Created a Home-assistant automation to pause the solar battery charging at ~80% and only charge it to 100% at the last possible moment. This is to minimize time spent at full charge, which apparently is bad for the battery. It considers the estimated remaining PV production.

Data collected over nearly two years shows our BYD 7.68kWh LiFePO4 solar battery operates at an average of 94% efficiency (charged vs discharged). Capacity degradation is at 2%

TIL that Frigate can analyze the audio stream of RTSP cameras for certain sound types and expose these as Home Assistant sensors. Configured mine to detect barking, yelling, alarms, etc and will create automations based on these https://docs.frigate.video/configuration/audio_detectors/

Created a pie-chart to visualize my remaining pizza, here at 75%

Created an automatic VPN connection on router level between home and another property I own. ASUS routers allow this over OpenVPN. Planning on using this for easier IoT devices access with home-assistant

Oops.. IKEA VARMFRONT power bank recall

This guy (daughter says its Patrick) had come too close to the beach, moved him to a safer depth

Drove from Sofia to Greece today in a BMW 320d. Car computes 4.6l/100 km (51 mpg), and with tank capacity range of 1200km I can technically drive to my vacation destination, drive around another 350km and return back home on one fuel tank. Wishing such EV range was possible

Bought the new IKEA TRETAKT zigbee smart plug to test. Design is better than their previous smart plugs, integrates well in Zigbee2MQTT. I only wish it had power monitoring capability

I was about to complain about the heat, then decided to check global temperatures. Forecast for 52*C in the Middle East for tomorrow make me wonder how is it possible for people to function in such conditions

Heat pump annual maintenance done, “before” and “after” pump flow rate pictured below. I assume this affected performance significantly. Lesson learned 🙂

Energy flow

Upgraded my Home Assistant to RPI 5 hardware recently mainly, so it better handles cameras in Frigate + Google Coral TPU. I am now monitoring 5 security cams at 10 FPS with ~25%-ish CPU load, the RPI 4 wasn't able to handle half of that without overheating, and 75%-ish CPU load

Signs of becoming lazy – load the appliance's user manual to privateGPT and query it:

IKEA’s new zigbee motion sensor, the VALLHORN, finally arrives here. Grabbed couple pcs to test with Zigbee2MQTT in home assistant. No ETA about the PARASOLL and BADRING yet. These seem to expose illuminance as well, interesting

Adding (finally) a logic level converter between our Ecodan ASHP UART port and the ESP32 interface to Home Assistant. Don’t ask why I don’t have it in place to begin with…

Ordered 23rd of Oct 2023, received today #raspberrypi 5

Note to self: refrain from system updating around the holiday season

In 2023, our 6.4kWp @Fronius PV system produced 7.05 MWh, fulfilling 60% of our electrical needs and saving us ~920 EUR. Our 7.68kWh BYD battery stored 1.83 MWh for later use and the OhmPilot diverter captured an extra 1.84 MWh, boosting our self-consumption by about 26%. #solar

Zigbee2MQTT time

In Lisbon, was last here 15 years ago

Getting rid of MelCloud in favor of ESP32 for full local control and home assistant integration for our Ecodan ASHP Using https://github.com/rbroker/ecodan-ha-local

No grid electricity for 9 out of the last 12 hours due to a snowstorm. Running my inverter in emergency power mode off the battery, topping it from the grid whenever it becomes briefly available. Solar production is close to zero, as panels are completely covered with snow. Good news, grid power is up, bad…

Interesting visualization of my 3D printer bed level using https://github.com/jneilliii/OctoPrint-BedLevelVisualizer/tree/master plugin for OctoPrint. Not bad, not great

Auto bed leveling kit and other goodies for my Creality Ender 3 v2 3D printer. Should have ordered these ages ago