this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
25 points (100.0% liked)

Aotearoa / New Zealand

1949 readers
25 users here now

Kia ora and welcome to !newzealand, a place to share and discuss anything about Aotearoa in general

Rules:

FAQ ~ NZ Community List ~ Join Matrix chatroom

 

Banner image by Bernard Spragg

Got an idea for next month's banner?

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (48 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (25 children)

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 :).

Yes good point! Doing a test now, set to dry, will check how it goes.

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?

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (24 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I have an unused Pi4 4GB model lying around, I might try run HomeAssistant on it. Sounds like a fun project.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Do it! You might also consider this list of self-hostable projects: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

load more comments (22 replies)
load more comments (22 replies)
load more comments (44 replies)