I have not been writing code for a year, but my current job is still about providing and choosing technical solutions based on requirements and context. While the company I work for has a strong direction towards GenAI and Microsoft solutions (who doesn’t…), in my private projects I look into the other direction of Small Web, Decentralisation, Self-Hosting and the Rot economy of Tech these days. This also proofed a good opportunity to dive deeper into Home Automation and Docker. It’s an ongoing process, but here I’d like to talk about a few pet projects I did in the last year.
It started back in early summer 2023, I got myself some Shelly smart plugs , installed [Home Assistant]() and began to measure my energy consumption. This ran on my mini-pc – a small Intel NUC 11 Performance – I had been using for a year for backups, but little else. The NUC was an upgrade from a RaspberryPi 3 running dietpi I used for the same purpose. For convenience sake I kept using dietpi also on the NUC 11.
By measuring energy consumption, replacing inefficient devices (ffs get rid of old light bulbs!) I was able to reduce my already low energy consumption by another 20%. Having this visually not only helped reducing total consumption, but also shifting consumption to times windows which are either cheaper by having a lower hourly price or by optimizing for lowest CO2 usage by consuming when most renewable energy is in the grid. Often this coincides with low prices, but not always.
Since working on energy projects professionally and switching to a dynamic energy tariff in February I have been looking more into energy topics. In between I tried to build a predictor that could guesstimate the energy prices for upcoming days based on weather and other factors, but eventually I realized, that this is fruitless as the prices is a negotiated market price based on consumption expectation across all of Europe. To say it simple: the price is not only caused by weather, it’s set to provoke and steer market reaction. I have not the data to predict that.
What is more helpful is experience. On average daily energy is cheapest during the week between 3-4am and 11-2pm. Avoid the 6-8pm evening peak. On the weekend, consume between 11-4pm – sometimes you are lucky and zero to negatives prices. By timing dishwasher and washing machine accordingly, 50% of my consumption falls into the cheapest times.
On a regular day, I have 2kWh consumption split with laundry, kettle and dishwasher each at about 1kWh per run being the most hungry devices. Another 1kWh falls to my Tech and I can see in my consumption, when I run the gaming PC with VR. Despite my below-average consumption, I have been dancing around getting a balcony solar-installation for almost a year. At 300€ these have become sooo cheap… story for another day.
I managed all smart home devices in Home Assistant. in the beginning, this ran on the NUC managed by dietpi. Eventually in Spring this year I reactivated the raspberry after all, to run Home Assistant OS on it instead. This offers some more customization and supervising options, necessary to install more custom plugins and integrations.
Add the Home Assistant App to this and you have a neat remote for your home.
I stopped tinkering here with Home Assistant at this point, although topics like MQTT data broadcasting are still on the list of things I’d like to checkout one day.
Home Assistant at this point was in my local network and only accessible at home. How to make it available remotely and what other infrastructure I started hosting at home, I’ll cover in part two.