visitors this year: 32 This tank level sensor produces surprising detail about my heating oil usage. It’s a bit like a smart meter for oil so I now know say, how many litres I...
visitors this year: 67 what you need to set up a Bluetooth proxy A Bluetooth proxy requires almost any of the ESP32 development boards you can find at maker shops or Amazon. You need...
visitors this year: 28 You can connect the Switchbot water leak detector with Home Assistant without the need for a Switchbot hub. The detector uses Bluetooth and wifi to send out its alarms which...
visitors this year: 266 Smart devices often find their best uses in Home Assistant ‘automations’. ‘Automations’ are better known as ‘routines’ and they make quite unrelated devices interact with each other as will be...
visitors this year: 557 why a server? what can I use a home server for? a vpn, a router, an ad-blocker, storage for backups, a photo library, a music server, a printer server, a...
visitors this year: 744 TLDR: one morning too often I’ve woken to find that my ‘smart’ things has gone stupid and they haven’t turned on because the Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant has gone...
visitors this year: 863 My boiler burns heating oil from a tank and unlike the ‘gas’ that most homes burn it’s finite – so when it’s gone I’m cold. Ordering heating oil is tricky...
visitors this year: 1,673 I’ve been using the Wireguard or nginx to access my home network* securely and I’ve explained in other posts (links below) how they’re used and set up. Tailscale however is...
visitors this year: 5,720 You can graph temperature on this cute display and use buttons to turn on the heater as needed – the project works with Home Assistant and needs very little else...
visitors this year: 4,240 your need for a (nicer) sub-domain: At home you access an IP camera, a router, Home Assistant, a wi-fi access point, a NAS drive (eg Synology or QNAP) or perhaps...
visitors this year: 2,279 Here is a tank level sensor that’s more useful than anything you can buy. This post focuses on my housing and the calibration for a basic sensor to measure oil...
visitors this year: 3,852 how to make a heating oil tank level sensor that’s more useful than anything you can buy. This sensor… Background: homes like mine use diesel oil as a fuel to...
visitors this year: 2,244 how to make a heating oil tank level sensor that’s more useful than anything you can buy. This sensor… Background: homes like mine use oil as a fuel to keep...
visitors this year: 8,361 Let’s start with the reminder that an easy route to a security camera setup is to buy a kit with cameras and a system box to record events on site...
handling data from experiments / home & garden / monitoring at home
by Roger · Published Mar 2022 · Last modified Mar 2023
visitors this year: 1,589 I know that I ought not leave things powered on. Knowing that is easier than remembering that an e-bike or drone or laptop battery is still connected. Below I show...
visitors this year: 3,361 The very popular, but hardly-known Xiaomi nightlight, which lights up a dark space when you pass, now has a ‘smart’ version. A night light is nice on a dark stairway...
visitors this year: 19,825 Why do this? At an early point on the journey to network heaven you may have a need to connect from some holiday location say, to a camera, your computer,...
visitors this year: 582 two meanings of getting out of sync: Scenario one: You’ve two independently controlled table lamps which you’d prefer to turn on or off together. The lamps could be smart lamps...
visitors this year: 6,062 The Home Assistant home automation hub is more useful if you can access it remotely. In addition to having anywhere access with a browser URL, there’s an excellent phone app...
visitors this year: 18,659 If you need to access Home Assistant remotely away from home, skip this page and instead go to access your Home Assistant remotely using DuckDNS, Letsencrypt and the nginx SSL...
visitors this year: 255 Your smart bulbs, switches and door bell all come with a useful manufacturer’s app – over time you’ll accumulate many such apps. While Home Assistant might make them redundant, here...
visitors this year: 782 If you need to know when a device, like a dryer or washing machine has finished working, get a ‘smart plug with energy monitoring‘. Amazon list many of them but...
visitors this year: 6,952 This ceiling ‘coffer’ is lit by four 5m LED strips – each is cut to fit the space. When my kitchen lights turn on they fade up in a few...
visitors this year: 3,917 If you use Home Assistant you can show temperature, time and other sensor entities on this cute display. The inspiration for this mini-project came from a need to display my...
visitors this year: 1,094 Ovens may have digital controllers or analogue temperature controllers and cooks seem to have blind faith in their settings. In this household the cooks were burning food so I checked...
visitors this year: 2,092 My other page tells how much heating oil the boiler uses. Here’s how I collect and display energy use measurements around the home. My measurements provide two things – a...
visitors this year: 5,622 A home automation platform, such as Home Assistant, allows you to monitor temperature on graphs using sensors placed around the home. Monitoring temperatures allowed me to turn on/off my heating...
visitors this year: 2,191 Yes. Below you’ll see how to control HomeEasy devices through Home Assistant and the RFlink receiver/transmitter. (This also controls other manufacturers’ wireless sockets). You’ll be able to create timers and...
visitors this year: 1,532 or how to selectively expose Home Assistant entities to Alexa with emulated hue Home automation platforms like Alexa, Google Home and Home Assistant show major differences in the devices that...
visitors this year: 426 The need: you use a table light for watching TV and a main (wall) light at other times and you want a coffee table button to switch between one or...
visitors this year: 739 a 3-gang wall switch for your home automation – using eWelink, T4EU1C and Home Assistant I got to a point where I had plenty of ‘smart’ lights and gadgets but...
visitors this year: 31,300 a project to integrate inexpensive 433MHz RF devices with modern smart devices. We’ve brought all the instructions to get going with RFlink on one page. see also: 433MHz smarter letterbox...
visitors this year: 1,769 In a previous project I set up temperature sensors in my room and sent the data via Bluetooth to Home Assistant, the home automation platform. Home Assistant is software that...
visitors this year: 7,405 Toggling a light switch means that a press of the switch will turn the light off or on depending it what it was last doing. There is nothing clever about...
visitors this year: 1,493 I wouldn’t especially recommend the D-Link DCS-D150 motion sensor but it does have some features that had me buy it. Firstly it plugs into a wall socket above a worktop...
visitors this year: 733 ‘Smart meters’ and metering devices usually measure the electricity used by the whole house*. However I prefer to pay attention to the electricity used by individual devices, such as a...
visitors this year: 5,868 In this project I control a Sonoff light switch using Home Assistant. You can do the same with other Sonoffs. The switch shown here is the T4EU1C wall plate switch....
visitors this year: 1,080 The regular way to switch a Sonoff relay is to use the official ewelink app. Other ways require you to ‘flash’ the Sonoff device with Tasmota or ESPHome software and...
visitors this year: 4,553 1. Get IFTTT to put the data I send into a Google sheet Go to IFTTT, sign in and add the Webhooks service and the Google Sheets service. Follow this...
visitors this year: 2,668 How to make inexpensive, ‘old’ technology, 433MHz devices work with today’s smart devices see also: 433MHz smarter letterbox RF sensors and receivers If you’ve used any of the following examples...
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