We’re doing a kitchen & bathrooms renovation, and the construction is generating a lot of dust, to the point that I was changing the HVAC filter twice a week. I wanted to see just how much garbage is in the air, so I started looking around for air quality sensors. Naturally I wanted one that I could integrate into my Home Assistant so I could generate notifications if the air was extra filthy. ...
I’m moving from Twitter to Mastodon. Specifically, I’m @unixorn@hachyderm.io. Here are my first impressions. ...
Some tips about setting up Zigbee or Z-wave mesh networks. I’ve had a few people new to Home Assistant ask about how to best set up their mesh networks. Here’s my take on what works best. ...
I wanted to switch my new Home Assistant (HA) installation to write data to PostgreSQL instead of SQLite for a variety of reasons. Here’s how I did it. Here’s why I decided to switch: Resilience. If you’re running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi’s SD card, the constant churn of history updates will eventually destroy the card. The more entities you have, the faster HA will grind your SD card to failure. Writing all that to another server that is writing to a real SSD or spinning disk eliminates that problem. Convenience. I can back up the postgres database without having to stop HA. I don’t even have to run the backup on the HA server. Speed. Using a real database will speed up history display, especially once you have a large number of entities. ...
Securifi Peanut plugs have issues with zigbee2mqtt. I have several Securifi Peanut Zigbee switches. Overall, they’re nice little smart plugs and make good Zigbee routers to strengthen your Zigbee mesh, but they have one annoying issue - zigbee2mqtt doesn’t recognize them perfectly, though there’s a simple fix that I’m going to document here. ...