I’ve been using HA for a while; having my home just “do things” for me without asking is fantastic. My lights turn on to exactly the levels I want when I enter a room, my grass and my plants get watered automatically, heating and cooling happens only when it needs to. There are lots of benefits. Plus, it’s just a fun hobby.
One thing I didn’t expect, though, is all the interesting things you can learn when you have sensors monitoring different aspects of you home or the environment.
- I can always tell when someone is playing games or streaming video (provided they’re transcoding the video) from one of my servers. There’s a very significant spike in temperature in my server room, not to mention the increased power draw.
- I have mmWave sensors in an out-building that randomly trigger at night, even though there’s nobody there. Mice, maybe?
- Outdoor temperatures always go up when it’s raining. It’s always felt this way, but now it’s confirmed.
- My electrical system always drops in voltage around 8AM. Power usage in my house remains constant, so maybe more demand on the grid when people are getting ready for work?
- I have a few different animals that like to visit my property. They set off my motion sensors, and my cameras catch them on video. Sometimes I give them names.
- A single person is enough to raise the temperature in an enclosed room. Spikes in temperature and humidity correspond with motion sensors being triggered.
- Watering a lawn takes a lot more water than you might expect. I didn’t realize just how much until I saw exactly how many gallons I was using. Fortunately, I irrigate with stored rain water, but it would make me think twice about wasting city water to maintain a lawn.
- Traditional tank-style water heaters waste a lot of heat. My utility closet with my water heater is always several degrees hotter than the surrounding space.
What have you discovered as a result of your home automation? While the things I mentioned might not be particular useful, they’re definitely interesting, at least to me.
The biggest one was probably a combo of having an anemometer, and heat/humidity sensors in each room.
When it’s cold outside, the top floor of the house (loft conversion) loses more heat. But it loses significantly more heat when it’s cold, and the wind is blowing parallel to the floor joists.
I realised that because they’re not perfectly sealed (old house), enough air pressure means that the floor void can easily hit external temperatures, meaning the rooms have cold on twice as many sides.
I will (eventually) get some suitable insulation in them to stop this.
Tell me more about automatically watering plants
I have a Rachio irrigation controller. I’d recommend OpenSprinkler to avoid being tied to a “cloud” service, but I didn’t know that when I purchased my Rachio.
One of my irrigation zones feeds into my greenhouse. It splits off to two solenoid valves. When it’s time to water my plants, HA triggers that zone through the Rachio integration and opens the appropriate solenoid valve that connects to my emitters. If my humidifier gets low, then it does the same thing but opens the other valve.
I have a Dyson smart air purifier / heater combo in my room. It has a mostly real time app that shows whether the air is healthy or unhealthy. One night I was laying in bed and felt some gargantuan ass thunder brewing, so I aimed my cheeks toward the Dyson and watched gleefully as my air quality went from green to red. Technology is amazing.
My old Samsung printer can enter a state where it consumes ~100W without doing anything meaningful. It’s not obvious what is wrong, but without power monitoring I would have never realized this.
CO2 levels raise astonishingly fast when people are present in a room.
I have mice visiting my garage and I can tell when by looking at the motion sensor history.
My uninsulated roof stays frost free even at -15°C.
What type of printer? Maybe keeping the ink from going solid?
Maybe it’s keeping the roof frost free too…
Probably a laser printer, keeping warm to be ready to print as soon as it gets a job. My laser printer (also Samsung) draws nearly 1000w after a cold start.
If turned off after use, as in powered off, the laser printer first must go through a warm up cycle where it needs to heat up the fuser so it can “bake” or fuse the text/image to the printed page. This is where you see a tremendous power spike, and can often overload a battery backup if you have it connected with a computer as well.
I learned my air filter uses almost no electricity so I just leave it running 24/7 now.
- My TV’s power consumption is basically doubled when the input is running at 2160p compared to 1080p.
- Running the portable AC in my office for more than 24 hours causes it to cycle off and on because the humidity collection sump fills up and needs to be emptied (it throws a completely unhelpful error of ‘Low Temperature’).
Note to self: game at 1080p with glasses off to lower electrical costs
That’s really interesting with your TV. I would actually expect power consumption to increase with 1080p since it’s having to upsample the input to match your native resolution. Unless you’re playing 4k content on a 1080p panel, in which case it makes more sense.
The humidity in my apartment is affected far more by cooking than by showering.
Is it the food or just that your extractor fan is bringing in outside air? (Please tell me you cook with an extractor fan!)
I don’t have a fan, but I have a window near my stove. HA’s graphs let me compare the effect of opening the kitchen window by itself vs opening it while cooking, so I can isolate the effects.
Are you cooking on gas?
