Introducing our house and the hardware setup
I live in a woodden house from 1965, which underwent a major change (it was split into two) in 1987. That is, its NOT a new house. The living area covers two floors, with a basement/garage underneath.
Since I live in Norway the primary heating source is my wood stoove and electric heating panels.
I have a very tech skeptic wife, and two boys and everyone needs to live with my various ideas and “improvements”. So pretty much like everyone else I guess.
Infrastructure Hardware
I have so far not invested in a lot of infrastructure, but rather started to better utilized what I had. So the entire setup is mostly run using:
- A Synology NAS DS412+
- Two Ubiquity APs (UAP-AC-Lite)
- Lots of ethernet cabel
- An Aeotec SmartThings Hub (for controlling my Z-Wave and ZigBee things)
- A pfSense based router (a small rugged device I installed pfSense onto)
In addition I have various Z-wave and ZigBee enabled “things” lying around, some bought recently but most bought years ago because I was dreaming!
Notable Sensor/Support Hardware
Of course there are some additional devices in the house, I already mentioned some ZigBee/Z-wave devices. These are just run-of-the-mill sensors and plugs.
A few other interesting devices are present though
- Netatmo Weatherstation (Indoor + Outdoor + Wind Gauge + Rain Gauge)
- Pow-U AMS Reader (https://amsleser.no/hjem/7-pow-u-universal.html)
The Pow-U is the most important one, but the Netatmo is the only “smart device” my wife bought, so it deserves a special mention 🙂
Software
Most of the software I have running is on the Synology NAS the setup is currently as follows:
- Docker (to ease my installation burdens)
- Ubiqity Unifi controller (Docker Image)
- Home Assistant (Docker Image)
- Eclipse-Mosquitto – MQTT Broker (Docker Image)
Originally I intended my home automation adventure to be based solely/primarily on the software provided with the Aeotec Hub.
Luckily I discovered Home Assistant, and now my Aeotec Hub is mostly used as a bridge for the z-wave/zigbee devices. I might get rid of it at some point. Who knows.
Enough text, here are my current dashboards in Home Assistant:
A weather/environment overview
Since everything is in danish/norwegian here is a short explanation:
The left column displays my living room environment, the temperature, CO2 concentration and humidity.
The middle column displays rain and humidity outside.
The right column the average wind speed and wind gusts (along with the direction).
All thanks to the Netatmo sensors!
A simplified Power overview:
The middle column displays my current power usage, and the predicted percentage of fossil fuel used to deliver said power.
The right column depicts the 3 phases and their current/voltage levels currently.
The current power information is all thanks to the Pow-U while the nordpool thing is an online service.
Of course the built in energy dashboard of Home Assistant deserves a prominent display, though I mostly use it to see my historic power consumption (which I can also find online at my power company)
I am not going to explain how all of this was installed, but in one of the next blog posts I will try and go into some of the details of getting the power integration up and running.
esben