We built a house 7 years ago and it’s insulated and has double glazing. I’ve installed Home Assistant with temp sensors in the bed rooms and seeing 70%+ humidity levels. Temperature is always above 16c
We ventilate it, but still it’s 70% in the bedrooms. WHO recommends 40-60%, so we’re a bit worried.
Living room is around 55% during the day when we have the heat pump set at 21c.
As it’s pretty humid outside I think it’s almost impossible to get it lower, but are there any other tips? I don’t want to run dehumidifiers. Would an HRV like system help?
Yes good point! Doing a test now, set to dry, will check how it goes.
First of all, it can be a rabbit hole. Secondly, it’s awesome. I’ve set it up on a Raspberry Pi, and set up a Zigbee mesh with the Home Assistant SkyConnect dongle from here. I bought some Sonoff temp sensors, and Sonoff Smart Sockets to increase the Zigbee network range. I’ve also bought some Smart Sonoff Bulbs at Aliexpress but I’m not very happy with them as they caused some Zigbee network issues. Seems to have resolved it by itself somehow.
Our heat pump is not a smart one, so I’m using a Broadlink RM3 Mini to control my heat pump. Works like a charm. That way I would also be able to set it to dry and heat on intervals of e.g. 1 hour during the night.
Any other questions just ask.
Oh boy, that’s cheaper than I was expecting startup costs to be… I am oh so tempted now!
With HomeAssistant, as I understand it, it needs the full Pi? I have a bunch of services running on my RPi 4 and so when I’ve looked at HomeAssistant I haven’t been able to install this without touching the other stuff on there. I think they have a docker container version but it has a lot less features.
I have for a while been intending to uprade my stuff to something that can handle photos/videos better, but haven’t got around to it. I might need to wait until I do that, then I’ll have a spare Pi to use for HA.
I’m guessing an RPi 1B won’t handle it. It’s running Pi hole at the moment, but I think this is about the only thing it’s capable of.
I’m running it dockerized as well as I’m using it for other stuff as well, like PiHole, media server, etc. No problems at all.
Some features are missing, like editing config files in the browser. Major gap is that add-ons are not supported. Add-ons are essentially 3rd party apps, like DuckDNS, Frigate or MQTT. It’s mostly annoying because the documentation assumes you run the HASS version. But it’s no big deal, you can set up those apps yourself. I’m running Frigate and MQTT dockerized and connected to HA without issues.
For docker resources, check out https://www.linuxserver.io/. I used to install apps like NZBGet, Radarr, etc. all directly, which was very annoying as each app uses a different install script. With the docker compose files from linuxserver it was a breeze. I only run PiHole directly, as I saw some issues with the Docker version, the rest is all dockerized.
Ah thanks! I think I decided not to continue when I saw it didn’t support add-ons as I thought that would make it pointless, but it sounds like you can run them in their own docker container and connect them. I’ve used linuxserver.io docker containers before. Thanks for the tips!
Hey hey. Yeah I’ve been toying with the idea of going to a dockerised setup for HA. I run it as a VM on one of my servers and that’s been rock solid along with add ons and the like.
My moto with this whole HA thing was to always do it as cheaply as I can. That has meant a fair amount of building circuits and such myself which is quite a bit of fun.
Also check out ESPHome. It’s great and integrates into HA very well.
Yeah I run HA as a docker container on unRaid, alongside ESPhome. It works fine - have never had a situation where I wished I was running the OS/VM version of it instead.
TBH though, I kinda hate HA; its really kludgy for anything that I’ve wanted to do, and a lot of the presence based stuff seems super flakey. I’m constantly getting notifications about Frigate events when it knows im in my home area & they’re supposed to be silenced.
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll take a look!
I don’t think I would know where to start with “building circuits”…
Heh it’s great fun and there are tons of guides. It’s just hooking up wires mostly :). I would call it building circuits I guess haha.
If you want some very specific stuff like height sensors for standing desks (something I still need) you will have to go the self build route. Also to make my dumb alarm smart I have to do some soldering apparently.
That is my next rabbit hole I guess :)
Not sure, HA itself is not very demanding. Most demanding thing I’m running are NZB’s (extracting / par check), Photoview (to index the photos on my NAS), and Frigate (web cams with motion detection). I’ve set CPU limits for each docker container to ensure it’s not overloaded, installed a fan, and now it seems to perform okay.
The RPi model B was the first iteration of Pi’s available (they released two at the same time, A and B). It has 512MB RAM and a 700MHz CPU. It is painfully underpowered. I doubt the stuff you’re talking about would be able to run on it. But since you mentioned running HA dockerised alongside other services and having it work OK, I think I’ll do that method on my RPi4.
Yeah, the RPI4 is pretty good. I had to install a fan as it got hot pretty quickly and at 85c it will throttle.
Main issues I had were with photo management solutions, which would completely knock out the Pi. Photoview and Pigallery2 are ones that are working well on my RPI4. I still have CPU limits on those docker instances.
Also, had to tweak a bit with the settings for Frigate. They recommend a Coral for motion detection, but they are very hard /impossible to get or very expensive. I run 2 cameras with CPU motion detection and it works well. Load of my PI is between 1 and 2 so that’s fine for a quad core CPU.
Yeah I had the same issue wirh photos. I have a plan to eventually upgrade the main board from my Framework laptop and turn the old one into a server to deal with photo/video stuff.
Check power usage. I also used an old Intel Desktop PC, but found it used about $150 / year power. Rough estimate, but if you leave something running 24/7 it’s good to keep the power usage low.
It’s a laptop so should have lower power usage than a desktop anyway. But I kinda expect anything doing photos/videos will use a bit of power. I might have to see if I can get a power usage measurer that’s compatible with Home Assistant!
The smart plugs I linked before have power measurement built-in. It’s Zigbee, so locally only.
Most of the ones sold in NZ are all WiFi based, which is annoying as they depend on the cloud. Philips Hue is I think the only proper local solution, but bring your wallet if you want to go down that route.
Do you have any old x86 computers lying around?. I am running a NAS serving a dozen docker containers and a VM on an ancient 4th gen intel cpu. I never got into the home assistant stuff but maybe I’ll also give it a go! I use PhotoView to share photos with family through CloudFlare zero trust tunnel.
Computers outnumber adults in our house by quite a bit, depending on what you count. There’s one in particular that I think would make a good server, but it’s a laptop and I can’t find the power cord!
Other than that, the Raspberry Pi 4 handles many services just fine, it’s just photo/video that are pretty slow (and gets worse the more you use it, so probably thermal throttling - it doesn’t have a fan). But it turns out you can run Home Assistant in a docker container and still use the addons by connecting them in other docker containers, so I will give this a go once I get a chance.
I have an unused Pi4 4GB model lying around, I might try run HomeAssistant on it. Sounds like a fun project.
Do it! You might also consider this list of self-hostable projects: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted