I have alerts that push out when the fridge door is open.
And another that flashes all the lights in the house when the doorbell rings.Not sure this belongs, but my most proud automation is an automatic water bowl for my dogs. It automatically drains, rinses, and fills 16 times per day so they always have fresh water. They deserve a better life than my lazy ass can give them.
:O it’s hooked to the tap and a drain I assume? How big is that?
Correct! It connects to a sink drain the same way a dishwasher does. It is actually a bathroom sink, the kind that sits on top of the counter. We have had three Great Danes at one time so trying to keep up with a clean water dish was really impossible. We no longer have large dogs but the desire to keep them in clean water persists.
Super cool. I’ll have to keep that in mind for behind my kitchen wall 🤔
What a clever idea! Is the dirty water drained from the bottom of the bowl or is it pumped out?
Pumped from the bottom. The basin sits on a raised box that holds the internals, including a pump for draining and a water valve for filling. Basically it uses a timer that commands the pump and a sump circuit for the fill valve detecting high, low, and overflow conditions.
The pump runs for three minutes every hour for sixteen hours between 0600 and 2200. The three minutes is enough to drain the entire thing with enough time for the clean fill water to rinse the basin and be drained away before stopping the pump and letting the fill top it off with clean water.
Easily the most ridiculous is the one I made on a motion trigger from the camera pointed out my window to take a snapshot, pass it to ollama/qwen3, and have it compose a haiku about the scene to be read aloud by Pocket TTS.
I get notified whenever a band on or adjacent to the ipecac label is about to play in stockholm.
Salesman at the door button and routine exported to HomeKit. My doorbell camera shows a PiP of a person detection on my AppleTV. If I say “Siri salesman at the door” then HA will briefly turn on the flowerbed sprinkler zone to chase it away. Never gets old.
I’ve got a led strip on my toilet door. It turns red when someone is inside (mesured by the wasp in a box principle.
You should set up a speaker in your toilet and start to fade in orchestral music when the occupancy time is getting too long.
Where do you guys find power outlets for all these weird placements of LED strips? :D Outlets in my house is not in great places for something like this.
I lucked out and was simply in a relationship with a gal whom I helped purchase a house with a handy switched power outlet near the ceiling which was likely intended for seasonal decorative lights.
I co-oped the outlet once we got married but I need to replace the piece of tape that keeps the light in with one of these multi-button zigbee mains-powered switches that fit in multi-gang decora plates. I refuse to do wifi unless I can run esphome on it, and I will only trust matter when it runs over thread.I know there are some zwave rechargeable LED strips but they’re pricey
I’m unfamiliar with the wasp in a box principle. Is that the one where you keep a box of live wasps in the bathroom and determine if someone is in there based on how recently you’ve heard a scream?
Here’s the problem, I keep a jar of poisonous gas triggered by a randomly decaying radioactive atom in my bathroom, so all of my wasps are in superposition.
Suggestion for enhancement: Have the LEDs start out yellow and after a couple of minutes turn them red because entry has likely become dangerous.
Or put a mic in the bathroom and make the LEDs yellow for pee sounds and red for fart sounds.
I’m kidding but I actually think this would be fun, but you’d need a way to differentiate sounds.
Need an LLM tuned for violent shitting
Does meal prep because I don’t really like cooking count?
Got an Alexa as a gift. I use it to turn the living room light on and off. Basically a high tech Clapper.
Get rid of that thing immediately, it’s recording everything you say and sending it to Palantir
Thought of another one…
I bought some TP-Link wifi bulbs that were flaky from the start. After some investigation I discovered that these particular bulbs felt it important to phone home to China every few seconds and became very, very unhappy if they couldn’t get through. After a short tantrum they would reset their wifi connection before regaining consciousness. What that meant in my 3 bulb fixture was that when my “lights off” scene was triggered and my firewall was blocking their corporate masters, one or more of the bulbs was often still in a stupor and would remain on indefinitely.
Did I just go spend $25 on some new, decent bulbs that actually worked? Nope - no way some stinking TP-Link bulbs were going to win! Instead I spent hours creating multiple redundant automations that checked for each possible failure state, kept polling the bulbs until their tantrum ended and they regained consciousness, and then turned off whatever bulbs were left on.
Every time I turned off the lights I was able to declare victory. After I felt they had learned their lesson I bought some Zigbee bulbs that actually work.
You’re my spirit animal.
This is some shit I would do. Fuck you and your not working, I’ll show you who’s boss!
Turn the lights on and off in the basement. The kids kept playing with the lights and arguing over it, so I automated the whole floor and blocked the switches off.
Arguments immediately stopped.
I made an automated sandwich maker. The automation turns it on, sets a timer, shows the timer on tv, turns it off when the timer goes off, pauses the tv and turns lights in kitchen on, if after sunset. Ridiculous? Jup. But also super cool.
My dishwasher automatically selects it’s Eco program when powered on. The Eco program uses more water and more energy than the Auto program while also taking almost twice as long. So I have an automation that triggers when my dishwasher is powered on and then selects the Auto program for me - because pressing a button to change the program after loading the dishwasher would be too much to ask.
If it uses more water and more energy, what exactly is “eco” about it?
@pfr @homeassistant just remember that this machine needs to clean it’s pipes too, just using chemicals for that won’t do very well i guess. I’m not saying that this is logical (making this eco mode) but using more electricity for hot water and using more water (for not reusing too much water all over again) is probably the sweet spot for lasting much longer. Which in turn is not in the interest of the company selling these machines. I guess.
How did you measure the water going through? Did you hook up an in-line flow meter to the dishwasher? I would be interested to know if my Bosch dishwasher is the same way because I always use Eco.
@JustEnoughDucks @EarMaster I’m not the original poster. I have seen lab test results supporting the LOWER water usage claim in ECO for common devices.
According to my own monitoring via smartplug, my own dishwasher uses about a 20 to 30% less electrical energy when in ECO mode as opposed to AUTO mode. It is a Bauknecht, which is likely very similar to your Bosch device in many ways (Bosch, Siemens, Bauknecht household devices all being manufactured by the same company…).
Thanks for that. Now I need a new dishwasher.
@EarMaster
Is somebody trolling a little bit out there?
ECO mode, exactly as the name implies, uses less water and less energy.@EarMaster
Under some specific circumstances AUTO might be more economic but that would be the exception rather than a rule.
Mine is turning on a fan when an exercise video is played. Pressing a button is way too difficult.
I used to do this for lighting and fans whenever my VR headset turned on.
Not too crazy but I have automations based on whether external doors are open: if it’s hot and it’s cooler outside and someone opens the door then the fan near it gets turned out. Similarly if the heater is on but someone leaves a door open longer than one minute (conservative) the heaters will shut off.
I have 4 lights in my room that I use for different things. Ceiling light, light above my bed, lights hanging from the high part of the vaulted ceiling (these are yellow glass really pretty but kinda dim great for before bed) and a small stained glass lamp.
I have an automation to turn on the small stained glass lamp at 7 because that’s when I should be getting ready to get in bed, wind down, read a book, something like that. At 825 my phone goes into sleep mode, night light and night mode activated. At 830 all the lights in my room turn off and my fan turns on.
At 330am my alarm goes off and the stained glass lamp turns on and the fan turns off. It’s dim enough to not be blinding but bright enough I won’t just turn my alarm off. At 340 the yellow lights come on to make sure my ass gets up. As I’m walking out of my room, I can double tap the light switch down and it will turn off all 4 lights and the fan if any of the above are on.
I also have a button hanging by a command strip on my night stand that can control everything for when I’m too lazy to open the app on my phone 😂
