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>* a vibration sensor combined with a tiny hall sensor on the door of the washer/dryer to notify me when laundry is done (trying to measure power usage on 220v wiring was looking to be more annoyance than it was worth, so i went a different route!)

Your option was likely much less expensive, but aeotec does make a clamp-on energy sensor[0]. It's made for reading your whole-home energy but it should work for your purposes. But like I said, your solution was likely much cheaper (these are about $99).

[0] https://aeotec.com/z-wave-home-energy-measure

I thought about that, and like you said it was pretty expensive, plus it would require me to cut the power line for the dryer to pull one of the lines out.

And then I was back at square 1 for the washer, which turns out uses little enough energy in a lot of cases to be hard to tell when it's "done" vs when it's just pausing between cycles or swapping water out.

I also wanted to have the notifications continue until you actually empty it, and that required a door sensor anyway!

I really want to get one of those for the oven though, my wife tends to worry that she left the oven on (she never has!) and something like this connected to it might help ease that worry. And I REALLY don't want to do anything invasive to the oven, as that's one thing that i REALLY do not want accidentally turning on or shorting out.

What's your setup for the front door camera? That's something I'd like to add to my house, I know there are a packaged solutions but I want to build it.

So I bought a ring a while back, I fucking hate the thing. It's unreliable, it's closed off, and has an awful API.

But until I get around to replacing it, I also have normal IP cameras out front. So i combined the API from Ring with the IP cameras that let you access the video stream to take a snapshot on motion or a doorbell ring, and use HTML5 notifications to send it to all my devices.

Get a doorbird. More expensive with the same feature set as the ring but a few big benefits. Their REST api is documented and they support callback webhooks. So you can have your doorbird make a webhook http post with a blob of json telling home assistant it detected motion or someone pressed the doorbell. I’m planning on using this to have a “doorbell” automation play on our Sonos speakers, which home assistant also supports very well.

This is great to know. I’m doing a big home remodel and ran CAT6 to my doorbell and have an unopened DoorBird just waiting to be installed in a few months. I love this idea!

Yup. I've got an outstanding person TODO item to see if anything in the HASS side of things needs enhancement, since I'm a python dev and have the Doorbird http api docs.

This is a great list of things you can do. Just reading thing went a good way from changing my mind from "useless contrivance maybe a bit fun to hack on" to "actually sounds useful."

Where do you buy your sensors, and which ones do you use? Sounds like they are all over the place so they need power and wireless (or a lot of cabling....)

the motion sensors and door/window sensors are zwave.

They are battery powered, but i've had the oldest ones for almost 2 years now and haven't had to replace the batteries yet, and when I do I can get a pack of like 10 for $15 so it's not bad.

All of the light switches are zwave as well, and they go in the wall behind the toggle switches, so from the outside you can't see any difference.

I get most of them from amazon, and i've used a bunch of vendors over the years. Aeotec, ecolink, linear, and a few no-name brands.

Can you share specifically which zwave sensors you're having good luck with? I have had mixed luck with sensors.

By far my favorite was the aeotec micro smart switch energy gen2

It's not sold any more, and it's not zwave plus, but I have like 12 of them and they are by far the best i've used. They are small, run consistently 100% of the time, have good range, and more.

I have 2 of the aeotec nano switches which are zwave plus, but they are also $60 so it's almost double the money...

I've also used fibaro but ended up removing it because there was a delay between when i flipped the toggle and when it would turn the light on, and that was not okay in my book.

I am looking to replace the light switches with zwave-plus modules simply for the extra security, but i'm not in a massive rush.

In the sensors world, i use ecolink's door window sensors. They are cheap and work well enough, although I did have 2 out of about 20 that were bad and needed to be replaced shortly after installing them.

I am also trying out zooz 4-in-1 sensors for motion right now. They work pretty damn well with a lot of control over sensitivity and range, so I'm happy.

For the garage doors I use linear/gocontrol's GD00Z-4 modules, and my door locks are kwikset with a zwave plugin board, and there are a few plugs around the house from various companies that all have worked perfectly so I don't really have anything bad about them (ge, aeotec, r-tech)

> ...notify me when laundry is done

You could hook into the buzzer circuit for this notification.

I have a rule that all my "modifications" must be easily undone, and can't impact the "thing" if it stops working.

So where possible, I shy away from any modifications to the device itself that aren't extremely simple to undo.

A vibration sensor and hall sensor on an esp8266 is cheap, works consistently, and is VERY easy to take off if I don't want it any more.

I did hook into a humidifier once kind of like this, I hooked the esp8266 up to the on-off button, but I try to avoid it if I can.

it would be interesting to hear what hardware and sensors you ended up using.

pretty much mostly zwave (from various companies over the years), with some one-off stuff on a few esp8266 chips that I got for a few $ each on aliexpress.