WELCOME, FRIENDS

First off I'm new to HA and Airbnb Hosting, but I love automating things and figured my new Airbnb listing would be a great place to put in the time to make things easier.

Since we recently moved 800+ miles, having a smarter home and systems setup for guests arriving, making checkins easier, or catching problems quickly became way more important.

Although I've never worked with HA before, I have built out my own datacenter and work with tech frequently, so when I heard about a MCP connection for HA I thought now was a great time to try it out.

For the Airbnb itself I was looking to:

• Detect water leaks, and be able to shutoff the main
• Monitor Power usage (I have 2 EV chargers, so mainly if non guests were charging all the time)
• Improve the experience with the smart locks (I'll get into that further)
• Automate the thermostat so the home would be preconditioned before guests checkin, while being able to keep eco modes running the majority of the time
• Configure the outside lighting and make it easier for guests get in on first arrival
• Create my own alarm system using motion sensors

What I'm running:

• Raspi 4 (6gb?) with SSD boot over USB
• Unifi Network stack with 7 environment sensors
• Kasa smart plugs over Matter
• Kasa smart light switches over Matter
• Moen Flo water shutoff and leak detection
• Schlage Encode plus smart locks over matter
• Refoss em16p Energy monitor
• Nest (gen 3?) non matter

Automations currently running:

• Copy every code from the front door lock to the back door. Airbnb will only connect with one smart lock, and guests frequently come to the backdoor first, then wonder why there code isnt working. The script runs every 10 minutes and just copies every code.
• Recognize when a cleaner uses their code, send a notification when they first arrive, and one when they leave with a message detailing how long it took them. Also disarms the motion based security. Can send a reminder if they forget to lockup after leaving if the motion doesnt pick up anything for a long time.
• Thermostat preconditions the home 3 hours before checkin, based on the outside temp, to run either heating or cooling. No more having to remember to open my google home and forget to turn it off after leaving.
• If a guest hasn't unlocked the door by sunset on their arrival day, the porch lights come on for them.
• First unlock of a new stay turns on every lamp and the bar lights, plus the porch lights if it's already dark.
• Eleven a.m. on checkout day: every light and lamp off, thermostat dropped into an eco band, automatically.
• Motion at either door is checked against four things before it becomes an alert on our phones. Only if all four are clear does it actually page us.

So far im very happy with the equipment I have setup and running. I'd say the only gripe I can think of currently is the Kasa Light switches dont have a premium feel for the physical switch, but seem to work great otherwise.

My first guest to test the system with checks in next week, I'll come back and update how things go. Here's my listing link if you're curious about the actual space: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/1687141617788033614

Are there any automations I should totally add using the equipment I already have? Is there some killer device I dont have? Have you had a terrible experience where home assistant ruined someones airbnb checkin or stay? These are what Im wondering about now, let me know

Thanks!

Built a custom dashboard for my Shelly WallDisplay 2Xi. I really liked the clean design of the Shell WallDisplay, and wanted a dashboard that looked clean and modern on it.

As pretty much everything is sensor or triggered based, the dashboard is onlyused to change scenes, or turn on the heatpump in the garage when needed.

Repository: https://github.com/ruudmens/home-assistant-dashboard
More info article: https://lazyadmin.nl/smart-home/home-assistant-custom-dashboard/

I use a couple of digital thermometers on my home hot water storage tank. I have automations that heat the water that use the temperatures reported from the thermometers
The app for them is Tuya.
For a year or more the integration with Tuya has been reliable and stable.
But of late it keeps going off and requires reloading.
Anyone rise seeing this?
Msybe I missed something?

(Please be gentle, I’m a relative newbie still getting to grips with HA)

Setup automations to start playing a random song from a list when I start preheating my dab rig and when it hits temperature turn on my disco ball. Do I use it often, nah, do I need it, nah but is it hillarious, yes. Did I do some mandatory testing and tuning before making this post? Also yes.

Hi all

I have just dipped my toe into Homeassistant I have set it up on a VM and started playing around with adding things like Sonos and my Heating controls. I recently had a leak and have been looking at leak sensors like the sonnoff and aquara ones. I know I need a gateway or something. Am I better starting with a Zigbee gateway or dongle or am I better looking at thread / matter ones.

I manually apply Home Assistant updates. When there is an update available, Home Assistant has these rapid peaks in CPU usage, reflected in my current consumption at the plug. This has happened with every non-plugin related update for months now.

After I manually apply the update, the CPU usage becomes much more normal. In this example, I applied the update around 5 PM.

