I really like getting a notification that someone is at the door when I’m out. Yeah maybe it would be better with a video or picture, but I paid less than a fiver for it, including shipping from fucking China
Haha I literally setup this exact thing yesterday, and then spent ages making Telegram notifications that delete themselves after a set time, so as not to clog up the feed. Because what’s the point of knowing that someone was at the door after they’ve left?
I have a motion sensor in the bedroom that turns the light on when you enter it (or leave it) and turns it off after some time once there is no motion detected anymore. But there is also a button right next to the door which disables the automation for 10 minutes for entering the bedroom at night when our youngest is already sleeping in the room.
Simple but very useful and even my wife likes it alot.
I haven’t used Homekit, so I can’t speak to that, but I have had an ecobee for several years now, and it’s integrated into HA.
It’s not clear to me if your setup is “1 heating system for one room, and a second system for a different room”, or if it’s two heating systems for the same area.
In the first case, I don’t think it’ll work - ecobee is only designed to control one heating system. The remote thermometers just tell it what’s going on where they are, so it knows if that room needs more heating or cooling. If they do, then it fires up the HVAC to make that happen. You can tell ecobee which thermometer(s) to use to trigger the HVAC - at night, you probably care about the bedroom more than anything else, while in the day you probably care about the living room more. But it can’t simultaneously control two separate systems.
If it’s the second case, ecobee does, I think, have provisions for two stages of heat, so it’s possible you could set it up to use the second HVAC as stage 2. But I’m not certain about this at all. You might need an additional relay, I’m not sure.
But I think there might be an easier solution that doesn’t require a full blown second thermostat using HA, and this is what I do for our pellet stove (we have a main household HVAC, and a pellet stove for extra heat). Get something like a Shelly 1 and use that to trigger the second heat system. Then put in a temperature sensor - an ecobee remote sensor, bluetooth, wifi, Zigbee, etc., whatever works best for you - and with those two things, you can create a “thermostat” entity in HA, then use a thermostat card to control it. Assuming HA is running and it’s getting info from the thermometer, it works well. Of course you’d mostly access it on a phone or computer, not something mounted on the wall (unless you put a tablet on the wall to view and control HA, but that’s a whole different project).
This isn’t necessary for it to work, but I have a script set up that has logic such as: []If the outside temperature is above 50 degrees, set the thermostat to 50 so the pellet stove shuts down and doesn’t restart. (Don’t need it.) []If the outside temperature is below 45 degrees, set the thermostat according to the rules below. []At night set it to 70 degrees, during the day, 72.
[]If the outside temperature is below 32 degrees, set the thermostat to 78 degrees so the pellet stove stays running.
ERVs should be controlled by humidity, outside temperature, and time. Some come with an automated mode that adjusts run time and fan power with those. It’d probably be difficult to find controls that have multi zone, HA integration, and E/HRV features in one package.
In my extensive experience, use Zooz zen series for the bulk of your switches. Buy inovelli for special switches such as by your front door or anywhere you might want the use of the LED indicator strip and scenes.
Majority of other smart switches will give you issues with dimming flicker. Trust me, I’ve bought thousands of dollars of smart switches. Zooz and Inovelli are great choices.
I also have an oil boiler, and a tank in the garden. The tank was fitting with an Apollo Ultrasonic oil level sensor, which sends a signal to base station with a very basic LCD display in the house via 433Mhz radio.
I use an RTL-SDR USB radio dongle, a cheap 433MHz antenna and the rtl_433 software to monitor the signals from the ultrasonic sensor, which transits roughly once an hour. The level measurement transmitted is a fairly accurate centimetre value (I compared it with manual measurements with a dip stick for a few months).
The base station only showed a vague level indication with 10 bars, but now I have more a more precise smart display of the tank level, without any extra modification to the tank system.
I’m starting to wonder if there are white label ultrasonic sensors out there since this looks like the Beckett. It also looks like this won’t support 120 AC. I’m in the USA and our namby pamby grid can’t handle it.
I have oil heat too and I struggle to imagine how you would add a sensor to it. That tank is solid and thick, trying to get anything inside it is a horrible idea and trying to sense through the metal is going to be prone to problems. In the past I’ve just pointed a camera at the main gauge.
My tank came with a mounting point on the top of it where you can fit an ultrasonic sensor. You just configure it with the depth of your tank and that’s it. I have a unit inside that shows how much oil I have left.
Apparently, it uses an RF protocol that can be intercepted and interpreted in HA with the right dongle but I haven’t done that.
Edit: mine looks like this although with different branding.
The only option I could think of would be integrating an industrial oil tank sensor.
A wire sensor that uses Time-domain-reflectometry would likely be the best, but expensive. This uses a corrosion resistant cable and uses wave reflections when a pulse changes mediums (air to oil) in order to give a level reading.
More difficult to DIY though. You have to know what you are doing.
Ultrasonic sensor might work, but it depends on if oil for home heating gives off fumes that would interfere with it.
Otherwise another DIY solution would be optical sensing like a ToF sensor. Maybe the most realistic for easy integration in ESPHome, but like the ultrasonic sensor, you would have to protect it from a full tank contaminating the sensor with oil.
If the tank is plastic, a capacitive sensor could work too.
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