Using Home Assistant to automate my aquarium

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Hello everyone. I’m tinkering with Tasmotized Sonoff switches and Home Assistant to do things with my aquarium.

Right now Home Assistant is controlling the aquarium lights with a Sonoff Basic and a Sonoff TH10 with DS18B20 temperature probe to control my heater.

I have automations configured to turn the lights on at 11:00 AM and off at 7:00 PM.
And my heater is set to turn on if the temperature goes below 77.0°F and turn off if the temperature goes above 78.0°F.

I am also going to add a Sonoff Basic inline with my filter, so I can turn that on and off from within Home Assistant.

One of the things aquariasts do a regular basis is a water change on the aquarium.

When you do a water change, you need to ensure that the heater is off (and won’t come back on) and that the filter is off. This presented a challenge, because if I manually turn the heater off, then it may turn back on, if the probe shows a temperature of 76.9°F or lower.

So, I did some tinkering and I created a group called “Basement Aquarium Water Change.” In that group I added the heater switch, the filter switch, and the “turn on heater if water goes below a certain temperature” automation. So, in theory, I should be able to flick the switch on that group and be able to have it shut off the heater, the filter, and make sure the heater stays off. Then when I am done, I flick that group back on and move on with my life.

Does this sound like a reasonable strategy, or am, I missing something?

Also, is there a way to trigger an alert if a group has been off for too long? If I do a water change and forget to turn the stuff back on, can I get an alert on my phone telling me group “Basement Aquarium Water Change has been off for 45 minutes!” to tell me I forgot to turn my stuff back on.

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You almost certainly want to read this thread on somebody else’s journey.

1 Like
3

Hi,

yes, you can certainly do this, just use the following syntax ( i do more or less the same)

- alias: Aqua Warning
  trigger:
    platform: state
    entity_id: switch.heater
    to: 'off'
    for:
    minutes: '45'
action:
  service: message.warning
  entity_id: notify.notify

This should do the trick.
Of course if you reboot HA during that 45 Minutes, it will lose the time and will not trigger.

Regards
Crey

4

Nice! Thank you for this. I’ll go try it out now.