I also haven’t seen any problems with either my z-wave mesh or my Zigbee mesh, but it’s an interesting tell that several network troubleshooting features have been added to Home Assistant over the last year or two
I also haven’t seen any problems with either my z-wave mesh or my Zigbee mesh, but it’s an interesting tell that several network troubleshooting features have been added to Home Assistant over the last year or two
While I don’t have a good real life answer since I haven’t done that, the newest z-wave devices have a long range mode for exactly this type of thing and at least on paper have well over this range. You might do so research on those and look for those devices specifically
But if your phone doesn’t have great signal across the entire house a lightswitch inside of a metal box in the wall is going to be worse.
I hesitated expecting exactly this, but so far it’s worked flawlessly.
My house is older construction with very dense walls, and yes all the switch boxes are metal. When I enter my house, cell coverage drops to one bar and might goto zero as I walk around the house (thank goodness for WiFi assist). WiFi disappears as I go through certain doorways so I need a mesh and mesh routers about 10-15’ apart can’t communicate with each other. Back when cordless phones were a thing, they would only cover a room, although interestingly 900MHz was the best cordless phone frequency and higher frequencies had worse range. My house is horrible for radio signals.
But both Zigbee and zWave have worked really well. It probably helps that my first priority was smart switches, which are one or more repeaters in every room and more likelihood of straight lines through doorways, but it just works. Much better than WiFi.
And with home assistant, it’s easy to have both
I’ve been wondering about thermal storage for heat pumps but we don’t have time of use metering yet. I see a few options online but contractors aren’t familiar and it’s not even clear whether they are really available
My parents house when I was a kid had resistive heat, but they added thermal storage when our utility started doing time of use and it made a huge difference in the bills. However I don’t know the overall payback period
Same here. My primary use case is making it work naturally for a voice assistant, so it’s a bit inconsistent because it needs to reflect what we actually call things
Welll, you’re way ahead of me. In addition to not getting one yet, I’ve got the flu for over two weeks now. Actually my ex caught it before Christmas and it slow-walked through the family ever since
It’s there and configured. Ready to go. You can do it
I also have excellent results with Siri. While I have it require a click before listening, I’m always wearing my watch so it’s still pretty convenient.
But I have to admit the always listening part is kind of nice. It started off innocently enough : hey my thermostat can do Alexa. Then we discovered the intercom feature and ended up with one in every room
That will an important metric to determine. I know the doc said raspberry pi or similar are too slow but what local control is sufficient. Even among Pi’s there’s a large range of capability- I wonder how a Pi5 does or if it’s demanding of memory or something
Looks great!
Bummer. That’s one of my primary uses for Alexa, that I’d like to fix.
They’re cheaper at Inovelli’s store, plus you can buy multipacks to save more: https://inovelli.com/collections/inovelli-blue-series
Definitely curious as well, but so far haven’t gotten around to trying
I used to do that but it would constantly nag until I connected it
They also used to creep me out, but Siri was the one that got me. Of the majors, Apple is most concerned about privacy and the only one whose business model is not exploiting us that way. More importantly, as something on personal devices, it’s still useful if you require a click rather than always listening. It becomes normalized, and you no longer consider what you’re giving up
Then we discovered using Alexa as an intercom, and the convenience of always having it listening in every room, and threw out our own privacy. I’d really like to claw this back
One of the best parts of HA is the HomeKit bridge: any supported device is exposed to HomeKit …… so if I’m using a personal device, my VA is Siri. Much smoother and more integrated than any of the app VAs. I have it configured to require a click, so it’s not always listening. However the rumors of the upcoming Apple smart home hub are mighty enticing, so we’ll see
I stopped using Google Assistant years ago.
Echo devices are pretty much in every room and a huge privacy issue. Also that’s my one integration with the biggest internet dependency. I don’t know if I can get rid of them, but I’d surely like to try
Was anyone able to order one? I saw this last night and at 2 hours after post, all three us retailers were saying sold out. I suppose it’s a good problem for ha to have.
Edit: one of the retailers updated their message to “ we have sold out of our initial HA Voice stock in 21 minutes”
While I love data and crave the dashboards, for everyone else:
I’ve given up persuading anyone to use any of the smart functionality, although I’m likely to get the Apple home hub when it comes out.
I’ve looked into various e-ink projects for dashboards but never had the time to follow through
I read it’s something like typical $5 price difference and z-wave have to pass compatibility tests
I initially went with z-wave because
But I ended up with both, no problem, and will soon add Thread.
I strongly prefer local networks instead of WiFi so I know they’re not calling home, it’s cleaner separation, and allows battery devices