I’ve been using HA for a while; having my home just “do things” for me without asking is fantastic. My lights turn on to exactly the levels I want when I enter a room, my grass and my plants get watered automatically, heating and cooling happens only when it needs to. There are lots of benefits. Plus, it’s just a fun hobby.
One thing I didn’t expect, though, is all the interesting things you can learn when you have sensors monitoring different aspects of you home or the environment.
- I can always tell when someone is playing games or streaming video (provided they’re transcoding the video) from one of my servers. There’s a very significant spike in temperature in my server room, not to mention the increased power draw.
- I have mmWave sensors in an out-building that randomly trigger at night, even though there’s nobody there. Mice, maybe?
- Outdoor temperatures always go up when it’s raining. It’s always felt this way, but now it’s confirmed.
- My electrical system always drops in voltage around 8AM. Power usage in my house remains constant, so maybe more demand on the grid when people are getting ready for work?
- I have a few different animals that like to visit my property. They set off my motion sensors, and my cameras catch them on video. Sometimes I give them names.
- A single person is enough to raise the temperature in an enclosed room. Spikes in temperature and humidity correspond with motion sensors being triggered.
- Watering a lawn takes a lot more water than you might expect. I didn’t realize just how much until I saw exactly how many gallons I was using. Fortunately, I irrigate with stored rain water, but it would make me think twice about wasting city water to maintain a lawn.
- Traditional tank-style water heaters waste a lot of heat. My utility closet with my water heater is always several degrees hotter than the surrounding space.
What have you discovered as a result of your home automation? While the things I mentioned might not be particular useful, they’re definitely interesting, at least to me.
Most recently I discovered my house naturally has one of those “the sun will shine exactly here at one time of the year” things going on, like a treasure hunting movie trope. A reflective mosaic hung on my neighbor’s shed is in the right spot that, in late December, sun reflection causes a arc of sunshine to slowly sweep over and brighten up spots on my back porch for an hour or so.
I recently made an ESPHome based weather station that includes a LUX sensor. I was updating a lighting automation so it would turn on sooner during dark mornings using the new sensor and I noticed a daily spike in light. The neighbor put up that mosaic several years ago and it took a HA histogram for me to notice.
I’ve caught the front door and garage door left open several times (kids)
I found out my garage under my bedroom is primarily why my room is hard to heat and likely has poor insulation in the ceiling.
I found out my Samsung TV was sending a LOT of data home.
I know every time my Roomba gets stuck so I can go and locate it before the battery dies.
I know when my unraid Dockers fail to update and accidentally delete the old containers, so that I can go and re-add them.
One of my children were doing remote learning and I would get an alarm if he didn’t get up in the morning and start using his Chromebook.
How much data is a lot? Mine lost wifi privileges for putting ads in my stuff, but I’m still curious.
It was burning a few gigs a day. Which wouldn’t have been noticed except I wasn’t using it to stream anything. I originally put it on the time out vlan, But my wife wanted to make changes to art mode, and of course that requires cloud connection. I should probably go back and isolate what it talks to and see if I can get art mode to continue working without letting it do whatever high bandwidth application it was trying to do before.
That’s nuts, good luck with the sluething
- My TV’s power consumption is basically doubled when the input is running at 2160p compared to 1080p.
- Running the portable AC in my office for more than 24 hours causes it to cycle off and on because the humidity collection sump fills up and needs to be emptied (it throws a completely unhelpful error of ‘Low Temperature’).
I learned my air filter uses almost no electricity so I just leave it running 24/7 now.
My old Samsung printer can enter a state where it consumes ~100W without doing anything meaningful. It’s not obvious what is wrong, but without power monitoring I would have never realized this.
CO2 levels raise astonishingly fast when people are present in a room.
I have mice visiting my garage and I can tell when by looking at the motion sensor history.
My uninsulated roof stays frost free even at -15°C.
What type of printer? Maybe keeping the ink from going solid?
Probably a laser printer, keeping warm to be ready to print as soon as it gets a job. My laser printer (also Samsung) draws nearly 1000w after a cold start.
Maybe it’s keeping the roof frost free too…
While not publishing it, my weather station uploads my indoor temperatures to weather underground. The plaintext password is in every packet. It uses unencrypted HTTP.
My TV continues to chatter to random servers on the internet long after it has turned off. It transmits to a telemetry server on every single button press.
My air conditioners drain a lot more power when I haven’t cleaned the filters. It’s almost double.
A chromecast will try to bypass your router’s DNS and go straight to Google’s. It is constantly pulling data even if you’re not using it. I’m fairly certain it’s that slideshow. It’s not cached at all.
OP’s post is a good lesson in the value of metadata and how important data privacy protections are.
My old furnace was hilariously oversized for the house.
One of the nifty things about smart thermostats like Ecobees is that you can pull usage data from their web portal. I grabbed a CSV file covering a cold snap last year that reached a 100-year record low, and using Excel I summed up the total heat output while we were at that low.
The furnace was only running 50% of the time, even when it was with a couple degrees of as cold as it’s ever been where I live.
Needless to say, when I got a new system installed I made sure it was more properly sized, and given that I had a convenient empirical measurement of exactly how many btus I actually needed in the worst case as scenario, that was easily done.
