Home-Assistant - Tag - vo.rs

Power Monitoring with Home Assistant: Tracking What Your Home Lab Actually Costs

Fri, 15 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

I used to wave away questions about what my home lab cost to run with a confident “oh, not much”. Then I put a meter on it. The rack idles at 140 watts, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you do the maths: 140W is roughly 1,226 kWh a year, and at my tariff that’s about £370 just to keep the lights blinking. Measuring it didn’t make it cheaper, but it stopped me lying to myself, and it surfaced a couple of genuine surprises.

ESPHome: Building Custom Sensors for Home Assistant

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0000

There is a particular joy in solving a problem with three quid of silicon instead of forty quid of someone else’s cloud-tethered gadget. ESPHome is the tool that makes that joy repeatable. You describe a device — its WiFi, its sensors, its outputs — in YAML, ESPHome compiles real C++ firmware, flashes it onto an ESP32 or ESP8266, and the device shows up in Home Assistant automatically with no cloud, no app, and no telemetry leaving your house. I’ve built temperature monitors, soil moisture sensors, a letterbox-open detector, and a CO₂ meter this way, and every one was easier than wiring up the equivalent off-the-shelf product.

Zigbee2MQTT vs ZHA: Home Assistant Zigbee Integrations Compared

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

If you’re building a smart home on Home Assistant and you’ve sensibly decided to avoid the cloud, you’ll standardise on Zigbee for your sensors and switches. Then you hit the fork in the road: do you talk to your Zigbee radio through ZHA (the built-in integration) or Zigbee2MQTT (an external bridge)? People treat this like a religious war. It isn’t. Both are good. But the choice shapes your setup for years, because migrating a meshed Zigbee network of fifty devices to a different coordinator software is a tedious evening you’ll only want to do once.

Voice Assistants Without the Cloud: Whisper, Piper, and Home Assistant

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 09:00:00 +0000

I have always found something faintly insulting about commercial smart speakers. You buy a microphone, put it on your kitchen counter, and then pay a subscription to a company that would dearly love to know what brand of coffee you argue about at breakfast. The convenience is real, but the bargain is rotten. So a couple of years ago I tore the cloud out of my voice setup entirely, and the technology has matured to the point where I can finally recommend it without a disclaimer the length of a mortgage agreement.

Wake-on-LAN Automation: Powering Servers On and Off with Home Assistant

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 09:00:00 +0000

I have a beefy machine in the cupboard that exists to do exactly one thing: transcode media and crunch the occasional batch job. It pulls something like 90 watts at idle, which over a year is a meaningful slice of the electricity bill for a box that’s genuinely busy maybe two hours a day. For ages I left it running because the alternative — getting up and pressing the power button when I wanted to watch something — was worse. Then I wired it into Home Assistant, and now it sleeps until it’s needed and shuts itself down when it’s idle. The savings paid for the effort in a couple of months.