Why Smoke from the Boiler Room Proves You Need Home Assistant at Work
Why is there smoke from the boiler room? – Botanical Garden using Home Assistant
I faced a simple question about smoke in our greenhouse boiler room that took hours to answer because our building data was trapped in five separate vendor silos. The EU Data Act now gives us the right to reclaim this data, and I am using Home Assistant to unify it. By combining open data with AI, we can finally see the whole picture and stop renting access to our own building.
You can't run a greenhouse without gas unless you can see the moments it slips — a fault, a silent fallback — and close them one at a time.
- 8fingerlouie
I had a "similar" situation that also prompted me to take back my data.
My heat pump had also thrown an error, but because it sits in a closet (the indoor part anyway), and we don't use its tiny screen for slow TV, nobody noticed until it started getting cold. To make things even worse, the heat pump resets its error messages every 24 hours and retries, removing the error message in the process, so you may check on the heat pump and it shows zero error, yet 30 minutes later it calls for technical service.
I ended up installing an eBus shield in mine. It is a €50 ESP32 device that reports data to MQTT, and HA can pick it up [1] from there.
Things went a little overboard from there, so there's smart electricity meter monitoring, water meter monitoring, automatic valve controllers on main valves, basically anything "house" can be monitored and controlled from HA.
On the bright side I have very few smart light installations. Lights are more or less a solved problem in my book. 100+ years of electricity has pretty much revealed the optimal placement for light switches, and while some lights truly benefit from smart bulbs or relays, the majority doesn't (in my home).
5-10 years ago I didn't care if smart technology had local control, today I won't purchase anything that doesn't allow me to control it locally in some fashion. I don't mind having to tinker a bit with ESPHome or MQTT, that's fine, and for the vast majority of people, a cloud integration is probably the right solution, […]
- jelder
> This is not bad luck. It’s a structure.
Either AI wrote this, or the author thinks this is what humans sound like now.
- jrmg
It kinda worries me that one of the big points here is that you can give non-technically-inclined users power by allowing them to build Home Assistant interfaces using Claude.
In my experience (and one look at the Home Assistant forums shows I’m not alone), allowing AI to write Home Assistant configs is a questionable activity.
There’s so much old, wrong information out there that it regularly uses (or tries to use) deprecated or removed features, and often even hallucinates config fields if you ask it to do something that is unsupported (and, of course, the user doesn’t know beforehand what’s supported). And you better have backups, because once it’s inserted unparsable nonsense or messed up the white space in the YAML config files, Home Assistant just won’t work.
Admittedly, my experience here is six months old, and I was talking to Claude not using an agent - but still…