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.
I’ve caught the front door and garage door left open several times (kids)
I found out my garage under my bedroom is primarily why my room is hard to heat and likely has poor insulation in the ceiling.
I found out my Samsung TV was sending a LOT of data home.
I know every time my Roomba gets stuck so I can go and locate it before the battery dies.
I know when my unraid Dockers fail to update and accidentally delete the old containers, so that I can go and re-add them.
One of my children were doing remote learning and I would get an alarm if he didn’t get up in the morning and start using his Chromebook.
How much data is a lot? Mine lost wifi privileges for putting ads in my stuff, but I’m still curious.
It was burning a few gigs a day. Which wouldn’t have been noticed except I wasn’t using it to stream anything. I originally put it on the time out vlan, But my wife wanted to make changes to art mode, and of course that requires cloud connection. I should probably go back and isolate what it talks to and see if I can get art mode to continue working without letting it do whatever high bandwidth application it was trying to do before.
That’s nuts, good luck with the sluething
Do you have some sort of notification for the docker fail one? I’m currently just periodically visiting the previous apps page in the Apps tab, but that’s annoying and manual.
Right now I’m using uptimekuma, It writes to a private telegram group I set up just for alarms.
I also have set up some user scripts that do curl calls to write to telegram on certain system conditions, like when I add a file to IPFS.