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2023 Prime Day Deals

Interested in home automation? Here are a few of the prime day deals I would personally recommend.

Note, this is not a kitchen-sink post full of non-relaxant links, but, rather, a list of things I have hands on experience with.

Every single product linked below, will work with Home Assistant, 100% LOCALLY, without any required cloud services or subscriptions.

If, you need reasons as to why required cloud services are bad, see Reasons to avoid cloud products

  • in Solar
  • 11 min read

Lessons learned from a local disaster

Continuation of the home solar project.

Around Midnight, Saturday June 17th, a very strong storm passed over my house, and hit my town and surrounding areas with a 115mph wind gust.

Power was out for around two and a half days, in which case, I powered my house fully off-grid.

While- this doesn't sound like a huge deal- do note, I was able to maintain climate control in my home, along with my ENTIRE rack of servers.

FADD - Feline Area Denial Device

My wife presented me with a unique challenge recently.

"The cats keep getting on top of the kitchen table, and getting hair everywhere!"

So- the logically minded person I am- I decided to build a home-assistant integrated device for keeping cats off of the table!

I present to you, the FADD. Feline Area Denial Device!

Pioneer Minisplit control using ESPHome

Around a year and a half ago, I installed a Pioneer Mini-split and integrated it with Home Assistant

I used a local integration, which had a cloud dependency for the initial setup. And, since installation, it has been working flawlessly.

However, last week, it completely stopped working and I was unable to reinitialize it.

So- Today- I will be replacing the midea dongle, with a device running esphome.

Using ESPHome on critical devices, such as networking gear

In an effort to monitor the consumption of everything- I ran across an unusual problem.

When connecting my core switch to a ESPHome flashed smart switch, I noticed two things-

  1. It is very easy to accidentally turn the switch off.
    • This is a problem, because you cannot turn it back on remotely! Since, wifi connects to the core switch.
  2. When flashing updated firmware, the relay will quickly toggle for a very short duration.
    • This can cause devices to power cycle.

So, I set out to see how I could customize my configuration to be suitable for managing my core switch.

I will be implementing:

  1. A button to power-cycle the core switch.
  2. Configuration to prevent the relay from toggling during firmware updates / ESPHome restarts.
  3. Removing toggle switches.
  • in Solar
  • 11 min read

How to start your A/C compressor off-grid.

Starting your A/C compressor generates a massive inrush current. Many inverters will have issues getting the motor spinning.

In the case of my 3.5 Ton unit, the L.R.A. (Locked rotor amps) is 112.0 amps @ 220v (24,640 watts). This is far more current then my inverter can provide. This is the amount of amperage which it can potentially take to start the compressor motor.

This post, describes how to install a soft start, which will allow your compressor to easily start off-grid using your solar array with inverter and batteries, or via a smaller generator.

  • in Solar
  • 7 min read

Installing Solar-Assistant

Per my home solar project, I needed a method to collect data from both my batteries and inverters, in near-real-time, with no dependency on the internet.

Since, my inverter's connection relies on cloud applications to move data around, I decided to give Solar Assistant a try after reading of its support for the solark-12k.

Finished Energy Dashboard:

ConnectX-3 Set Port Mode to ETH/IB

I just swapped my TrueNAS from a Dell R720XD over to a Dell r730XD. During this migration, I moved over my NVMe drives, NICs, and everything else relevant.

However, after firing up TrueNAS on the new hardware, I noticed my 40G NIC was not listed in the list of devices!

After once again googling how to change the mode over, I figured I would just quickly write some documentation incase this happens again in the future.