£995 Fee.
Currently saving me £400 a month, so the fee will pay itself back pretty quick.
how smart has your home gone?
- Thread starter utajoker
- Start date
Currently saving me £400 a month, so the fee will pay itself back pretty quick.
Caporegime
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Yeah I can see it's 1.09% now. That's a very good rate. Nothing like that was available even 6 months ago. 1.25% @ 5 years was as good as it got
I guess I got lucky - signed all the paperwork on that rate about a month or so ago.
It's on a 70% LTV which helps with better rates.
Associate
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The LTV will definitely help.Our remortgage pushed us over that so we chose a discount tracker with no early redemption and will re-mortgage again once our extension is done.
Associate
Very is the best answer
Home Assistant now runs everything in the house and I've got a whole bunch of stuff plugged into it.
Sonos speakers, Tado, AV Amp, a mixture of z-wave, zigbee and wifi lights, zwave on/off switches, Harmony remote, house alarm, Unifi router, switches and APs all link in.
The only cloud based service I'm reliant on is Tado, the rest (including Hue, will work with the internet being down, which is important for usability.
I haven't done much in the way of dashboards but all of the lights are controlled by Node-Red logic flows so triggers will turn on certain lights based on conditions.
What do you run Home Assistant on?
Atm I’m running it on a PI 3B+ I had spare, but want to put it on something more powerful/reliable
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I’ve got it running on an oldish (7th gen intel) laptop as a VM. I’ve had it running on a
pi but SD card issues meant a rebuild. only challenge with the esxi route was the USB pass through in v7 but it’s been rock solid.
Associate
What’s the advantage of running it as a VM, is it so you can run HA OS?
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Yes, HA OS.
Just noticed an annoying software issue with Echo Show units where every 12s the screen can fade out to black, just to fade back in again. eg: Show time ---> 12s fade to black --> show nothing --> show time --> repeat.
I can reproduce this on a Gen 1 Show and a Show 5 and Show 8. All of these have all Home Content turned off as I just want the time shown. At times they seem to get into the above loop/issue, at other times it stops. If it's not happening, "Alexa, show home" seems to kick it off.
It's very annoying as it looks crap and grabs your attention when it shouldn't.
If you have any Home Content enabled: Time Shown --> 12s --> Fade to something (eg: weather or a tip) --> Fade back to time --> Repeat...
If you do not have any Home Content enabled: Time Shown --> 12s --> Fade to nothing --> Fade back to time --> Repeat...
Just spent 2hrs on Amazon Support reporting it...
I can reproduce this on a Gen 1 Show and a Show 5 and Show 8. All of these have all Home Content turned off as I just want the time shown. At times they seem to get into the above loop/issue, at other times it stops. If it's not happening, "Alexa, show home" seems to kick it off.
It's very annoying as it looks crap and grabs your attention when it shouldn't.
If you have any Home Content enabled: Time Shown --> 12s --> Fade to something (eg: weather or a tip) --> Fade back to time --> Repeat...
If you do not have any Home Content enabled: Time Shown --> 12s --> Fade to nothing --> Fade back to time --> Repeat...
Just spent 2hrs on Amazon Support reporting it...
Last edited:
Soldato
This is why many people like the idea of having a local system of control. Whether it's your Internet connection or the cloud services that are down, either way you're screwed without it
I think 90% if not more of my setup is locally controlled through Home Assistant.
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Ouch, I can bet that won't be within a 48 hour fix!
This is why many people like the idea of having a local system of control. Whether it's your Internet connection or the cloud services that are down, either way you're screwed without it
Same here, everything in my house can survive without internet (apart from my 11 year old)
This is why many people like the idea of having a local system of control. Whether it's your Internet connection or the cloud services that are down, either way you're screwed without it
Yeah I get that and given the present issue this might make me consider it but the level of understanding and focus I'd need to setup HA and then explain it all to my other half is generally beyond my level of interest.
In fairness I can control hue and nest on my local wifi so the main impact is I've lost my smartthings automation and spotify through my echos which I have in basically every room.
I just took the ring doorbell off, turns out banging on the door still works lol.
No... I saw the new one being delivered today but I don't know if they're installing it and I assume it'll take ages to configure. It's been down since Tuesday.
Fortuitously I'm scheduled to have my FTTP installed on Monday so I may hurtle from a barely existent 3g hotspot (yes... 3g, I don't even get 4g in the house which is insane.. I'm in a town centre in surrey ffs.. vodafone may go to the kerb after this too) to 900mb up and down.
Here's hoping because this is killing me, work has been impossible and a weekend without netflix, prime, music from speakers or anything that isn't already on the sky box is not a particularly pleasant concept.
I'm not sure if the Pi3 supports boot from SSD, but after HA was starting to log too many metrics (it was just constantly at IOWait) i had to upgrade my pi4 to use an SSD.
This is why many people like the idea of having a local system of control. Whether it's your Internet connection or the cloud services that are down, either way you're screwed without it
Definitely this.
Associate
Home assistant running that controls lights, smart plugs, heating etc from Hive and TP link. Also have automations running that turn lights on and off at certain times and detect motion at certain times to turn lights on for X minutes.
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I’m waiting on zzoomm or whatever they’re called so I can get rid of BT, I can just about get 4g but throughput sucks.
With regards to the home assistant and setting it all up, it’s much easier than you think. I’ve been in to home automation for years and migrated to HA in an afternoon. The app on the phone and the dashboards make the whole setup very non tech friendly, plus it can integrate with HomeKit, not sure on the android side. All in, with the relevant sensors, I can do everything without touching an app.
Hmm. Maybe.
Considering who I work for homekit is never going to happen but I guess perhaps I might give it a look.
A project is never a bad thing I suppose!
Associate
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Ha! Seriously, 95% of my stuff was auto discovered. I’m running zwave, hue, and so much more. I’m not a programmer so I do most stuff through node-red or the interface, but it’s really easy.
Soldato
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Jesus how big is your house ?I went all-in on the smart home about 2 years ago.
I've also physically removed all light switches and use philips motion sensors with automations to control how lights operate. By default lights in common areas like the hallway or landing only come on for 1 minute. I've recently configured things so that if I walk around the house at night (00:00 to 06:00) lights only come on 25% brightness. If I am out, the motion detectors in the kitchen are disabled so the dogs aren't triggering the lights and no light comes on if the light level is above 10 lux which reduces the need to needlessly put on a light. At night I have it set up that when someone arrives home (geofencing) the outdoor lights turn on and any time the last person leaves the heating goes in to Eco mode.
- 96 cat6 network ports in the house
- 4 UniFi access points (1 external)
- Smart meter
- Solar panels
- EV charger
- Ring video doorbell
- Nest thermostats control each zone of underfloor heating (4 in total)
- Every light is a philips hue bulb (including the 6 external)
- ...and we have a series of smart plugs to control the kettle, living room lamp and PC
If I'm on the PC in the home office the motion automation to trigger the lights is disabled, so I can play games etc without the light going on/off every time I move/stay still
Thankfully, most devices are HomeKit compatible, so they work off my network of iOS devices but there are things (such as the Ring and Nest stuff) that don't play nice out of the box. For this, I've set up a Raspberry Pi running HomeBridge which allows me to add them to the Home app on iOS. I can then view the cameras and alter the thermostats using my phone/iPad or use voice activation.
Little things that I set up still impress me e.g. If you push our doorbell, the feed appears on my TV / watch / phone or having the ability to quickly turn off every light with the tap of a button. I also have NFC tags dotted around (such as near the cooker) to automatically hand-off audio on my phone to ceiling speakers or HomePods at a pre-determined volume.
I had 18 CAT6 ports in my previous house and the guys running the cable were laughing at me asking if I was running a data centre.
Current house although bigger will likely have less ports as wifi will run most things and a single Unifi AP is running whole house wifi (in fairness haven't thorough tested outdoor coverage yet)
Also, how do you deactivate the motion sensor automatically when you are on your PC ? this sounds very useful.
