Today I read a short blog post from Home Assistant about the use of cloud services for Home Automation: Your hub should be local and open And although I don’t use Home Assistant as my primary home automation controller, I do agree with this view. Besides dependence on an internet connection, I also find dependence on a company a great risk. Home Automation startups come and go, and the last thing you want is for your house to stop working because your software supplier is bankrupt.

That is why I chose an open source project when setting up my Home Automation, which also happened to be started in the Netherlands: Domoticz. The main reason for this choice was that it is an open system, which a large community is working on and testing. It supports many protocols and hardware. And it runs on relatively cheap hardware.

The core

So the heart of my home automation system is Domoticz, which runs on its own Raspberry Pi 3B+. I run the latest stable release and before upgrading I test it on another instance. The database is backed up automaticcly to my NAS every night, as well as the custom scripts I wrote. To ensure that I do not have to reconnect my hardware during a restart, I have setup persistent USB devices.

Hardware

In addition to the Pi, I have connected a RFXCOM RFXtrx433 Transciever, that can receive the wireless (433 Mhz) signals from my sensors and control other hardware via that connection. This device supports several protocols, but I mainly use it for my Klik Aan Klik Uit (KAKU) sensors. This version is no longer made, however successors support even more protocols, such as Somfy. To increase the range, I replaced the standard antenna for a version with more range.

Sensors

The first sensors I started using were Oregon Scientific temperature sensors that I placed in every room of my house. For the bathroom and washroom I use a version which also measures the humidity. In addition, I have one on all exterior doors, most interior doors and a number of windows KAKU contactsensor. It is also on my refrigerator in the garage, so that I get a message if the door has been open too long 😄

Actors

My home automation system now mainly uses the motto Measuring is knowing, but i have some devices i can control. In my back garden I use a 3-in-1 Switch which can switch both my garden lighting and sockets with a 5-core cable. I switched the latter so that I can, for example, connect Christmas lights to it and because I think it is a safe idea anyway if outdoor sockets do not always have voltage.

I would still like to provide the lighting downstairs with pulse dimmers, so that I can dim and switch the lighting via scenes.

Smart meter (P1)

Of course, my energy supplier can read my electricity and gas consumption via the smart meter, but they probably only do that periodically and I get the conclusions once a month. With a simple USB cable that I connect to the P1 port I read my consumption from my smart meter every 10 seconds and store that information in domoticz. You can get that cable ready-made, but you can also build it yourself, like I did. I send my gas meter reading via api every day to Mindergas.nl to forecast my gas consumption based on degree days.

OpenTherm Gateway (OTGW)

To gain even more insight into my gas consumption, I installed a OpenTherm GateWay between my thermostat and my boiler. You can buy such a gateway ready made, but of course it is much more fun to do it yourself. This gateway is viewing the traffic between my Nest Thermostaat and my boiler, because both of them support the OpenTherm protocol. For OpenTherm, a boiler was turned on or off by the thermostat, but with OpenTherm it is possible to control the boiler and gain insight into, for example, the boiler temperature and the temperature of the return pipe. You could even control the boiler with the gateway. Through this gateway, for example, I saw that my boiler temperature was heating every night from the minimum temperature (37 degrees) to the desired operating temperature (60 degrees). By deactivating that at night I save 1/2 m3 of gas per day 💸 Incidentally, the information can also be manipulated, so I always showed the actual room temperature on my old Honeywell thermostat two degrees higher 😇

Nest Thermostat

The Nest Thermostat V3 was something on my list for a long time and after the renovation of our ground floor and underfloor heating, I decided to make the purchase. Connecting and connecting to the boiler was easy and also reading the room temperature and presence detection in domoticz worked quickly. This means that I can use the Nest thermostat as a temperature sensor and can see whether there has been movement near the thermostat.

Still, I am not happy with this purchase, for two reasons. First, I found out that a smart thermostat with OpenTherm that learns what your routines are has no added value at all if you only use underfloor heating. Secondly, the only way to get the information from the thermostat in my home automation system is through the Nest API, making me dependent on the availability of my internet connection and that api. I would rather immediately read the thermostat, but unfortunately Nest does not provide that 😞

Nest Protect

My Nest Protects I primarily chose the design (I don’t want an ugly pimple in my living room and kitchen) and the fact that they combine a smoke detector with a carbon monoxide detector. In addition, they have an extra WiFi network with which they are connected. I deliberately chose the wired version, so I don’t have to change the batteries every time. The annoying thing is that you can only mount this version above a central box, but fortunately there are people who also have a solution for that.

Besides the fact that I can read the status (via an api) in domoticz, I actually do little with this information. Unfortunately it is not possible to read the movement information, so I can also use it as a motion sensor.

Robotstofzuiger

The purchase of a robot vacuum cleaner was actually not a necessity, but more out of interest. I had a budget model before that I was not really satisfied with, but the choice for this LG Hombot was mainly based on the fact that you can provide a wifi dongle and open source firmware. This makes it possible to use a script to read the status and battery percentage in domoticz and to start and stop the vacuum cleaner. So, based on the presence information of my Nest Thermostat, I can have my robot vacuum cleaner start (no movement after x time) or stop (movement detected).

HomeKit

To make the WAF somewhat acceptable I installed HomeBridge installed on my raspberry pi which I use for example to control my Sonos. Within HomeKit I have different scenes (eg Good morning, Cooking, Watching TV, Good night) with which you can easily switch multiple systems. There are many HomeBridge plugins to control your devices.