A different perspective

Posted May 15, 2025 7:10 UTC (Thu) by AdamW (subscriber, #48457)
In reply to: A different perspective by dskoll
Parent article: A kernel developer plays with Home Assistant: general impressions

The main value for me is doors. Being able to allow access for the catsitter, or a friend who shows up unexpectedly with something to drop off, or whatever. Being able to check whether I remembered to lock the doors when I'm in bed, without actually getting up and going to look. Being able to open/close my garage door if I don't have the dedicated remote with me, without using the godawful MyQ cloud thing (thanks, ratgdo).

But the other stuff is, honestly, just fun. Have I actually used the ability to control my heat pumps from HA much, since I set it up? Well, nah. Was it fun? Well, yeah. Is it world-changing that I can use it to auto-shutoff my ebike battery charger once it gets close to full capacity, and not have to do it manually or worry about the battery burning the house down if it overcharges? Nah. Is it kinda neat? Sure.

YMMV, but I've found HA extremely well built and designed in just such a way that fiddling around with it feels like *fun*, not a chore.

A different perspective

Posted May 18, 2025 15:56 UTC (Sun) by nirik (subscriber, #71) [Link]

yeah, same here... it's been 'fun' to play with. You _could_ do everything yourself, but it would be a lot of infra work and reverse engineering of tons of devices, this way you can integrate things pretty quickly and easily. There's also a lot of flexability in the framework to show things the way you would like if you want to tinker with the data.

A few things that stand out for me:
* Just having easy historical data is great. You can see how much the temp changed in that room over the last day/month/year and have a nice graph of the data. Being able to graph the temp sensor by your chair against the ductless heatpump sensor way up on the vaulted wall lets you see that heat sure does rise (and allows you to easily adjust it)
* consolidation of remotes/controls. I no longer need to find the remote for the blinds, the heatpump remote, etc. Everything is easily controllable via my phone or laptop.
* Being able to check the moisture level in the garden to know if I should water, and being able to water from anywhere.
* Being able to tell exactly how many gal of water I water the fruit trees (since pressure varies here on a pressure tank/well system).
* I do have a few 'requires internet' things: My car (it pulls from toyotas api) and my cpap machine. It's unfortunate that I don't have direct control over these, but adding them here allows me to at least have/save all my data locally.
* Being able to tell how full/empty propane tanks are should be nice for when we are in a power outage and running on generator. In the past I have had to go out and just lift the tanks from time to time to see how much might be left, this way I can know when to switch without going out into the cold/wet/rain/snow.
* Having the data on my hybrid hot water heater has been interesting. I got to learn about upper and lower tanks, that heatpump mode draws about 300-400W, but when we use a lot of hot water and it kicks on the electric element, it uses ~5500W. Avoiding that by increasing the target temp should save us on the electic bill

Anyhow, will stop there. I think it's a nice fun framework for wrangling iot stuff under local control with a pretty interface.