount of power each one uses and the cost. I'm on the Octopus tracker so the rate changes daily.
Can I do this?
I've got a bunch of Tapo smart sockets, a mix of P110M and P110MA which I've configured in HA.
I'd like to be able to track and keep a daily record of the amount of power each one uses and the cost. I'm on the Octopus tracker so the rate changes daily.
Can I do this?
You'll want the octopus energy integration, and also grab an integration called power calc.
You'll need to create some manual entities for summing up the costs, but easy to do.
A bit more info, the octopus energy integration will provide you with entities for current rate and standing charge.
The powercalc integration creates energy and utility entities for any device that has a power output. The utility entities will track daily/weekly use etc.
Last edited:
If you’re with Octopus then ask them for a Mini device. This is a small USB powered widget that you can hook straight into HA with Bottlecap Dave’s Octopus Energy integration and provides all the data you need to do what you want. Unless you’re just after data specific to those plugs… The integration should be installed no matter what though as it’ll provide the correct tracker prices for your calculations
You get a lot of entities out of the box. You then need to do the calc - which I did in the interface so it wasn't saved/stored anywhere.
Commissario
I have one.
Installing now.
I'm off to bed in a bit so won't do any more tonight but any hints as to how I can link these all together would be really appreciated.
What’re you trying to do? Measure the electricity usage and cost of individual devices or your home as a whole? Individual device tracking is not something I’ve done so I can’t help but it’s a common thing to do so other folk either here or on the wider Internet can help.
Whatever you’re doing, install the Octopus Energy integration through HACS. That will give you access to the tracker prices and let you pull in data from your Mini. I set this up myself quite some time ago and remember nothing about it so it couldn’t have been too traumatic to do.
For whole home data, HA has a preconfigured Energy dashboard. Edit it and set it to collate the data you get from the Octopus Energy integration. In my experience the costs are generally correct but can sometimes vary wildly from actual costs eg yesterday HA says I used £10 of electricity when it was half that. Don’t know why this happens!
Whatever you’re doing, install the Octopus Energy integration through HACS. That will give you access to the tracker prices and let you pull in data from your Mini. I set this up myself quite some time ago and remember nothing about it so it couldn’t have been too traumatic to do.
For whole home data, HA has a preconfigured Energy dashboard. Edit it and set it to collate the data you get from the Octopus Energy integration. In my experience the costs are generally correct but can sometimes vary wildly from actual costs eg yesterday HA says I used £10 of electricity when it was half that. Don’t know why this happens!
Last edited: