Saturday, 3rd September, 2022

I should sort out smart home heating before this winter. I don’t think it’ll make a huge difference to our bills, but given the cost of gas and electric is about to go 4x then every small amount will be worth it. Plus our current setup does annoy me. I’ve found the right model and brand that I want to go with. I just need to figure out which radiators should get TRVs (controllable valves) to make the most of it. Going with Drayton Wiser products. Mostly as it seems they’ll work perfectly well with Home Assistant completely offline. I’ll probably just use their app to do everything at first, and maybe forever, but it’s nice knowing that if they shutdown their servers I can still use it. We only have one other smart thing, and that’s the garage door opener. I have it with Apple Home (running on my iPad) as it’s handy to ask Siri as I’m cycling home to open the garage. I’m sure it can be integrated with Siri, although not really sure heating needs to be. It’s mostly configure and then forget. Perhaps in the effort to save money, maybe it needs to be made less convenient to increase the heating 😅.

I might get some other smart home things, but not really sure what would be useful.

My friend has just about everything “smart’d” - every light, heating, cameras, power measurement, and EV charging. He has a variable power rate and I think it gives the supplier the ability to choose when he charges his EV overnight. Essentially makes it very cheap. It’s pretty cool. The other stuff seems a bit excessive. Some of the lights are nice, as it lets him group them together independent of the wiring circuit, where you’d want two sets or certain lights on together you can turn them on with one “switch”. I could see a few smart lights being useful for the kids at night or when we’re away to simulate someone is home.