Home Assistant beginners

Bluecube said:
The easy way is to get a Nabu Casa subscription. That way you can expose your HA lights, switches, etc to Alexa and just go from there. It's a straightforward and generally frustration free way to do it.

What make are your TRVs? I have a Hive set up and the main obstacle for me was ensuring the boiler turned on when the TRVs were turned on
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Really not interested in paying a subscription. Trying to get away from all that.
 
robj20 said:
Really not interested in paying a subscription. Trying to get away from all that.
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I get that, I really do. However, after spending far, far too much time reading complicated solutions that I couldn’t get working, the Nabu Casa subscription just let things work with minimal fuss. Plus it’s supporting the development of HA which made payment a lot easier. It’s barely a pint a month…
 
robj20 said:
Been having issues with a few smart plugs. From what I can tell they aren't the best because they are WiFi ones and rely on the cloud service from the manufacturer Tuya.
Got a Sonoss ZigBee one to try should be a lot better with it connecting directly to HA.

Also started putting together my own dashboards, I can already see me wanting one of the Sonoss screens, be really handy in the living room for all the lights, maybe if the doorbell rings show the camera to see who's there.

Next I need to work out how to use Alexa to turn on the switches and lights I want it to in HA.
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I highly recommend the IKEA ZigBee plugs I think they're £6. Looks like they're phasing them out so I'll be stocking up!
 
Bluecube said:
I get that, I really do. However, after spending far, far too much time reading complicated solutions that I couldn’t get working, the Nabu Casa subscription just let things work with minimal fuss. Plus it’s supporting the development of HA which made payment a lot easier. It’s barely a pint a month…
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I get that, but I'm dead set against them. Sick of getting lured in at what initially is a great price for each year for it to get worse and more expensive.
Might look at the local voice assist, don't need anything fancy just simple "bedroom light on" sort of stuff.
Or I'll just forget that idea and use some remote buttons or more sensors.
 
You seem like you have your mind made up here so I'm not trying to convince you, but just want to add that the cost of Nabu Casa hasn't changed for as long as I've been using it and all it does is provide secure remote access to HA. There are no bells and whistles which keep getting changed and put behind paywalls etc. It's a very no frills service and just saves the headache of trying to get things talking with Alexa/Google Home reliably. I absolutely wouldn't even put it in the same category as subs to crap like Tado or Google Home Premium etc. Being able to pay for it on a rolling monthly bases at circa £6 is also nice to cancel whenever you want (though you do lose out on a discount for paying up front for a year).

I have the local voice assistant and was very underwhelmed with it tbh. it seems at it's best when it's connected to the cloud (via Nabu Casa) or a local LLM for faster processing times. without either of them things its sluggish from what I saw. Haven't used it since they were released so things might be better now.

Another option you could look at to stay full local/sub-free is just a tidy dashboard or widgets that can be used on your phone/tablets around the house. I use a few widgets on my iPhone and iPad which trigger various actions and automations and it's a nice easy alternative to voice commands. The nice thing is they can be added to your screen amongst your other apps for super quick access. no need to open the HA app first then do what you want
 
Im going to finally upgrade heating controls. Tado X is the main contender I think. I know there are others I could consider.

Anyone have Tado and can vouch for it?

No smart TRVs planned (at least not yet), single zone combi boiler.

I just want better scheduling, app control etc.
 
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danlightbulb said:
Im going to finally upgrade heating controls. Tado X is the main contender I think. I know there are others I could consider.

Anyone have Tado and can vouch for it?

No smart TRVs planned (at least not yet), single zone combi boiler.

I just want better scheduling, app control etc.
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Not Tado but I went with Evohome, fully local and self sufficient, bit you can integrate it with HA easily and do all the fancy stuff if you want to. But I like that it can tick along on its own as well.
 
Bluecube said:
The easy way is to get a Nabu Casa subscription. That way you can expose your HA lights, switches, etc to Alexa and just go from there. It's a straightforward and generally frustration free way to do it.