You might recall that carbohydrates being burned release a lot of H2O.
IME, the humidity from cooking is much much less when using an induction stove
Hydrocarbons. Carbohydrates are in bread, pasta and potatoes.
Oven full of carbohydrates = good
Oven full of hydrocarbons = bad
No, induction.
I haven’t tried to differentiate between cooking involving boiling, steaming, etc. versus sautéing, frying, or other oil-based methods—I assumed the humidity spike was due to the former.
Many many places (it is a trend now) just have extractor fans that simply run through a shitty filter and blow it back into the room. My old rented house (it was just renovated in 2021) was like that along with tons of moisture problems coming from a half-assed renovation (turns out, the church officials were embezzeling a ton of money from the church company that came out a few years later) of a protected monument house from the 1500s.
Some apartments can have a charcoal filter hood instead of a fan that extracts directly to the outside, depending on ventilation design. My fan is one of those.
By recording the electricity use in my house I noticed a 1500 watt spike at a semi-regular interval. It would happen every 50 minutes and lasted for a few minutes. While overall not that much of a draw, it sort of drove me crazy not knowing what it was…
Then I discovered that it was our septic system’s effluent pump (the leach field is up on a hill). The pump was turning on way too often because ground water was leaking into the pump chamber. It’s not supposed to do that. The tank was about 45 years old, so not a huge surprise really.
Basically, my home automation (or tracking, really) lead to an $8k concrete tank replacement (more or less, as we had the guy do some additional stuff while he was here).
That’s not really a bad thing though. Maintaining your house is very important. Our well had failed a coliform test the previous year, and I’ve yet to get it re-tested to see if the new tank fixed that little problem. I’ve been giving everything some time to settle down.
My old furnace was hilariously oversized for the house.
One of the nifty things about smart thermostats like Ecobees is that you can pull usage data from their web portal. I grabbed a CSV file covering a cold snap last year that reached a 100-year record low, and using Excel I summed up the total heat output while we were at that low.
The furnace was only running 50% of the time, even when it was with a couple degrees of as cold as it’s ever been where I live.
Needless to say, when I got a new system installed I made sure it was more properly sized, and given that I had a convenient empirical measurement of exactly how many btus I actually needed in the worst case as scenario, that was easily done.
Not sure if you got this idea from Technology Connections but he recently didn a video using this exact premise.
I checked HA and found that A) my furnace fan is likely dying as the furnace overheats and power cycles frequently and B) despite the overheating, or furnace has only run at most 25% of the day during the coldest temps we’ve gotten this winter (which has been mild and only down into the low 30s). I think if/when we replace the furnace we can safely cut the BTU rating down while still maintaining our desired temperature.
Having an oversized furnace really isn’t a bad thing, and only having it run half the time sounds like a good thing to me.
Evcept you spend more on it for no reason
That was in a worst case scenario though. I’d expect my furnace to reach closer to 80% duty cycle in a once in a lifetime cold front.
It’s better to have it max out in a 100 year cold snap, as they don’t happen too often, and it’s ok to drop a few degrees when that happens. Much more important to save money on your heat pump investment than spend thousands worrying about weather that never happens.
Technology Connections video about this problem:
I thought working 100% for hours on end wasn’t recommended for a residential unit. Love me a Technology Connections episode, thanks!
yeah, I could be wrong, but that was the takeaway I got from the video, yeah. I have district heating so I don’t have first hand experience.
Even 100% on the coldest day is not per se an issue provided additional heat can be used. Space heaters, gas fire places, and baking being big ones.
Well, if cheating is allowed…
It wears out the furnace doing short butts and the house doesn’t get heated evenly. I had the original furnace from 1968. When I upgraded everything with insolation and better windows, I went from a 80,000 BTU on/off furnace to a 40,000 but modular furnace. No more sweating after 10min and then cold. Just evenly bring up the temp over a longer time. https://youtu.be/DTsQjiPlksA
That technology connections video is great. It’s crazy how oversized heating systems are, especially when it costs us so much money.
A little headroom ain’t bad, but it had three times the required heating capacity for my area’s “design day” low, which meant that for most of the winter it was kicking on for maybe 5-10 minutes per hour and then leaving massive cold spots in the house, because the thermostat was smack in the middle and all the walls were bleeding heat.
My new heat pump is just about 2x the design day heat requirement, but that also means it’s got capacity to handle extreme lows without resorting to resistance heat, and in any case it’s fully modulating so the house has stayed quite comfortable so far.
One of the nifty things about smart thermostats like Ecobees is that you can pull usage data from their web portal.
Ecobee also let’s you connect over HomeKit and allows you to control when the internet is out 😉at my old house I actually blocked the mac address for non internal and just had HA automatons take care of the rest.
