Home Assistant

[Semple]

I'm running Home Assistant in a Hyper-V virtual machine under Server 2019 on a Dell R210ii, this machine also runs pfSense and Unifi Video for my CCTV, basically all the stuff that needs to run 24/7 without being touched.

Pinging this up. Can you tell me the size of your HA database?

You're running on a lot more beefier hardware than my rpi4. I'm now getting to the point where my rpi4 is very frequently in iowait where it can't keep up with writing to the sd card.

My DB size is only at 1.2Gb which seems small, but i suppose also irrelevant as i know i have hundreds of entities logging to the database, but i do know when i delete the DB, i can run a good few weeks without iowait issues.

Been debating whether to buy a SSD adapter for the pi, or abandon the pi altogether and buy a NUC.

 

[Semple]

Yes tempting. I've got other projects where the extra grunt would come in handy.

It seems the go-to nowadays is to install proxmox and then set up HA as a container.

 

[Semple]

@Semple Are these the gosund plugs? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gosund-Wireless-Function-Monitoring-Required/dp/B07ZSDWQQ8/

Deal seems good. Might order some.

Yep, i don't think Gosund do any others. Unfortunately i missed out on the 4 plug deal last time, so had to make do with 3 .

 

[Semple]

Nice. I ordered them earlier. Should come in handy. I need to stick one on my freezer really. The socket switch sometimes gets knocked and it can be days before I realise!

Ooof yeah i can imagine that being a nightmare.

At least you could set up various ways of notifying you when it switches off.

I'd been tempted to stick one on my fridge/freezer, as a way of assessing the life/condition. In theory the electric consumption should pretty much be the say day-in day-out, so if you start to see it consuming more electric, then gives a hint that the motor might be playing up etc.

 

[Semple]

Yeah i would definitely do at least a push notification on phone/tablet.

If you've got Google speakers, you could have it announce over the speaker (i'm sure the same could be done with Alexa).

 

[Semple]

Thought i'd update as a couple of projects i've been working on have finished.

Ikea recently released a "dumb" low powered air quality monitoring device. Someone decided it would be great to capture the data and import into HA. This is done through a esp8266 (esp32 can probably be used as well, but is typically on a bigger board than the esp8266 and there's not huge amounts of space inside the enclosure.

I also added a DHT11 sensor to provide temperature and humidity readings, as these are tiny.

Graphed data:


Pictures of the device:



Pictures of internals:

 

[Semple]

Excellent work Semple - great idea, hadn't spotted this from Ikea - might get a few.

Any extra recoding required for the DHT11 to achieve this? Might try with a DHT22 or even a BME280 as they're generally much more accurate (BME would also allow barometric pressure etc)

Just the relevant sensor config in esphome so that it can read the sensor. It'll be the same for the DHT22 just with a change of model.

I can't take credit for the idea though, there's quite a thread over on the HA forums of other things people have stuck in the enclosure. Carbon Dioxide and Carbon Monoxide sensors for example, although from what i recall reading the carbon monoxide sensor has to heat up a fair bit to take a reading which can throw the temperature sensor in close proximity.



My next project is to attach a camera to the water meter, and use optical character recognition to grab the numbers from the display. You can get zigbee devices that you can stick onto the water meter to obtain readings for you, but my water supplier (united utilities) have slapped their own device on the end, so that they can drive by outside and collect a meter reading without having to physically check the device. Which leaves my only option to get an automated reading by using a camera and OCR.

I've got the OCR part going at least, i just need to now test it with some real seven-segment numbers, and then get a mount printed to house the camera securely on the water meter. Will update the thread if the project is successful.

 

[Semple]

Does that mean you already monitor the electricity/gas meter, with a blink counter - I'm looking for a more affordable device than friert at ~£50;
albeit an electricty monitor with a clamp, is perhaps more versatile to rotate around white goods/appliances

I have a prototype built copying this design (https://github.com/klaasnicolaas/home-assistant-glow). I don't have a smart meter installed yet, and although these devices are non-intrusive, i'm a bit apprehensive installing in until i've had a smart meter fitted. I suppose i could stick it on a battery pack in the mean time just to confirm all is working before running a small wire for power.

