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Comment by danparsonson | Hacker News Reader

I would like to suggest a third alternative which is to set an alarm for the maximum time it will take. The HA option is more fun though for sure.

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But why? Why add a manual, less accurate step instead of just using HA and solving it once? Steaming takes 20 minutes, a quick wash is ~1h, a boil wash more like 4h.

Why do I want only my phone to have a notification? Why do I want it to override other settings and go off at a set time rather than when I choose to interact (as a notification would)?

You can absolutely solve this in other ways, but adding an automation into HA for notifying me about forgetting to setup the dishwasher took a few minutes max and I only had to do it once.

I'm not saying don't use HA - you do you. I get the alure of home automation and I'm glad you're finding it useful. All I'm saying is that the argument that 'the phone timer might be wrong therefore use HA' is a false dichotomy. You know what kind of wash you've selected and you know how long it takes roughly - you wrote it in your comment :-) It takes a few seconds to set a timer for that plus 10% for variability.

> ... adding an automation into HA ... took a few minutes max

... plus the hours it takes to setup and maintain HA and the machine its running on and the wireless hub and the dishwasher... etc. I bet you won't save back the total time spent across the whole lifetime of the system. That's not the only measure of success and that's fine.

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