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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Thanks Dave again for the insights!
Our heat pump has a dry setting, but it must be set 2c lower than ambient temperature. So it's getting quite cold. I was hoping / assuming that a dehumidifier wouldn't cool that much.
But perhaps worth giving it a try for an hour or so.
Ah interesting, I've never read the instructions just hit "Dry"!
Don't forget to warm the room back up before checking the humidity or the cooler air might make you think it hasn't made a difference :).
On another note, I've always wanted to try home assistant but never got around to actually getting any equipment. What sensors did you get?
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.
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
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.
When you say Zigbee is local only, I presume if you have remote access to Home Assistant then you can use this to control them? But they don't rely on a cloud server. That sounds ideal.
Yes, Zigbee is a protocol for a mesh network. Mains powered devices like smart bulbs and smart plugs are routers as well to extend the coverage. Temp sensors are end devices only (and not a router). You also have Zwave but I think Zigbee is more popular.
Downside is that not all Zigbee devices follow the Zigbee standard, it's a bit of a mess sometimes.
So... there's a new kid, Matter and Thread. It's very new, so not a lot of devices, but the SkyConnect dongle is Matter/Thread ready. It will come first to HASS, and afterwards to dockerized (another advantage for HASS).
The benefits are that it's indeed local only (i.e. your local network) and the batteries in end devices like temp sensors will last much longer than the wifi equivalent.
I didn't know about all of this 6 weeks ago, hope it makes sense.
You're making sense! I can't want to dive in and get started, but will probably take a month for anything to arrive from ali express.
Glad it makes sense! Delivery times seem to have improved. It still sometimes takes a month, the Zigbee smart plugs arrived within 10 days. For the SkyConnect I ordered at Seeedstudio and paid extra for quick delivery, it was here within 5 days. Any questions just DM me.
Will do, cheers!
Oh, for remote control to HA, I use Tailscale. So I can connect to HA from my phone anywhere by turning Tailscale on. And, I get e.g. notifications for motion sensors. Very convenient.
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.
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll take a look!
I don't think I would know where to start with "building circuits"...
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 :)
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.
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.
I'm seeing some odd behaviour. I've set the heat pump to dry twice, for about 30 minutes. Both temp and RH drop, which is good. However, as soon as I turn it back to heat, the RH jumps up about 6% within 5-10 minutes. The sensor is a couple of meters away from the heat pump, so that's odd.
Also outside it's 14.5c @ 72% so I have no idea how to get it 16c and below 60%. That seems only possible if I shut all windows and have dehumidifiers running 24/7. I see articles where they recommend 30-50% in winter, how the heck is that possible when it's damp outside.
Could this be as simple as the heat pump is blowing out dry air, but hasn't turned over much air total. Then when you stop it, the dry air mixes with other air around the house and the humidity comes back up?
I dunno man. I tend to think I live in a warm, dry house. We only heat rooms we are using but otherwise we don't hesitate to turn on a heat pump. We have never had an issue with mould or dampness. But I just have this feeling when I get some sensors they are gonna say 70% like yours and I'm gonna have to go down a rabbit hole trying to work out why!
We do have a DVS, but ours is an older home. I think they help more with heat recovery (all they do is pump air from your ceiling cavity into your house - which is often warmer because heat rises). They do slightly pressurise the house because they are pumping air in, which can help stop outside air getting in cracks, but I can't imagine a fairly new house like yours would have the same issue with that as our 50's house. Maybe throw a sensor in the ceiling and see if the air is warm and dry up there?
I think your assessment is likely correct, 30 minutes isn't long for a dehumidifier to do much work, and unless there's a unit in each room, or its central then for the total volume of air it won't have pulled much more than was in the general area its located.
Yeah we assumed our house wouldn't have moisture issues being so new. But... If I hadn't measured I wouldn't know as we don't have massive moisture issues. Main issue is condensation on the window frames as they are not thermally broken. Well it is what it is.
I've ordered a 10L dehumidifier, we'll ventilate more, and let's see how it goes then.
It's not so easy to get onto the ceiling but it's indeed worthwhile.
Good luck!
You don't have a man-hole in the ceiling in a wardrobe/laundry or other out of the way place where you can just poke a sensor up into the ceiling?
Yeah, I noticed it didn't do anything when set to e.g. 22c when it was already 22c there. Then I read the manual, which is a bit cryptical:
Notice the bold part. First it says, if the temp setting is higher/same as ambient, it will perform slightly below ambient. However, next sentence it says it stops when temp setting is higher/same as ambient?
I have to set it e.g. 2c lower than ambient, otherwise it just doesn't do anything
Yes I noticed it contradicted itself. I think that was probably referring to the earlier part, that you start it when the temperature is high then it keeps going until it reaches the set temperature.
I am going to go and play with ours now, we haven't really used that setting, but I have no idea what the humidity is in the house. I've just in the past in a different house had to work out how to reduce dampness and mould.
Yes, guess you're right.
I've got a cheap weather station from Aliexpress which also has a humidity sensor, that could be a temporary solution for you if you don't go for the HA route.
Nah, that takes the fun out of it. Given how cheap the parts are I'm going to have a play at getting HA set up when I get a chance.
Good luck!
One tip if you have a SO: Make sure that they are on board, and that it only adds benefits & there's a backup/fallback plan. E.g. don't say "Oh sorry the lights don't work if the internet is down", that won't go down well :)
Haha good point! What is the plan when that happens?
I'm avoiding plugs that require internet access, but it's a bit hard, especially in NZ. E.g. the TP Link smart plus don't work if the internet is down, and my standing desk is Tuya based which requires the cloud.
But, e.g. the TP Link plugs still have a button to turn them on manually in case the internet is down. The lights still work if you turn them off and back on at the wall. So everything can still work without internet.
Ok cool, I'll be sure to think about that stuff before getting too far along, thanks for the suggestion.
Most of the lights in our house are built in LED downlights, so can't really switch them out for smart bulbs, it would need to be a smart switch
Yeah it's a big rabbit hole like I suggested. I am also looking at automating our "dumb" alarm, our garage door, our Nissan Leaf, etc. I'm no longer allowed to talk about it during dinner, so please take it slowly :)
Just to add, it IS very handy. I've just created a script that sets the heat pump to Dry & 2c lower than ambient temperature.
This way I will be able to create automations to e.g. run it on Dry every night for e.g. an hour, then back to heat, etc.
This sounds like a rabbit hole I'd like to get lost in. Except when I'm away and no one else can use anything because I stupidly started an update just before I needed to leave and it broke things and now nothing is working.
Yep, try to do small things first instead of letting hell go loose if something doesn't work.
I've set up a tablet in the living room as "wall panel" where e.g. the kids can change the thermostat for their bedrooms, check the weather forecast, and it shows random photos from the NAS as a screensaver, which is just fun & nice.
That's cool! I like that idea.
What is something simple to start with if getting into HA? I already have a NAS.
I started with:
Next to do is put smart plugs in our electric blankets, make our dumb alarm smart and make the garage door smart.
You can run it dockerized to get started.
Oh cool. I'm going to try the temp sensors. Thank you!
A dehumidifier will actually add a bit of heat.