What are you all monitering with your HA System eg temp, motion, door open close, humidity smoke ect?
what sensors are you using to moniter these values? And what protocol do you use
what are you monitoring these for? what do you do with them?
do you build your own sensors or buy readymade
I’m asking because I am planning on adding z wave to my system soon and was wondering about the different sensors are the all in one sensors worth it or is it better to get individual sensors for each job just wondering the best way to go I’d prefer to get the advice have a think it saves throwing money away making silly mistakes
The doors into the house, temperature, humidity, outside temperature, online status of my server and services (anything with an IP address and a port that provides something for home automation, online/offline status of phones for presence detection, smoke/CO alarms, 1 camera to provide backup to the garage door Reed sensors.
All of the door sensors are Reed switches wired to the gpio of RPis and their status is published to Oh using MQTT. The smoke/CO alarms are zwave. One temp/humidity sensor is the Nest and the rest are DIY Arduino with RFM69HW transceivers and a gateway on a RPi that published the readings using MQTT. The servers/services monitoring is just using the Network binding. Presence detection uses network binding and an hping3 script. Outside temperature comes from Wunderground, fetched using HTTP binding.
I monitor the doors mainly to get reminders that we have left them open. The back door remaining open is also a signal that the dog has been left out. I monitor temp in the house and outside to control the house has in the summer. I don’t have Central air so I run the fan to bring the cool air from the basement. I have sensors on all floors of the house so I can use the differential between floors to decide when to turn the fan on and off. The smoke/CO alarms do not need explanation. I use the services and servers monitoring to monitor on the sitemap and to generate alerts when a rule attempts to do something that requires a service or server that is not online (e.g. when I try to open the garage doors but the RPi that does this use offline. The presence detection is self explanatory.
A little of both.
Lots of people use zwave multisensors. I went DIY because I only carted about temp/humidity and was able to build my own for a fraction off the cost, pls I have the option to build a nice case for them and let them sit on a shelf exposed.
I would not go DIY for a smoke/co alarm though. I can’t say I recommend the ZCombos I have either as there is no way to look them nor a way to tell in OH what type of alarm it is.
