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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Especially after adding in all the power draw of the automation requires…

    What exactly is the incremental power draw for automation? My network gear and server (a little nuc) are sunk power costs as I self host other services.

    Idling, my home uses around 100W with the fridge off. One 10W light is an additional 10% of my power budget, and I have a lot more than one light in my house. I also pay about $0.40/kWh.


  • I can be a bit neurotic about turning off lights when I leave a room, so Home Assistant was a nice way to free up brain space for me. A few motion sensors here and there + some simple automations, and the lights mostly handle themselves. Zigbee sensors and Zigbee or Matter-over-WiFi bulbs, so everything is local. A free VPS+WireGuard setup means I can access them remotely should I need to, with TailScale as a backup.

    Cloud failures mean I can’t access remotely, but local control is unaffected—if my smart devices stop working it’s almost certainly my fault :)







  • Our Internet went out for a few hours today, so naturally my smart switches, lights, cameras, motion sensors, door sensors, and power monitoring… continued to work as of nothing was wrong.

    Home Assistant is great, and using local-only devices is awesome. If my smart home stops working it’s my own fault, not some 3rd party.







  • You’re just gatekeeping.

    ThinkPad with a generator? Nothing wrong with that — maybe add LoRa, get a ham license and add some packet radio or digital modes and you have a neat disaster setup.

    MacBook that you don’t want to scuff? Well, I’m not that precious with my gear, but you do you. Many Mac laptops last a very long time, and the performance of modern Apple silicon is really, really impressive — and you have UNIX out of the box. Plenty for a tech enthusiast to like.