[madaxe_again]

I switched from openhab to HA about a year ago and haven’t looked back - it’s absolutely night and day in terms of configuration and discovery.

My use case is maybe a little extreme - I live off grid, and I have HA managing our picogrid (dump loads, shifting charge between battery banks, throttling the hydro, etc.), our water pumps, monitoring filters and telling me when I need to change them, and then of course all the usual climate control etc.

Ironically the one use case I have no interest in is the most common one - lighting.

[matthew-wegner]

I guess power draw on lights is pretty low, but one thing I do with my Home Assistant setup is aggressively turn off other rooms (and I'm on grid):

If office computer is used, and "home alone" mode is on, turn off all non-office rooms.

If I hit play on something on the main TV, or my laptop is used and its network MAC is the couch dock, turn off all rooms except living room, etc...

(I have a guest mode that disables these things, which is automatically enabled when my partner uses her door keycode)

[madaxe_again]

Yeah - as we’re off grid with a well managed storage system we essentially have no limit on power, usually a surplus, so lighting (all LED, of course) is just negligible - if I turn every single light in the place on we barely draw 250W. For energy saving, I do have it do stuff like turn off the underfloor heating/AC when we go out, or when we are for whatever reason low on power.

Now, if they were incandescent it would be a different story entirely - it would be more like 3kW!

I do actually have one small lighting project in mind - it’s about 500 meters from our house to the mill/guest house, and I’m toying with the idea of having little LoRa/solar fairy lights that turn on and off as you walk from one to the other at night, based on device presence, zone by zone, mostly because it would feel magical.

[nixgeek]

Do you write about your picogrid and other MEP stuff anywhere?

[madaxe_again]

Not yet as it continues to be a work in progress - still a few bits around frequency shifting that I’m not thrilled with - but I actually need to do a thorough writeup of it all fairly soon just in case I have a chainsaw accident or whatnot.