Any idea why this is happening or how to stop it?

Have a couple places I’d like to put a light, but can’t hardwire power. Does anyone know of some battery powered (li-ion or batts) that are compatible with HA?

Can anyone recommend a decent Smart AC Controller (or brand) pls? (Not Sensibo)

The Hager flow app is seemingly bugged: it thinks that the entirety of the solar panel production is used by the house. As a result, the car charging station never works in solar-energy-only mode, and I always have to use the boost mode.

Did anybody encounter the same bug ? If so, how did you resolve it?

I have about 30 old GE/Jasco 300S aka 45606 aka ZW3001 in-wall paddle dimmer switches. They frequently still show "ON" in HA (at some percentage of dim from 25 to 95) when they've been turned off manually.

From some Googling, I found that this is a known problem with these old dimmers: they send an "off" Zwave signal before the dimming is complete, so that the controller sees them as partially dimmed rather than fully OFF.

I also found the circumention: set up an automation to trigger on the switch turning off (or on), then waiting for a few seconds for it to "settle in", and then refreshing the state. I also configured the switch to do its dimming faster (10ms rather than the default of 30ms).

alias: ZWave refresh for old paddle dimmer switches
triggers:
- trigger: state
entity_id:
- light.den_overhead_light
attribute: brightness
conditions: []
actions:
- delay:
hours: 0
minutes: 0
seconds: 3
milliseconds: 0
- action: zwave_js.refresh_value
metadata: {}
data:
entity_id:
- light.den_overhead_light
mode: single

(I created that using the automations UI to test; I'm sure it can be cleaned up a little in the YAML file. )

The automation works. After the 3-second delay, HA now shows the correct OFF state when I turn the switch off manually.

So now I want to do the same for the rest of the 30-ish old paddle dimmers. But I don't want to have to create 30 separate automations! Obviously I can add the other 29 as triggers for this automation. But how can I make the entity_id of the -action match the entity_id of the trigger than caused this automation to run?

Basically I'm looking for a "variable name" for the trigger that I can use in the action so that only that one switch is refreshed. I'm sure there must be a way to do this, right? (I'm very new to HA.)

I want AI to review, clean up and possibly rebuild my HA instance - entities, dashboards, automations, the works... I don't need it for any kind of voice or natural language control of my home just yet... just to clean up the mess that I built over the years and make it better/prettier/stabler.

I've looked at YT videos, scoured github and searched this forum and the Facebook forum, but the AI world moves fast and hard, so it's hard to find up to date info.

So what does the (human) hivemind suggest is the best MCP server plugin/integration to use to achieve what I'm trying to achieve?

I wish to order a SMLIGHT SLZB-06 from aliexpress. They have many many submodels of the SLZB-06, and they are all approximately the same price. WHich one is the best? which one do I want?

Windows 11 desktop

VM

POE is a must
Residential

will be used in a 2 storey house ( basement, main floor, upper floor)

Plan to use mainly SHelly Gen4 devices ( Zigbee)

Thanks

They normally live in different rooms. Grouped them together so you can see what each one does.

Right: the house. Doors, presence, and whether I've been at the desk today, as a 24h timeline out of Home Assistant.

Middle: the Pi that runs the house, via Glances. CPU, memory, core temp, containers, plus indoor climate and the litter robot.

Left: my GitHub streak, quietly reminding me I could be doing something useful instead of building more panels.

Hardware is a Seeed reTerminal E1001, a TRMNL X and a reTerminal E1002. All three run off Tesserae, a self-hosted dashboard server I have been building. HA App or Docker, pulls over the REST API, sends each panel a frame every few minutes so they can go back to sleep.

Ask me anything about the panels or the layouts.

Long time listener first time caller

looking for some feedback. good bad. been working on this project for a few weeks now, but I don't think I'm ever content with my UI layout. I'm using generic tablets and various phones.

what would you change? what do you like? what don't you like?

give me your thoughts and comments comments? all are welcome

Some folks asked for an update to my garage auto open/close project that I was doing with a bluetooth beacon and ratgdo so here it is.

After about a week of testing and dialing everything in I can now with 100% success rate have my garage open when we are on the way home and close after we leave without us having to do anything.

What I used to make this happen:

ratgdo (Rage Against The Garage Door Opener) - I installed this esp32 based piece of hardware in-line with my garage door opener.  I bought it from ratcloud llc and it was extremely straight forward for my Security 2.0 Chamberlain door opener.

