GreatAlbatross

@ GreatAlbatross @feddit.uk

Posts

68
Comments

527
Joined

3 yr. ago

Moderating

homeassistant lemmy.world

United Kingdom feddit.uk

UK Politics feddit.uk

3d ago

Physical user interface
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GreatAlbatross @feddit.uk 3d ago
I haven't had a single zigbee button need a battery replacement yet.

2w ago

Coastal road swept away into the sea in Devon

Plus, the terrain near the coast here is an absolute bastard for point-to-point roads. You'd struggle to make the alternative road any more efficient than the existing b-roads.

4w ago

xkcd #3196: Aurora Coolness

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GreatAlbatross @feddit.uk 4w ago

Very accurate. When we had the northern lights here, we pulled over on the way to the dark-sky location, and the aurora filled the sky. After it died back a bit, we drove on to the dark-sky, where we spent 3 hours sitting in the dark working out if the green bits were going to spike up again.

1mo ago

Why the NHS still wastes billions on patients who shouldn't be in hospital

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GreatAlbatross @feddit.uk 1mo ago

The 2010s gutting of social services also contributed to this. Services that might have helped the elderly continue to live in their own homes, or supported in their community, got ripped up. So everything slides until they hit the one thing that can't be cut, a hospital bed.

1mo ago

How to add weather station

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GreatAlbatross @feddit.uk 1mo ago

Do you have rtl_433 mqtt auto-discovery set up?

2mo ago

Boiling lobsters alive to be banned in UK animal cruelty crackdown

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GreatAlbatross @feddit.uk 2mo ago

I reckon culture-grown meat will be the big one that shifts people away from slaughter meat.

Sure, growing it from a culture will still have people refusing on ethics grounds, but it's damned sight less suffering.

2mo ago

Boiling lobsters alive to be banned in UK animal cruelty crackdown

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GreatAlbatross @feddit.uk 2mo ago

That was the conclusion I reached a little while ago. So I've just stopped eating shellfish as a result.

I'm now trying to reduce the amount of cow I eat.

2mo ago

How to add weather station

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GreatAlbatross @feddit.uk 2mo ago

What type of radio is the weather station using? Are you pulling the data using RTL_433?

2mo ago

Central heating: is there any good way?

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GreatAlbatross @feddit.uk 2mo ago

Boilers are kinda on/off, from a control perspective. The boiler heats water to the set flow temperature, pumps it around the loop, and repeats until it's switched off. The amount of gas used is modulated by the boiler to make the water come out at the right flow temperature. Unless all the rooms in your house are perfectly insulated, or so badly insulated that they lose heat instantly, ad-hoq temperature changes in individual rooms is tricky to do well.

I did have smart TRVs for a while, but actually ended up binning them. So my current solution is: HomeAssistant controlled call-for-heat. This is a relay that when connected, turns the boiler on. Temperature sensors in each room. This allowed me to balance the radiators so they all warmed up evenly, and also feed into the HA thermostat to decide when the heat needs to come on. Manual TRVs in each room set to slightly above the normal target temperature. So they're normally open, but will close if something crazy happens, like someone turning on a fan heater. Timed target temperatures in HA. So the target temperature drops at bedtime, and rises just before I get up.

I also lowered the flow temperature of the boiler, which improves efficiency. I'm not 100% sure what you're trying to achieve in your setup. But adding TRVs to each room (and having one always-open, like the bathroom) would be a good step forward.

3mo ago

HA on Raspberry pi: SD card failure

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GreatAlbatross @feddit.uk 3mo ago

It was such a breath of fresh air when I finally put HA onto proxmox. "Oh, I actually have resource now? Sweet!"

4mo ago

Control light without 3rd party app

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GreatAlbatross @feddit.uk 4mo ago

A little late to the party, but yes, I can confirm that Hue bulbs can be controlled directly over zigbee. You will need a zigbee radio if you haven't already bought one (£20-ish). They literally just appear like a zigbee device inside that integration.

You may need to reset them before they will pair. I forget the pattern, but iirc it's on 2s, off 8s, repeated until you see an acknowledgement flash. Sometimes, you'll get one that takes forever, then the next bunch will just hop right on. I have several Hue hubs I still need to offload, as I sometimes buy the combo packs that include another hub.

I also found that the response time was a lot quicker over direct zigbee than farting around with Signiant/Philips' API.

4mo ago

Logitech will brick its $100 Pop smart home buttons on October 15 - Ars Technica

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GreatAlbatross @feddit.uk 4mo ago

The trick is to buy reasonably open devices, then provide the smarts yourself. If it can talk to / be configured by HomeAssistant, and doesn't require internet to work, it'll probably be fine.

5mo ago

Wet underfloor heating controllers

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GreatAlbatross @feddit.uk 5mo ago

That's indeed useful information! My boiler control for the central heating has the very useful function of a 30 minute button. Which means even if I torpedoed HA in the middle of winter, I could still get the house warm.