this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Good ROI Suggestions? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hi! I'm new to home assistant and I'm wondering what would be worth the cost. A lot of the "smart" appliances seem overly expensive and automating them would only save me a handful of minutes each day. I live in canada where power is cheap, so things that save power aren't particulary useful. A way to open/close the windows and doors sounds useful and would save me the most time, but costs thousands. A way to keep track of what is in the fridge and propose recipes to avoid food waste would be nice but I'm not entirely sure how I would setup such a system.

Does anyone have ideas of worthwhile things I could setup that would be worth the cost?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I haven’t yet put it into numbers and anyway compared to the expenses to get there will be depressing but measuring temperatures to take decisions on how to manage heat allowed us to reduce the house temp from 29 Celsius to 21 over a week of tweaking. This week we’re getting the cooling system installed and I believe that with this knowledge the running cost will be much lower. In a part of the house I already automated the curtains which led also to a decrease of temps - I could cut air condition altogether there. So definitely a confort gain at least. Now money-wise it’s anyway a cost case with the automation relying on new solar panels, heat pump, new electrical cabling… so if you exclude our perception of additional confort it’s definitely not seeing a positive ROI before I’m dead of old age. But no regrets anyway.