Home Assistant Assistance

General
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As recently mentioned I have some recently acquired Meross Smart Plugs and installed them yesterday. I found the HA interface confusing but I think that just reflects its extensive options and I no doubt will get used to it fairly quickly.

However, at last night’s meeting I was blown away by all the things @Belfry and @jdownie have plugged into their HA systems. There were refrigerators, washing machines, solar of course, weather, Aussie Broadband, SpeedTest and many others. The list went on and on.

I therefore wondered what others are using, how well they worked and whether they were hard to integrate. On the last point I wondered if anyone had a solar / battery system that worked “seamlessly” with HA.

Any advice and suggestions gratefully accepted.

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Yeah, i looked at and walked away from HA several times over the years feeling like that. I’ve kept coming back to it over the years because it’s the answer to most self hosted home automation questions. That UI gets easier over time. Stick with it. The flip side of that confusion is that there is always something to learn/explore in HA; like that integration stuff that @Belfry explained last night for example.

…so to add to your closing sentiment; i’d love to see some screenshots from others on their Home Assistant setups. This is a very cool topic. Something that might seem mundane to the poster will be exciting and new to readers. It’ll probably also add fuel the current global spending frenzy by nudging some of onto eBay / Amazon / Ali Express!

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Gday all,

My Hone Assistant basically runs my life! I’d be lost without it these so happy to show some of my work.

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I won’t be able to screenshot all my integrations but this will explain my setup.
Overview is just the front page.
Instead of having lists on all different apps I use the inbuilt todo lists and shopping lists integrations.
Smart Home is a tabbed section for all the different rooms. I put entities in each that are shortcuts to things I do, for example, turn off the aircon, change lights, etc.
Weather uses a lot of custom UI components and the BOM integrations
Security is a quick overview of the cameras
I’ll skip the next few as the come with HA
AdGuard is a back up DNS from my main one, which sinks config from the main one as well.
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Now the more powerful components!
HACS is almost a mandatory for me with HA. It allows you to use all the custom components that are not inbuilt to HA. Meross Integration is one that I use that is custom. Very simple to set up and easy to use once installed.
Music Assistant is custom component (through HACS) that has better control of media devices. I’ve found it way more reliable than the inbuilt media.
Node-Red is for my more complex automations in HA. You could do most of your automations in it if you like but the automation UI is way better these days.
Code Server and Developer Tools go hand in hand. Code Server allows me to change the back end YAML configs without SSHing into the box, using a web based VSCode. Developer tools is how you test calls, configs, templates, etc.

In summary I run my entire house through it. It’s a central hub for all my house automations, but also it’s not 99.999% uptime. My HA has its issues and it doesn’t do some things but it does majority.

Happy to take further questions :slight_smile:

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That’s handy.

I got my two Meross plugs going yesterday and inspired by Thursday night’s conversation I have ordered some more. The aim is to emulate @Belfry’s net zero electricity bill either with or without a battery. The key seems to be able to turn things off and on on a schedule, such as NASes when a backup is about to run, and for general household management - air-conditioning, lights, blinds, cat yurt, etc. :wink:

Currently my servers are running at 0.4kWh and at 0.3kWh with the QNAPs turned off. I have mostly mini pcs but there are a couple of towers that I expect are chewing up a fair bit of power.

@shirbo a home assistant demo at one of the meetings would be great.

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Thursday’s discussion prompted me to finally get off my bum and finish off my energy stuff in HA properly. I spent a bit of time debugging it yesterday, and now have the import/export/generation statistics and dashboards working very well, as well as a breakout of the individual appliance usage for the big ticket items. I want to add a few more usage monitors for a few other appliances (everything other than the hot water system and fridge, as hot showers and cold beer are non-negotiable), and over the coming weeks I need to tidy up the way that the data is pulled from the inverter via modbus. It’s working great but also polls a lot of registers that don’t exist on my inverter/network adapter/firmware combination. I realistically only need 4-5 data points so now that I know where they are, I’ll only poll the registers I need, tidy up the firewall rules, etc.

I’ll give it a few weeks to collect some data, then start experimenting with turning things on and off based on excess generation, with the goal to push that self-consumed solar stat up. Now that I understand it a lot better, I’m happy to talk about it in a bit more detail at a future meeting with something more formal than the ad-hoc chat on Thursday.

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Hoping one of the HA brains trust here can help me out with this one.

As per above, I’ve now got my proof of concept energy dashboard working reasonably closely to how I want the end state to be.

One remaining quirk is that occasionally untracked consumption will dip into the negative on the individual device breakdown. It doesn’t seem to align with any of the other HA data (e.g., electricity usage during that time period) nor the data from Sungrow’s iSolarCloud (i.e., there’s nothing on there suggesting that the data monitoring has glitched out for a minute and reported negative usage, which it does on the rare occasion). All the individual data points and the second source of data make logical sense.

An example from a few days ago:

Negative Usage?
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The rest of the energy data looks fine. This also doesn’t seem to be related to solar export when I compare it to the iSolarCloud data, and I had one instance of negative usage this morning well before first light. I’m not sure how untracked consumption is derived and it’s not an entity on its own in HA, but it seems to be the total usage for that time period, minus the usage of the known devices. Does anyone know exactly how that value is calculated or why it might be occasionally reporting a negative? Any suggestions about entities or sensors to keep an eye on? Is there any way to clamp a negative value to zero? I know it’s never going to be an exact science, but the dashboard showing “devices using negative energy” is annoying :rofl:!

I’ll continue to clean up the YAML and the logic over the coming month and will pick some brains at one of the in person meetings if I can’t figure this out over the summer period :grin:.

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I only signed the agreement for my solar panels this-morning. I’m hoping that in Feb 2026 i’ll have problems like this to work through alongside you :smile:

In the meantime, i went as far as i could in my environment. I’ve got a mariadb in a deployment alongside my home assistant container. I got a shell into my mariadb container and ran…

mariadb -p$MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD -u root $MARIADB_DATABASE

…to have a snoop around in the database. I ran a SHOW TABLES; to supply ChatGPT with my opening question in this chat.

I went as far as running the first query to get a list of entity ids, but that’s where i become less helpful. If I had bothered to get on with setting up that Home Assistant Glow again i might have something to play with, but i kind of knew that i really wanted a grown up solution like the Sungrow setup that i’ve just ordered.

Basically my approach was to determine if a) you’re getting negatives in that fundamental data series, or if b) some other data series is being subtracted off that before it appears on that chart.

:man_shrugging: hope that helps.

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Thanks for that - I’ll have a dig around in the data later on today to confirm what I now suspect since making my post this morning and looking through the last few days’ data again. I think a handful of the energy use sensors are reporting data in 0.25kWh increments rather than two decimal places. Where that blue device in my image has used <0.25kWh, it has rounded to 0.25kWh for the hour. HA is then taking the overall usage for the hour, subtracting the teal sensor’s usage (accurate to two decimal places), subtracting the rounded 0.25kWh for the blue sensor’s usage, and the result is a negative number.

I’ll see if I can increase the resolution of the sensor or clamp that untracked consumption value so it doesn’t drop below 0.