Greetings, it has been many moons since I have posted.
I want to ask what the best way is of accessing a remote ESPHome device safely.
Here is my specific use case.
I moved my ultra-ancient parents into a flat nearby where I can keep an eye on them. It has a 5kw backup inverter, because the power out here is prone to drop.
But it’s also colder than I’d like in that flat, so there’s an electric oil heater.
When the power drops, the inverter kicks in seamlessly, but does not enjoy carrying the load of an electric heater for obvious reasons, and the batteries get chewed up quickly, which the landlady is not particularly enjoying.
So to avoid drama, I’m figuring that a Sonoff PowR2 with ESPHome will let me turn the heater off if my HA detects that the grid has dropped. Easy enough in theory.
But.
The cottage is not on my network, but does have Internet access. I need to figure out a way to connect that ESPHome device to my home network transparently, because their inverter isn’t smart, so I will need to tell the device to toggle when I detect that the grid drops.
I thought of two possible ways so far.
One, somehow host an MQTT server somewhere exposed to the Internet; I have no idea if the password scheme used is robust enough for safe use, but I suspect this would be sort of easyish to configure, just need a server somewhere.
Or two, VPN to that network. I worry that I don’t understand VPNs well enough to achieve this, and also, I would need to build them a pi or something to run the VPN software over there. Seems harder. I don’t control that router, so I can’t change the config, I’d need to install a pi somewhere over there.
Do you have any suggestions?