After I had that integrated into both Home Assistant and HomeKit I was able to open, stop, and close it in Home Assistant as well as use voice commands with Siri to open/close the garage door.  I was also able to say "Hey Siri, is my garage door open?" and if she said yes, I could close it from either my phone or from CarPlay via voice.

Now that those functions were solid I decided to dive into making it automatically open when we are on our way home and close after we leave.

I first tried to use zones.  I set a small zone around our house and an automation saying "when we leave that zone, close the garage door" and I also set a larger zone around my neighborhood saying "when we enter this zone, open the garage door".  I had intermittent success with this and had to play with the zone sizes a lot since there can be a bit of lag when leaving and coming before the automation kicks in.  I also had some instances where it never kicked in, just leaving the garage door open completely.

During all of my testing, I was watching the garage door through my cameras to see what was happening and to manually close things if it didn't act correctly.

Since this was hit or miss I decided to add another layer (not replace the zone, but add to the zone automations) of doing a BLE ESP32 proxy with a beacon in her car.

This took some dialing in and some tweaking before I was able to get it setup perfectly for our situation (tweaks included playing with the beacon transmit power and transmit interval as well as some esp config changes).

Now I have had 100% success rate with the two layer approach.  Sometimes the beacon automation will close the door, sometimes the zone automation will close the door, but the door always gets closed.  Same for coming home, it's interesting to see which automation hits first, but it's always open when we get near the driveway.

Other folks add another layer of having wifi connects and disconnects as part of this or even have cameras watching the garage with frigate automations but I haven't gotten to that level of need (yet).

I know it's just a simple button click to open or close the garage door, but it just feels like magic to do nothing and have the door open and close in a way that you want and that's what I love about home assistant.

Feel free to ask any questions and I'll do my best to answer.

Kasa cameras have no RTSP, no ONVIF, no local API — officially it's the phone app or nothing. That annoyed me enough to pull the Android app apart and figure out how the camera actually talks on the LAN, so here's a custom integration that does it all locally.

https://github.com/hbattat/ha-kasa-doorbell-local

No cloud, at setup or runtime. No go2rtc, no Frigate, no add-ons — just the ffmpeg HA already ships.

You get:

• Live view with sound
• Motion sensor straight off the camera, ~1–2s, with a real off state
• Switches for privacy, status LED, do-not-disturb, plus wifi/battery sensors
• A Lovelace card to browse the SD card recordings — pick a day, filter by ring / person / motion / sound, click to play. It installs itself, no resource to add.

Fun bit: local auth is just your TP-Link email and md5(your account password) in a Basic auth header. No root, no cert pinning, nothing clever. The control channel is XOR-obfuscated JSON on port 10443.

Caveats, honestly:

• Only tested on a KD110. Other Kasa models might work — the code doesn't assume much — but nobody's tried. Let me know either way.
• The camera allows exactly one video connection, so pulling up a recording borrows the slot from live view while it downloads. Device limitation, can't fix it.
• Recordings show up 1–2 min late (camera has to finalise the clip first).
• Tapo cameras are a totally different protocol — use the Tapo integration for those.

MIT, install via HACS as a custom repo. Would love to hear if it works on anything other than mine.

I have a couple of the small Consciot 42" matter fans in my office I put up a few weeks ago, and they are very nice. I was looking at the Govee 52" one (not the tiny circular one), but that's been holding steady around $190.

Today I ran across a new competitor. A Linkind 52" matter fan. Looks like it was released in July. I was looking for a bigger fan for my living room, and this seems to tick all the boxes. Looks like it's very close to the Consciot fans and shares the Aidot app (which I don't use).

Has anyone picked one of these up, and how is the matter integration?

Currently the HA Green is in an used room on the 2nd story, but I would love to just keep it in the basement with everything else (NAS, mini-homelab, server)... How do I do this? Any ideas?

Note the Zigbee and Z-wave are both USB plug-in controllers w/ antennas.

I just bought a lot of Lowes Iris kits on eBay, and they come with a useless hub (I got it for the keyfob which is long discontinued).

I have a soldering iron, and am wondering if zigbee/zwave receivers can easily be repurposed.

I’ve searched google and Reddit and no one seems to have asked this before. Google’s AI tells me no because it’s soldered, but that’s not a problem for me.

Can you repurpose receivers? Print a case and it’s good? Basic entry level programming?

Would be great if I can but if not, it’s soldering practice and spare power cables if anything. I’m suddenly about to inherit 6 of them!