I'm waiting on delivery of a CT clamp that i plan to add on so i can measure watts via photodiode, and current via CT clamp. From my understanding you can only put the CT clamp around the live cable, so that rules out using it on things like appliances, as the AC would null the reading. - unless of course you spliced the wire to reveal just the live sheathed cable and put the CT clamp around that - a bit messy though!

 

[Semple]

Just a reminder for any HA users on here to test your backups!

Short(ish) story - I overwrote one of my esphome files, so went to my last night backup (mine are daily) to retrieve the file and after downloading the full backup I realised it was corrupt. Downloaded one from a few days ago and that was corrupted too, even going back a few months - all corrupted.

My daily backups are around 8Gb in size - which is quite a whopper. I knew my influxDB was getting big, so I was suspecting that was causing the backups to be corrupted.

I have two main users for influxDB, Home Assistant and Glances - which is an addon to monitor the system. After extracting the database, it had grown to a whopper of 20Gb, Glances was using about 11Gb and HA about 8.5Gb. I've been running HA for probably close to 4 years now, and by default influxDB is set up for infinite retention. I'm not interested in what my CPU was doing 3 years ago, so I've now set the retention period for Glances down to 7 days.

Now my monster task is to clear out a lot of the HA data - I don't want to nuke it all like Glances. I'll start by setting the retention period to 2 years and then start to look at what data I'm logging from devices/sensors that aren't useful.

So yeah, don't assume just because you're doing frequent backups, that they're all good.

 

[Semple]

This looks really interesting - although currently I use google home to run everything, but this looks smart. Do you need to be able to code at all to get the best out of it? Or is it literally linking everything via APIs or accounts etc?

It's come a long way to make things friendlier to setup.

Most devices now can be auto discovered and will walk you through the setup.

Other things are done/setup with yaml - which is pretty basic once you understand the syntax/structure.

Dashboards for example are fully customisable, but people have developed add-ons to auto-create these if you don't want to spend time doing any customisation.

 

[Semple]

Just one thing to note with Google, they've now opened up their API for public access but do charge a one time $5/£5 fee (can't recall the currency) for access.

I've got a doorbell I need to add but keep putting it off for installing/setting up other things.

 

[Semple]

*reviving meter discussion*
looks like there is a commercial reasonably priced solution now
which folks have integrated, could be my first post brexit aliexpress purchase

TUYA 1 or 3 phase Energy Meter

https://au-m.banggood.com/OWON-WIFI-Tuya-Single-or-3-phase-Power-Clamp-80A-or-120A-or-200A-or-300A-Multi-Function-Residential-Commercial-Application-p-1891726.html?rmmds=orderdetail Not sure how reliable banggood is, but they are selling a tuya wifi energy meter with different ct clamp sizes...

community.home-assistant.io

https://www.aliexpress.com/i/1005004845740618.html

finally get some high precision data

Nice, rather embarrassingly I've still got the prototype built I've just not bothered to try and install it. I recall having some issues trying to calibrate it.

Does this device also track power or just current? And does it calibrate well / reasonably accurate?

 

[Semple]

Any idea how InfluxDB getting too big corrupts the backup?

Not a clue tbh!

IIRC when I looked a bit more at the database mine was about 40Gb in size. So I do wonder if during the compression phase it's hitting some sort of timer and is killed before the compression has completed.

 

[Semple]

@jpaul how accurate/calibrated is the device?

 

[Semple]

So, Ive had HA running on a HP T530 mini pc only for a couple of weeks. It only came with an 8GB SATA SSD, and its now nearly full. For some reason the disk use jumped a couple of days ago 1.4GB for some reason, and now there isnt enough space for me to run the latest core update

So, I can try and dig into what caused the sudden jump in disk use, which will give me a bit longer usage before running into isssues again, but I'm thinking i might as well upgrade the SSD to a larger one, 256GB should be plenty. Now the question is, whats the best way to clone the existing drive and installation onto the new drive? I've got just one USB3-SATA m.2 adapter that I used with Balena Etcher to write HAOS initially, so wont be able to have both drive connected to my windows laptop. What software would I need to clone, such that I can just slot the new drive back in, turn it on, and everything on HAOS is as it was, just with 250GB more space!

Personally if it was me, I'd do a fresh install, and then full restore from backup.