Taras, thank you for your reply.
I suspect there may well be something else out there that’s 100% reliable. But I first looked for software that supported most of the devices I needed (key being “need”) and didn’t find anything except HA, so I stopped looking.
Not doing what I want, but doing it perfectly, is not really that useful.
Please don’t misunderstand my feelings. I’ve been using HA for five years now, and am up to 110 devices. By and large, it’s worked extremely well, extremely well. And when it hasn’t, most of the blame can be placed on cheap Chinese devices.
(Indeed, some of these devices remind me of a Samuel Johnson saying. “It’s like seeing a dog walk on its hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” It’s hard to imagine how much clever tech could be packed in for such few dollars.)
But there are glitches that seem to be entirely HA related, and here’s an example.
I live in a rural property with a septic field and a septic pump. Being originally a city boy … with actual sewers … I didn’t give it much thought.
Until the pump failed, unbeknownst to me.
Unbeknownst for a while, until the ground around the tanks seemed moist all the time, even mid summer, and the area seemed even smellier than usual abd I finalky investigated.
So, when the pump was replaced, I took some serious action. I started with an alarm, a switch on a float at a very high effluent level, higher than should ever be reached, that sets off a LOUD screamer. (So loud that when testing it, my neighbours from a quarter mile away came to investigate.)
Then I built a two switch pump control system … simple relay logic … to replace the original single float switch system.
With a single switch, the pump probably came on each time a toilet was flushed, hands were washed and so on. It could easily be 50 short cycles a day, each cycle but two or three seconds long.
Since pump motors fail more often due to start stop cycles than hours of use, a single switch is a bad idea. In the two switch system, there’s a high and low switch. The pump does not turn on until the high switch closes and stays on until the low switch opens. In my system, these two are about 100 gallons apart, meaning my pump turns on every 36 to 48 hours and stays on for two or three minutes.
This scheme is now standard in most every septic installation and the controllers are readily available. But they were all hundreds of dollars for little more than two $10 relays, so I built my own. (I have an electronics background, this system was easier to build than buttering my morning toast.)
But I’m also mindful of the old saying, “Once bitten, twice shy” and, if the truth be told, I’m a bit paranoid, so I built something else alongside. I built an ESPHome device to monitor the state of the switches and then added some automations.
One automation sends an email when the pump turns on, another sends an email when the pump turns off.
A third sends an email and flashes every light in the house if the very very high switch is tripped (just in case I can’t hear the screaming loud alarm).
And a fourth sends an email if the ESPHome device is offline for more than 15 minutes. I’m always worried … does no email mean no pumping? Or does it mean no monitoring?
There’s another quote that sticks in my mind, “quis custodiet ipsos custodes”. (Did I mention paranoia?) So I have a script running on my desktop computer that does a port query on the ESPHome device every five minutes, again emailing me if the ESPHome device doesn’t respond.
The computer has never emailed me to say that the ESPHome device is offline (except for those times I’m screwing around with the WiFi, which is a decent test of the cron job).
But every four or five days, HA does email saying the device is offline, even though the log file on the computer says all is well.
It’s just a glitch of some sort, so I just ignore these as well, paying more attention to the messages from the computer.
From this, and other such little niggles (most also dealing with offline devices that aren’t actually offline), I derive my opinion, not 100%, just spectacularly good beta.