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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Typical problem:

>> In my house, our nursery both cooled faster and heated faster than any other room in the house. The thermostat (a Nest) controlled the boiler from the living area, and would often turn off the boiler while the nursery was still chilly.

Nerd solution: integrated sensors. Smart home devices. Complex multi-zone heating. Issue never really goes away. Each time something is updated/bricked the entire system must be revisited. (See LLT tech tips videos about Linus's new house.) I'm still laughing at his hot LCD displays mounted directly below the thermostats in each room.

Actual solution: An electric space heater. Available at any Walmart for 25$. Built in thermostat. Problem solved.

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Put an ESP32[0] in the space heater. Detect temperature, humidity, barometric pressure. Detect human presents, identify if it is human versus dog. Provide Zigbee communication to Home Assistant. Send alert if dangerously excessive electricity is used, and shut down power to device. Check external weather to make sure water pipes do not freeze when away, and keep heat sufficiently high to prevent freezing but optimize for lowest power usage. Check every 15 seconds. Write automation that knows when away, on vacation, or price of electricity is too high turning it off, on, or throttling to reduce consumption. Reduce grid usage, by heating during best solar panel power generation.

And, then you just began. This is how Home Assistant used. :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP32

Where's the robot to pat you on the back?

Shhh. Do not scare them away too early.

https://www.ranzhourobot.com/pat-me-robot/

All because of one simple cherry...

I just stuck a door sensor on the nursery and have the space heater turn on if the door is closed for two minutes (and back off when it’s open for two minutes).

Perfect mix for us. Not (much) to break in the automation.

What space heater? I work from my basement and its a bit cold down here. I have a manual one but would like to be able to do some automations.

I run Home Assistant on a RasPi 4B and it takes care of the office temperature & humidity more precise and cost efficient than if I fiddled with the knobs on heater and dehumidifier.

And, it is fun.

Careful with how you're enabling the space heater, many smart plugs aren't designed for space heaters (or other high amperage devices). Though there are plenty that are.

> LLT tech tips videos about Linus's new house

I tried, I couldnt take it. Between doing things the most botched way possible and spending the most money possible (My 4 billion $$$$ home theater system clickbait) I couldnt take it anymore. Its a low form of scam / con when you use your home renovation as a tax writeoff and "content".

Isn't that pretty much all LTT content? High on money and flashy-flashy, low on facts and care.

Ya but it is also a common syndrome in Vancouver. Someone building a "nice" house is pulled in by people touting various control systems. The systems never really work. It is always the first time the installers to be installing this particular equipment. There are reasons why people with old money still use standard light switches just like poor people.

My rule for home automation is that the automation should merely augment the existing stuff and degrade gracefully in case of failure.

I automate accessory lighting, but not primary.

Christmas/holiday lights, mood lighting, under counter lighting, all that is controlled by automation.

Now, primary lighting for the room, there's a switch on the wall for that.

I remember some IoT switches that just had lamp and switch connector and outside of control did just that - worked as dumb switch so if all else failed lights still worked as usual.

It is still adding one extra component that could fail, but it was at least immune to "controller died, nothing works" problem.

Part of the reason why I went with Lutron Caseta, only to learn their hubs do not include telnet access on the basic model to allow private management of the switches. Still some workarounds for it, but the need to register a cloud account initially remains unimpressed.

The cloud is always someone else's computer, the cloud always costs someone $, and over time, there will be less incentive to provide it.

It's such garbage content and I also stopped watching. I figure he probably can expense a lot of the cost/tax because it's a business purchase once he makes content out of it but not sure if that works the way I think it does..

People write off personal stuff as a business expense all the time, it's not like tax authorities have the time to go through line items on invoices.

As for the legality, when you take stuff that you bought for the company and later use it for personal things, you need to "pay" the company for it, you can't just write if off.

The con aspect of tax write-off is offset by him being stuck with a lot of early adopter systems that don’t really work. I suspect his family would have been happier using 5$ thermostats that actually worked than such poorly implemented home automation.

LTT is like 95% entertainment 5% actually somewhat informative.

"Offset" for him, the money are still not going towards Canadian schools or healthcare or whatever.

LTT needs to make a video either way. If he sets up home automation at his house or an artificial studio demo the same money is spent and not ending up going toward Canadian schools.

In terms of the deduction, I doubt he’s committing actual tax fraud if for no other reason than he’s so public a figure.

OMG, a few thousand dollars is being deducted for a canadian business making money from mostly foreign countries, helping the trade balance, spending money in the canadian economy, hiring people who also pay taxes, promoting canada as a country and more, but they're ripping off canada because he dares have a few well documented tax deductions.

> My 4 billion $$$$ home theater system

I loved the idea of running my PC elsewhere in the house, so I looked up both the USB and Thunderbolt fiber solutions he recommended.

$800.

Plus that whole project has been a disaster anyway. This is like his third attempt at centralized gaming machines, and even this one is buggy and problematic.

His previous one was flagged by anti-cheat due to it being VM-based.

> Each time something is updated/bricked the entire system must be revisited.