What make are your TRVs? I have a Hive set up and the main obstacle for me was ensuring the boiler turned on when the TRVs were turned on
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Just checked and my trvs are haozee I got them from aliexpress for about a tenner each
 
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mid_gen said:
Anyone recommend a good tablet to use for a dashboard. One that actually powers off the external power and isn't prone to exploding batteries. Cheap is good :)
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Fie tablet 8 root it install kiosk mode in ha and it’s very good
 
danlightbulb said:
Im going to finally upgrade heating controls. Tado X is the main contender I think. I know there are others I could consider.

Anyone have Tado and can vouch for it?

No smart TRVs planned (at least not yet), single zone combi boiler.

I just want better scheduling, app control etc.
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Recommended it to my wife’s cousin and he says his is very good, if I was starting from scratch this would be the way I would go now.
 
danlightbulb said:
Im going to finally upgrade heating controls. Tado X is the main contender I think. I know there are others I could consider.

Anyone have Tado and can vouch for it?

No smart TRVs planned (at least not yet), single zone combi boiler.

I just want better scheduling, app control etc.
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I have the original Tado system.. Tado have recently introduced usage limits on their API which is causing Home Assistant issues. You might want to follow https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/151223 . It was Tado themselves who raised the warning is quite useful mind.

They've also changed the authentication so my Home Assistant needs regularly reauthenticating with Tado which is a pain
 
I've been happy with my Drayton Wiser system for heating. It integrates with HA over wifi (i.e. local and not via the internet) so no need to worry about cloud integration and API limits.
 
danlightbulb said:
Im going to finally upgrade heating controls. Tado X is the main contender I think. I know there are others I could consider.

Anyone have Tado and can vouch for it?

No smart TRVs planned (at least not yet), single zone combi boiler.

I just want better scheduling, app control etc.
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Is your current system communicating with boiler via opentherm/ems ? or could you get a module to enable that,
so that thermostat can use flow/return temps to help with efficiency and you can see that ? like i believe tado x pro app will show

I haven't bought into smart! trv's either - partly because when I looked few had anything other than open&closed (no intermediate valve control) which doesn't help provide efficient demand/response.
 
Having an issue with my HA.
I keep losing Evohome connection, but my curious I tap the menu button and settings and get a black screen with the text "Error while loading config" only way to fix it is to restart HA by cycling the power.
All my other stuff still works like ZigBee and Unifi.
 
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jpaul said:
your current system communicating with boiler via opentherm/ems ? or could you get a module to enable that,
so that thermostat can use flow/return temps to help with efficiency and you can see that ? like i believe tado x pro app will show
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I have a Worcester greenstar boiler which I believe uses a proprietary protocol. I looked closely at the previous Tado version but only the EU products supported opentherm and there was some information about a hack to use the Worcester protocol, but it was uncertain. With being unable to get the EU version of Tado v3 here, I gave up.

I don't believe Tado X supports the Worcester protocol at all, so I'd be limited to on/off only.

Tado seem to have dropped their community forum now too so I can't ask on there.

Additionally id technically not be allowed to wire opentherm into my boiler anyway as to access the wiring centre requires opening the case.
 
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I've decided to go for Wiser.

Tado is getting a bad reputation for paywalling features.

Drayton is a longstanding manufacturer of heating controls (my existing basic on off wireless stat is Drayton). So more of a solid legacy I think.

£85 in black friday sales for wireless thermostat kit 1 which includes hub and thermostat.
 
danlightbulb said:
I've decided to go for Wiser.

Tado is getting a bad reputation for paywalling features.

Drayton is a longstanding manufacturer of heating controls (my existing basic on off wireless stat is Drayton). So more of a solid legacy I think.

£85 in black friday sales for wireless thermostat kit 1 which includes hub and thermostat.
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I've had my Wiser system for nearly 2 years.

Can't fault it and was dead easy to install (although I believe their new hubs require some changes to the wiring).
 
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