Getting kids to do chores is always a battle. Here’s a way I incorporated chore tracking in Home Assistant that was also designed to motivate them.
Aside from my monthly utility bill, understanding my home’s energy consumption has always been fairly opaque. Setting up energy monitoring in Home Assistant has brought real-time insight.
Once you start down the home automation rabbit hole path, you’ll find a seemingly ever expanding set of automation opportunities. So if your are looking for ideas or just curious to see what is possible, here’s a list with the how-to details on a few of the more useful automations I have done around my home.
Lights are things not normally given a name. And even if you did name them just so Alexa can understand specific on/off requests, the chance of everyone in your home remembering them is pretty close to nil. So if you are using Home Assistant, why not make Alexa room aware so she can understand more natural speech from everyone.
I needed a reliable method to properly heat a detached home office. The process had to account for whether someone was home, if the space was in use, and the time of day to create an efficient solution that would not waste dollars and energy. Here is the solution I was able to creeate