I actually blocked the mac address for non internal and just had HA automatons take care of the rest.
Can you explain this? Not sure why but I cannot parse that sentence. You blocked external Mac addresses?
Not OP, but I believe he means he restricted outside internet access to that device (restricted communications to the thermostats MAC address to other internal devices)
I tend to post then disappear lol but what the other person said: at the router level, I added a rule specifically to block a given list of MAC addresses. That included IP cams & the ecobee, then had HA act on data from other sources to adjust temperature.
The one I was proud of was 433mhz door and window sensors that, if opened for too long, would turn off the heat / air and just leave a fan on.
Most recently I discovered my house naturally has one of those “the sun will shine exactly here at one time of the year” things going on, like a treasure hunting movie trope. A reflective mosaic on hung my neighbor’s shed is in the right spot that, in late December, sun reflection causes a arc of sunshine to slowly sweep over and brighten up spots on my back porch for an hour or so.
I recently made an ESPHome based weather station that includes a LUX sensor. I was updating a lighting automation so it would turn on sooner during dark mornings using the new sensor and I noticed a daily spike in light. The neighbor put up that mosaic several years ago and it took a HA histogram for me to notice.
Awesome. On a similar note, there is a time of the day at a certain part of the year when our TV seems to receive random remote control button pushes. I know it’s solar infrared but hadn’t considered it may be a reflection instead of direct radiation.
Did you use any established project for your weather station or just make it up for yourself? I’ve been interested in building an esphome weather station as well.
I, too, have such an interest. One thing I ran across about two months ago that I thought was neat was a project for a DIY wind gauge with no moving parts.
I never thought about temperature/humidity sensors! I know some gardeners that use them in various greenhouses, but that’s interesting stuff. Is there anything yall’ve learned about the power efficiency of heating/cooling methods? Currently we’re making a lot of baked goods and stews to keep the house warmer and more humid, but I don’t have any data on actual power use changes.
I’ve had a temp/humidity temperature in all house rooms for a few years now, and it’s dead useful.
Balancing the radiators and TRVs so everything heats up evenly.
Spotting anomalies (top floor loses a lot more heat when the wind is blowing)
And setting the flow temperatures for the radiators, as I can see the rate of heating compared to outside temperatures.
My electrical system always drops in voltage around 8AM. Power usage in my house remains constant, so maybe more demand on the grid when people are getting ready for work?
If it turns into a problem I wonder if you report that to your power provider they can investigate it. I assume it isn’t much of a drop though 240v to 210v ish drop.
We had a UPS that would report under voltage every winter at a remote radio tower. We sent the info to the power company and a few months later found the issue and we never got an alert again.
I assume it isn’t much of a drop though 240v to 210v ish drop.
If you had that big of a drop, it would likely have already caused the local power grid to trip and turn off. That hardware is not designed to run at a very large frequency differential from normal, and while 30v might not sound like a lot, it’s still enough to massively change the Hz of the AC.
A voltage change on the consumer side means increased current through a resistance somewhere in the line… Something undersized or overloaded, or a bad connection, for that kind of voltage drop.
Still, that should not change the AC frequency of the grid significantly in this case… You’re never going to have a different frequency than the power plants. They’re all sync’d and the entire grid would go down if the frequency changes too much.
Wait, how do you make your smart bulbs turn off and on automatically when you enter/leave a room? I’ve been using them for years and I always have to manually trigger them with an app! And how are you measuring power usage?
You’ll want to research “room presence” systems.
Here’s one I’ve been looking at implementing for an example: https://espresense.com/
If you go this route, you’ll absolutely need mmWave sensors as regular PIR sensors only sense movement not presence and you’ll experience lights shutting off when you’re sitting too still in a room. I’ve considered setting this up a few times but want mmWave and PIR sensors with a lux sensor all-in-one and the market for this is extremely small. I think only some sketchy Tuya and the Everything Smart Home youtube channel have sensors like this but they’re expensive and I just haven’t pulled the trigger.
- Motion sensors. The mmWave are very sensitive but also expensive. Nice for rooms where you sit still or lie down for longer periods, such as an office or bed room. PIR sensors are the cheap ones, very useful for hallways, stairs, kitchen and toilets.
- Some smart plugs measure current. Innr has a nice zigbee smart plug with a physical button and monitoring for around €20.
FYI If you have a Zigbee bridge, you can just connect most zigbee devices to it and you are not tied to the app or devices of the bridge’s brand.
Minor and obvious thing, but seeing it plotted finally made me recognize it: the temperature on my balcony is consistently lower than temperature inside my fridge for a good part of the year.
OP’s post is a good lesson in the value of metadata and how important data privacy protections are.