The advantage of a fully local, self-contained system is that you can treat it as an appliance - you don't have to update or tinker with it continuously. There's no reason for it to update or brick itself.

A friend of mine still has a Home Assistant set up from now almost 3 years ago running with no updates or anything - it just acts like a PLC to manage some lights, switches and toggles heating on/off based on window sensors. Nobody has to mess with it and it just works in the background.

>> toggles heating on/off based on window sensors.

Do people want this? Maybe I want both warmth and fresh air in the room? And I foresee the day where the window sensor is faulty. I'm shivering in bed as I have an argument with my furnace about which one of us should be in charge of setting the temperature in my bedroom.

It's a fail-safe against leaving in the morning for work, opening the windows, and leaving the heating on full-blast all day long as it tries to heat the outside. It matters even more now given the energy prices in some countries.

Hass just sends on/off commands to a self-contained thermostat in response to window sensor state change events. If it fails, you can still manually go to the thermostat and set it to whatever you want.

Are there any thermostats at all that work completely locally, i.e. without any internet access and no cloud, but still can be controlled via HASS?

Venstar wifi thermostats have a local API that can be switched on.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/venstar/

I've not used it (I installed one because I wanted scheduling and liked that it had further possibilities and wasn't overly expensive).

Yea, your best bet for non cloud/internet stuff is to stick with Zigbee or Zwave. I have a Trane Zwave thermostat https://www.zwaveproducts.com/collections/trane/products/xr5... that’s worked well for several years.

For a more advanced use case I’ve recently set it up so that the thermostat logic is within HASS. An automation driven by a binary switch helper then switches the thermostat to a fixed hot or cold value for heat and AC. Then I can feed the HASS thermostat with whatever temperature sensor data I want, like an average of multiple sensors around the house. All this is totally optional though if you just want to control the thermostat from within HASS.

Flip side - one sensor failure and your home is without heating, and if you so happen to be on winter vacation at the time it can possibly be catastrophical

Especially in Europe, many people have radiators right under the windows. If the windows are open and the radiators aren't turned off, the cold air will come in, fall down and hit the thermostat, which will lead to the radiator running at full power because it stays cold.

He must not look at the UI, because the HomeAssistant interface begs you to update it _constantly,_ it's actually one of my biggest gripes with HA

Yes, in this case nobody looks at the UI - Hass acts as a glorified PLC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_logic_controller). I look at it every few months out of curiosity when I have the opportunity to visit but given that it works well and fits their needs I resist the urge of updating the system.

If there was a need for a UI I'd probably enable the HomeKit Bridge extension and let them control it via HomeKit (with only specific entities whitelisted) so that 1) they don't have to suffer through the eyesore that is Material Design and 2) don't get confused by a lot of the internal, read-only entities.

If you're looking at the Home Assistant admin interface all the time, you're doing it wrong IMHO. The key reason to do home automation is if it's actually automated and not just replacing a bunch of physical switches with web page switches. For the things which cannot be automated, bridge them over to HomeKit (or Google's thing) so they can be natively controlled by your phone and/or voice assistant.

A lot of things could be automated in my home if HASS knew that I'm not working tomorrow, that one of us or both of us are in bed, etc., but no idea how to best tell HASS about these things and how to model all the different cases without going crazy.

You can integrate it with a calendar and have automations based on the events. So you can have a work calendar that it checks before doing specific automations.

People have also built a variety of presence sensors for beds. With pressure sensors and such. Or if you have a Sleep Number bed, it also has presence detection. You could also do things like detecting phone is in the room and plugged in as a rough equivalent for presence of the person.

The real win was balancing the boiler and TRVs. Automating the boiler for efficiency is neat. I'd have kept a spare thermostat connected (with a physical switch for it's power) in case all that automation implodes, though.

Electric resistive heating is much more expensive than gas heating.

Maybe a heat pump is more efficient (about the same as gas, depending on climate) but needs more capital than $25.

> Electric resistive heating is much more expensive than gas heating.

That seems like a complex question to answer.

Electric heating is more efficient than gas heating (100% Vs. 95%), but electricity costs more than natural gas, taking out any benefit. But that isn't even what makes this complicated, if they're running their natural gas whole-home system to heat a single room, how does THAT compare to a more costly room heater?

Heat pumps are definitely more efficient (e.g. 300%) but cost $1K for a single mini-split, and installation costs/permitting is expensive. $5K isn't unrealistic for just one installed, maybe $2K~ DIY (assuming you can even pull the permit yourself for both electric and HVAC).

I hear that Mr. Cool is a good DIY heat-pump option. The refrigerant is "precharged" / included (i.e. you don't have to mess with refrigerant). https://mrcool.com/diy-4th-generation/

Proper insulation is the best solution.

I find it hard to adjust the majority to fit the minority. Better to cater to the edge cases individually and keep the larger system more stable.

> I'm still laughing at his hot LCD displays mounted directly below the thermostats in each room

I caved and watched - as this triggered my interest. It was actually worse than I expected. They really have 'designed' the system to be broken, and they were just pretending they couldnt figure out how to make it work, and had been sat in a freezing house for weeks ... right?

Some things are a hobby to tinker with and learn from.

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