Big Joe Says

  If you have one of these Danfoss 102 old dial type timers you will know the biggest problems with these are the time indicators being pushed round instead of switching and also these timers have no flexibility. I had just moved in to a new house and had a very old gravity fed system with the Danfoss 102 as the controller and really wanted to make the system as smart as possible. Gravity Fed Central Heating System I went with the Hive system because they fully supported a gravity fed central heating system system where basically if you have the heating on you have to have the hot water on at the same time. You need to make sure you get the dual channel Hive Active Heating receiver the single channel version will not work with gravity fed systems. Danfoss 102 to Hive Wiring First off I am not a qualified electrician so if you are unsure of anything consult a qualified electrician, secondly make sure the electricity is off and you test to make sure it is off before you proceed. This...

  As it took a while for me to get the settings correct to enable me to send email alerts using Virgin Media in the UK, I thought I would document the process. Add a new user to Virgin Media First off add a new user to Virgin Media instead of using the main login for the account, this will make it to keep track of things and also interms of security, you don’t reeally want your Virgin account password stored in plain text on a device connected to the internet. Login to your account here: https://my.virginmedia.com/home/index Then go to My profile and choose Manage Accounts. Then click Create a new account. Choose a suitable First and Last name – I went for Home Assistant. Then pick an email address for the mailbox, I started mine with ha so I could easily know what it was. It must be at least 6 characters with no spaces or underscores. You can use . full stops though. Once that is confirmed, you will be promoted to set a password. Unfortunately Virgin Media wont accept a password l...

  As I keep forgetting the steps I thouht I would write a quick guide on how to setup a Shelly relay with Home Assistant, in this specific case I am using a Shelly 1PM. This guide is going to assume that you have already wired up your Shelly relay and you have Home Assistant up and running, Connect Shelly to your local WiFi Firstly connect directly to the new Shelly relay by WiFi, if you scan your WiFi you should see something like Shelly1-xxxxxxx or Shelly1pm-xxxxxxx depending on which version. Now open the Shelly App on your phone and choose Add Device, making sure the WiFi connection specified in the app is the one you want to connect the device to. You should now see the new Shelly device discovered in the app if you go to discovered devices, check that you can turn it on/off in the app as expected. Set the Shelly Relay with the MQTT Server Settings For my setup I am using the MQTT platform because I couldn’t get the direct Home Assistant Shelly setup to work. I have the mosqui...

  I’ve put this together to help me remember the steps and also hopefully to help out other people struggling to setup this with Home Assistant as a complete beginner. Zigbee2MQTT Hardware First step is that you will need some form of hardware dongle to act as the Zigbee sniffer, this is instead of a SmartThings or Philips hue hub. I bought one off eBay for about £15 (in 2021). This is the one I bought: Plug it into your Home Assistant and then your are ready. Install Zibbee2MQTT Software For this to work we need two pieces of software we need the Zigbee2MQTT driver software and then we need the MQTT software. First, the Zigbee2MQtt software, in Home Assistant: Go to Supervisor > Add-on Store Here we need to add a Repository by clicking on the 3 dot in the top corner. In here paste in the following repository: https://github.com/zigbee2mqtt/hassio-zigbee2mqtt Beware you might see instructions for a reposiriioery from https://github.com/Koenkk this has now been depreciated and yo...

  We use Home Assistant at work to control various things and we needed to configure it to send email using Amazon AWS SES (Simple Email Service), it was quite easy in the end. I am not going to go into how to setup AWS SES, I am going to assume you already have this working. Add AWS SES Setting to configuration.yaml Go to you Home Assistant, then Supervisor > File Editor > Open Web UI You want to open your configuration.yaml file In here create a new section called notify and add the following sections: name: a descriptive name for this notifier platform: smtp sender: the full email address of the sender authorised in AWS SES recipient: the email address of who you want to receive the emails server: the Amazon AWS SES server specified in your AWS account password: the password when you created the account It should look something like this: I found it worked better if I enclosed some of the fields with “” and before anybody gets excited those are not my credentials! If you r...