Yeah I have a home Home Assistant and an RV Home Assistant.

They are connected via Remote HA, when I’m home, but that’s not really what I was thinking - I was more thinking about ways it could notify me if it’s getting too warm inside for our pets.

My RV Home Assistant (running on a RPi5) could use one to stay connected all the time.

Problem is I don’t want to pay the fees to do that.

I feel you on not knowing where the break even point of heat pumps is! It’s so frustrating that that isn’t published.

Well it would vary for every house, season, amount of sunlight, etc. It’d require extensive testing and data collection to determine.

Our Ecobee thermostat does detect motion and can, in theory, automatically let the temperature drop if no one is home, for example. I tried it when we first got it, and I found that it must have been detecting our cats, so it was activating the heat when no one was home. I turned that feature off and went with the schedule instead.

Also, we have a heat pump with electric heat backup, so it may actually be cheaper to keep the heat constant, if it avoids using the electric heat. Unfortunately, I have no idea where that break-even point is (i.e., at some point, it’s likely cheaper to kick on the electric heat to bring the house up to temperature, versus running the heat pump for many hours - but I don’t know where that point is - and it certainly varies based on outside temperature, sun hitting the house, etc…).

These days, my schedule is extremely variable, so I just leave the normal schedule in place most of the time. I wish Ecobee made it easier to go, “Hey, today, I’m going to be out from 10-3, so let the temperature drop during that time.” (As it is, I have to adjust the permanent schedule each time, or I can change it as I’m leaving the house and tell it to resume the normal schedule in a few hours. But I forget to do it.) Home Assistant isn’t great with that kind of one-off thing either, unfortunately, as far as I’m aware - you pretty much have to set up an automation to run.

I have a ludicrously complicated script that sets the temperature for my pellet stove, using a generic thermostat (using a zigbee temperature sensor, and a Shelly switch to control the stove).

For example, if the temperature outside is above 50 (F), set the pellet stove temperature to something really low to turn it off. Turn on below 45.

If the electric heat kicks on (from the main hvac thermostat), set the pellet stove temperature high - I want that running if the electric heat is on.

I think it aims for 72 during the day and 70 at night, or something like that.

Oh and the ceiling fan nearby kicks on if the pellet stove is running. As does a vent fan in our bedroom.

That might be what they were thinking, no need for a hub.

I remember, when I was first networking my home computers in 1998 or whatever, someone telling me that coax with the BNC connector wiring was superior to RJ45 with twisted pair cables.

And at that time, it might have been, somehow, but even if that were true: It wasn’t hard to see into the near future and realize that twisted pair was where the tech was going, and investing in coax at that point was going to be a waste of money.

I had forgotten about that one.

Slashdot was really something. I guess it still is, technically they are still a going concern. But long before things like reddit, Facebook, Myspace, etc.

5 digit UID here. I spent many hours browsing /…

I have the same setup. I haven’t done much with it yet, but it seems to work well with the water heater.

Of course, it already happened, unless you literally just installed. If you read the last comment closely, the feature to check HIBP has been there for a while, but the message about it was blocked until recently. So if you really didn’t want to do this check… Well, too bad, it’s done.

I love HA, but the messaging is not always great. There was a new feature a while back that had a lot of people upset (I’m pretty sure it was automatically encrypting all backups), and the developers just kept saying, “It was in the release notes.” I always review the release notes before installing, and I definitely missed that, so I went back to read them with that in mind, and I still couldn’t find it. After a few minutes, I realized it was in there, sort of - it was just implied, not explicitly stated. Why not just say, “HA will now encrypt backups by default”?

I’ve actually had training in using plain language in business writing, so maybe it’s just more obvious to me. Unfortunately, I do not have the time to help that much, and we’d have to convince them there is an issue there, first.

Yeah, exactly how I read it, too.

The author actually agrees with you.

I’m not sure renaming them like that was helpful - I had to keep looking up which sensor was which.

Still one step ahead of IBM!