I just ordered one of those MHCOZY relays, hoping to use it in my RV to control the furnace (via the thermostat connection). Glad to hear they are reliable!

Either that, or you have wifi interference.

I had all kinds of issues with my zigbee network until I switched my wifi to use channels 1 and 6, and Zigbee to use 24 or something like that. Since then, it has been rock solid.

Good advice, thanks. I think the woman used gloves to touch it, while the dog and I didn’t touch the bird at all.

Poor bird! I hope you can help him!

Not an owl, but the other day I was walking the dog, and I saw one of the neighbors who walks regularly watching something. I asked if everything was okay, and she said there was a bird upside down in the road. She had flipped him upright, but he hadn’t moved (he was alive, but not walking or flying away).

I looked closer (I knew my dog wouldn’t hurt him, he loves everyone and everything) and he was shaking. So I continued on our walk, and checked on the bird on the way back. He had made it to the side of the road, at least, so he was safe from cars.

He wasn’t there later that day, and we got 8" of snow the next day, so hopefully the little birdie is okay.

I really need to get our birdhouses back out. One was on a pole that was being pushed over by growing trees, and the other was run over by someone taking a shortcut through our yard. The latter one needs to be replaced, but the former just needs to be reinstalled in the ground somewhere.

I can confirm their light switches and door/window sensors work as well.

The fan just turns on low when the pellet stove is running, nothing so fancy as changing the speeds based on the stove setting. But that could be accomplished indirectly by just looking at the temperature in the area - if it’s a few degrees higher than, say, the living room, turn up the fan speed.

In an ideal world I’d be able to control the setting on the stove remotely - there’s a button to change the setting, which a switchbot could theoretically do. Of course to do that reliably, HA should know what the current setting is. I haven’t really looked into this much.

But, yeah, I do wish I had a way to track the pellet level to alert me when it’s getting low. I have a Salt Sentry to monitor the salt in the water softener, with a gauge in HA, and it warns me when it’s getting low. Which is great (when it works, sometimes it stops responding). I’m not sure if it would work as well for the pellets - the pellets would be right up against the sensor when it’s full. Another option might be a weight sensor under a leg - I have no idea if this is even feasible, but if is, it should be able to detect the 40 lbs change (noting that there’s some ash left in the stove, so the 40 lbs doesn’t completely disappear).

I use the power monitoring plug for a lamp in the living room that is dumb, but it has a 433 mhz remote. The power monitoring detects whether it is on or not. I have one of those Sonoff 433 mhz transmitters, so with the power monitoring plug I can control the light. This also means it can be part of my “vacation” mode where it perhaps turns on at some point in the evening, then turns back off. Also, it turns on when first connected to power, so I can do an automation that sends the “off” command at night if the house is in Vacation mode and the light is on.

I don’t really have it set up yet, but in theory the power monitoring plugs could warn me if the freezer stops working (or is running constantly), the sump pump stops working, etc. I have the power monitoring in place, but not the automations to detect issues.

Yes to all of that, except for the comparison to the gas furnace: I don’t know how much electricity they use (I know some, because our previous house had one, but it’s not a ton - electronics, igniter, and blower fan).

Yes, I do have to buy pellets and load them into the stove; I like to say the stove warms me up multiple times: Loading the pellets into our pickup, unloading them and stacking them in the garage, moving the bags from the garage to the stove (okay, this is not that hard and doesn’t warm me very much), and then when the pellets finally get burned. They’re 40 lb bags, not terrible but some work to move. (On reddit, at this point, I’m sure someone would jump in and call me a wimp or whatever, but having stacked a ton of them alone multiple times, it definitely adds up.)

The stove has two motors in it, I believe: an auger to lift the pellets from the hopper and drop them into the burn pot, and a blower fan for the draft for the fire. There may be a third fan to circulate warm air across the heat exchanger tubes as well, but I don’t remember for certain. There’s also an electronic board to control on/off, heat level, when to run the auger, etc.

My comment above was noticing that the power it consumes isn’t very different on different levels - which isn’t surprising, the fan runs a bit faster and the auger has to turn a bit more often, but it wasn’t an obvious difference over a few hours. I have it on a power monitoring plug to detect if it’s running (for automations like turning on a ceiling fan to help circulate the warm air, and keeping track of run time so I know when I need to clean it). I’ll have to test different levels to see if I can find a way to detect which level it’s set on.

My office electric space heater, on low, uses more energy than our pellet stove.

My server (and network gear) also use slightly more energy than the pellet stove.

The pellet stove’s energy usage does not seem to be drastically affected by the setting it’s on - this winter I’ve been keeping it on setting 2 (of 5), but the other day I ran it at 4 for a few hours. No distinguishable change in electricity usage during that time.

I can click on the little down arrow there and hit “comment moderation history” and see the removed comment…

From what I understood from the Zooz documentation, it requires that your controller support LR before the devices can take advantage of it.

I’ve done the ethernet thing in two houses now. The first one was a single floor model, so it was relatively easy to run the wires through the attic to the rooms I wanted.

Our current house is two stories, and I wanted it in my office on the second floor and at a closet along the way for an access point. That was a bit harder!

I might need to run it to my wife’s office at some point. That one might be harder based on where she’ll need it, compared to the stairs.

Interesting concept. I have a script that uses long term tokens and curl to tell HA to turn on certain things I need before running a certain game, then turns them back off afterward. Presumably this could take the place of that script.

It’s an interesting idea, I wonder what other ideas people will have once it’s working.

I just wish I could get my script to disable the screensaver in KDE. I have the command that should do it, and it’s changing the right setting (ie, changing the same setting manually in the gui works correctly), but it seems like KDE isn’t aware of the config change, and the things I’ve tried to get KDE to reload that config aren’t working. No error, but the screen saver stays active.

We had the panel upgrade done at our previous house, along with a transfer switch and 30 amp outlet installed for our trailer, and I want to say that was like $3000. This was probably 10 or 12 years ago, so I wouldn’t expect to get that price now, but over double seems pretty hefty.

Finally got my new dryer vent installed!

Back story: The old vent was broken and letting air into the house. We bought a new vent several years ago, and painted it to better match the siding, and then it sat in the garage. That is, until last week, when we had a nice day, and I had time and inspiration to finally do it. It took like 20 minutes to install. Not sure why I kept putting it off.

The laundry room definitely doesn’t feel as cold as it used to! Success!

It can be used to make almost any switch smart. I used it for a motion sensor, but that’s just a different type of switch. But, I couldn’t find much info about it from people who used it, so I thought I’d write down how it worked for me, in case it’s helpful for others.

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Don’t forget the foreign governments booking tons of rooms in his hotels that were never occupied!

Ross Perot.

There’s a station near me with hoses that are long enough to do that with most vehicles (obviously my pickup wouldn’t fit, but every car I’ve driven is fine). But I don’t think most stations have hoses long enough to do that for anything but the smallest cars.

LOL I was ready to defend the driver, having pulled in on the wrong side of the pump once or twice. I drive different cars, and while most have it on the driver’s side, one vehicle I drive regularly has it on the opposite side, so I have occasionally made the mistake.

But then I corrected it by turning the car around and pulling into the pump on the correct side…