What opportunities do I have with a renovation/re-model? Thinking outside the box

We’re renovating our flat, new bathroom, new kitchen, new floor, refinished walls, updated wiring, laying cat6e, etc. I’ve got all kinds of possibilities here.

The bathroom presence issue is one thing that jumped out at me first. Do you think I could install a load sensor or two underneath the new tile floor in the shower, and run the sensor wires about 3 or 4 meters to the bathroom cabinet? Would signal attenuation be a problem? What’s the chance the load cell fails? I have sensors rated for 50kg… but maybe I should get others.

Similarly we are laying a new parquet wood floor. Could load cells be useful here? Are there are other sensors that would be more reliable?

I’m also placing a few power sockets in what would normally be strange places so I can attach permanent ESP32s or RPIs.

What other opportunities do I have that I’m not thinking of?

I use Zigbee and ESP devices.

(FYI this is in the EU where walls/ceilings are made of brick and concrete, so the opportunity to run new wiring doesn’t come up very often)

For shower presence, add a temp probe to the copper pipe after the knobs in the shower

Do you have a link to an example of such a device? It would have to be battery powered I suppose.

I’d use a DS18B20 (many suppliers and form factors to choose from) and wire it to an ESP that gets power from wherever you can.
https://www.altronics.com.au/p/z6386-stainless-steel-housing-waterproof-ds18b20-temperature-probe/

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This is what my bathroom looks like currently.

This will all have a subfloor/underlayment installed on top and then tiles over, so there’s no real room for access, and it’s all in the Zone 0 anyways (so, the wettest zone).

I was thinking of putting in a flow meter (YF-S201) but there’s no real place to access it without diverting the pipes significantly.

How do you attach the DS18B20 to the pipe? Could you share a picture?

It could just be pipe clamped on with a bit of thermal paste to maximise the heat transfer.
image

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