Home Assistant beginners

is there anyway to overcome the "requires neutral" wire on kit, uk homes dont tend to use a neutral wire

live earth and switched, anyone did anything fancy to overcome the neutral wire requirement ?
 
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maddness said:
is there anyway to overcome the "requires neutral" wire on kit, uk homes dont tend to use a neutral wire

live earth and switched, anyone did anything fancy to overcome the neutral wire requirement ?
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If this is smart switches, most of them come with a little yellow capacitor.

Connect that across the L/N at the bulb and they work fine.
Not had any issues with the ones I've got in service.
 
Hmm, that's a little more powerful than a switch so I'd guess not.

Best approach I can see without running more wires would probably be to repurpose the switch live as a neutral.
Then stick either a wifi connected switch module in the ceiling at the first drop, or just turn on / off the hue stuff directly.

That does though kinda stuff you up if the Internet goes AWOL..
 
hmm

the lights in ceiling always come on with the hue motion sensor, so i dont need any additional trigger / switch for them

in all honesty the main purpose is (as the switch is on the outside of the bathroom) is to stop anyone pressing the switch before they go in and then think why is it dark

i could either blank it off or put this in place (which is fancier)

could i do this somehow with the 2 wires i have in the switch? (live and common)
 
How do i go about adding my wifes phone to Home Assistant but not allowing full access? Just so HA can see her phone and send it notifications, maybe access to a custom Dashboard that just has some switches and lights on.
 
Irish_Tom said:
Good question. I'm not sure, but I could take a look.

To be honest, I think the shallower tray is more of an issue than the magnet — I would feel happier if the dimmer switch was more recessed.
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Probably not quite the answer you’re after but you could put a small thin pad of blu tack between the switch and the tray
 
Blu tack might be the answer. The 3D print was a bust.

Not sure if the design was bad or if the guy who did the print made a mistake, but it wasn’t what I was expecting. But at least it wasn’t an expensive experiment.
 
Irish_Tom said:
Blu tack might be the answer. The 3D print was a bust.

Not sure if the design was bad or if the guy who did the print made a mistake, but it wasn’t what I was expecting. But at least it wasn’t an expensive experiment.
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What issues did you have with the 3D printed one? I've done a few 3D printed replacement faceplates (some pre-designed, some of my own design) and they've all done the job for me.
 
Poolybit said:
What issues did you have with the 3D printed one? I've done a few 3D printed replacement faceplates (some pre-designed, some of my own design) and they've all done the job for me.
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Just gone back to check on printables.com and there’s definitely something wrong. The print I’ve received looks nothing like the render or the photos on the listing.

So either the file doesn’t match the listing or the guy (friend of a friend) did something wrong with the print.
 
Irish_Tom said:
Just gone back to check on printables.com and there’s definitely something wrong. The print I’ve received looks nothing like the render or the photos on the listing.

So either the file doesn’t match the listing or the guy (friend of a friend) did something wrong with the print.
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Fire me a PM if you want, maybe I can get something sorted out for you? I've got some white filament loaded up still if we can find a model that works for you. Assuming you're somewhere easy enough to post to!
 
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maddness said:
is there anyway to overcome the "requires neutral" wire on kit, uk homes dont tend to use a neutral wire

live earth and switched, anyone did anything fancy to overcome the neutral wire requirement ?
Click to expand...
A lot of smart switches allow you to bypass the neutral wire by simply adding a jumper in the right place. Fibaro and Shelly dimmer's both work like this.

The capacitor you add across a light also ensure there's enough load on the circuit (useful for LED bulbs), usually for any load less than 50w.
 
Poolybit said:
Fire me a PM if you want, maybe I can get something sorted out for you? I've got some white filament loaded up still if we can find a model that works for you. Assuming you're somewhere easy enough to post to!
Click to expand...

Thanks for the offer, but I'm going to see how I get on with the Blu-Tac solution for now.

I might tap you up if I'm not satisfied with that as a solution.
 
I've been experimenting with getting one of these (the smart version, I think the link goes to the wrong version) collected into ESPHome to display stuff from Home Assistant having seen this thread on the Home Assistant community forum.

It was easy enough to get it working and it's currently cycling through 5 screens - outside temperature (taken from OpenWeather), temperature of my hot water cylinder, fuel range of my car, iPhone battery % & iPad battery %. None of which are things I need to see at a glance from my desk.

Now though I'll see if I can actually find something useful to do with it. It was very much a case of 'buy first, think second'.
 
My job for the weekend is to move over from using a Cloudflare Tunnel to Nabu Casa for remote access. The reason for doing it is just to make it a but easier to manage. At present I'm controlling Zigbee devices from Alexa using Node-RED and this which works well but Nabu Casa lets me expose HA entries directly to Alexa.

Nothing I'm doing is difficult, but I've got quite a lot of Node-RED stuff setup so I need to get the entities exposed to Alexa via Nabu Casa and change the Alexa groups & routines over to using the new entities. The risk is I'll erode wife approval if she gets back from a weekend away and has to fight with Alexa to do stuff.

I should have done it using Nabu Casa from the beginning, but I was already using a Cloudflare Tunnel so getting access to my HA setup when remote was a 30 second job to setup using that Cloudflare Tunnel. Things then got a little more complicated when I wanted to control HA only devices using Alexa.
 
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