4 years ago I entered the home automation world. Repost from REDDIT (Edit 7/2020)

Five years ago this week I started with Smartthings kit and a handful of Z-wave device with a simple goal of automating the outside lights for my driving teenager who worked until 10 and make sure the playroom light was off when nobody was in the room. A habit which my 4 kids could not quit even today.

Now I have “invested” lots of funds and time and am all in with Home Assistant running the standard docker image on a Unraid server on hardware that I got for nothing from my place of work.

I switch to HA first using MQTT and Smarthings bridge. Eventually got a USB Zwave device and moved what I could over.

Like many I journeyed through HA on RPI with Hasio.os image, haspian and python env, before discovering docker. My docker was first on a NUC. Then I switched to Unraid to consolidate with other stuff.

Summary

  • Most automation is nodered. I have a few things still done in HA.

  • Four camera running Zoneminder unraid docker with object detect.Four outside camera

  • Integrated Rainbird with a relay hooked up to the Rain monitor that triggers during rain or average rain threshold

  • Raspberry Pi with RTL_433 and a SD antenna to pick up some Acurite sensor (Rain and Temp) and a few home made nano sensor (Dryer and Compost). I use Radio Head for this works with RTL_433. Docker powered.

  • 5 ESPHome on NodeMCU/Nodecu32: gate monitor, garage door controller for two doors, front landscape relay, back landscape, temp sensors, and a monitor for legacy door sensor and motion sensor that was in the house when I moved in.

  • Integration with Alexa via Nabu Casa. I have added Alex action notification for a few things. “The garage door has been left open do you want to close it” and action notification for the HA app on the iphone.

  • Raspberry PI connected to a TV running a google calendar, weather radar and camera view . I have 4 kids doing various thing and this was a great way to keep track.

  • TP Link plug, one for the washer the other for christmas lights. and 3 bulbs.

  • Presence is done with Life360, when the house is empty I change the Thermostats (3 zwave).

  • Neato D5 vacuum that I can set start as soon as the house is empty.

Alabama Power sends me a email everyday about usage from the day before. I turned that into a sensor so I can track usage. On a good day when there is work and school I save about $5 a day in the summer its $10 if we are gone a significant part of the day. If you are not doing this automation you should be.

  • I graph it all in Grafana with Influxdb

Other stuff

  • Piwigo for photo management
  • Unif control with some Old N wifi that I got from work.
  • KanBoard for managing my work, kids, church stuff, hobby to do list.
  • AdGaurd on a RPI , seems to work great.
  • All docker running on a home build dual processor unraid server.

my advice

  • Learn docker, it will make life easier. And easier to try stuff out.
  • Learn linux. Don’t ditch windows but you can get a lot of life out of old computers that people like to give away and use them to create a sandbox to play with a linuxos. That is how I learned just about everything.

I try to browse the forums to answer question but sometime I just don’t have the time. If you have any specific about what I have listed let me know.

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Glad to see your list of successes. One of my favorite things about this hobby is how it lets you branch out / dive in as you’d like.

At the bottom of the post you mention power savings from a daily email, could you elaborate?

I live in Alabama , we have alabama power. On their website I can subscribe to daily usage email, they get sent the day after about noon. Contain accumulative cost and usage and yesterdays cost and usage. I have them sent to gmail account that i use for home automation stuff.

My nodered automation check the email periodically for a specific subject/from address. I then parse the html using the node red built HTML parser and create sensors. I use the node red integration to create the sensor in HA. But it can easily be done with a MQTT topic.

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Would you be able to share how you set this up in node red or your configuartion? Unfortunately, imap content sensor is unable to read the emails unless there format is changed.