A Powerful Combination For Driving HVAC Efficiency : Polyaire AirTouch 5 + SMA Energy Meter + Amazon Alexa + Door Sensors + Home Assistant

Recently after a some deliberation in living with a undersized and under performing cooling system for 15 years, my family decided to replace our multi zone gas ducted heating and evaportative cooling system with a Fujitsu R2 High Static Cooling Solution (16.5 KW Cool / 20.5KW heating). As usual lets start with a video to … Read more

Flashing Tasmota on a Sonoff Basic R4 & Configuring for Home Assistant

In October of 2023 Itead released their latest Sonoff Basic appliance module the Basic R4. It is now based off an ESP32 chip, versus the ESP82xx of prior models and provides increased load capabilities at 2400w. This appliance module is cheap and is perfect for attaching to a desk lamp, inline in a power board … Read more

Aesthetically Clean Remote Switching Using MQTT with Sonoff and Shelly Modules

Automation and technology are amazing, modern advances allow us to automate almost everything in our daily lives, before we get into this post, here is an end-2-end example of this solution, enjoy. So now you know what we will be building, lets get in to it. There are almost no systems in my house that … Read more

Making Data Driven Decisions With A PV Array, Home Assistant and MQTT

I have been always wanting to add a Solar PV array to my house and recently, it made sense and I purchased a modest (7.5kw) system for my house. It has been as much of an IT journey of integration and extracting value from disparate systems has it been of reducing my carbon footprint. When … Read more

Bridge Building – Mosquitto MQTT to Azure IOT Using Paho MQTT and the Azure IOT SDK’s

I have been on a journey to explore Azure IoT and push the thousands of events that flow through my local MQTT broker (Mosquitto) in to Azure IOT. From direct connection to Azure IOT-Hub (via MQTT and SAS tokens) through to Azure IOT-Edge running locally with MQTT. I have been able to achieve my goals … Read more

Flashing Tasmota on a Sonoff Dual R3 & Integrating With Home Assistant

PLC based appliance modules have been something of a staple in my house over the last 10 years and at recent count, I had 72 X10 appliance modules. The challenges with X10 are pretty widely known but with the advances in X10, most of these challenges around reliability can be pretty easily solved. Adding in … Read more