Planning for the Home Assistant

Earlier today, I had no idea what I was going to write about for day 30 (seriously, I've made it to day 30 of #100DaysToOffload!). But news and discussions have been coming at me from all angles about hass.io for months now and I thought it was about time I considered looking in to it again.

Hardware

Step 1 is to decide what hardware I'm going to run this on. My old HP MicroServer just doesn't cut it any more which is why I started shutting down all of my internal services to begin with. The power usage of the thing was costing me more than using hosted services in the end. With a full bank of drives sat in there it was idling around 50W. Depending on what it was up to at the time, this could peak. But for arguments sake, we'll keep the ~50W idle:

50W * 24 (Hours) = 1.2kWh @ 18.08 pence/kWh = 21.69 pence/day. * that by 30 (average number of days in the month) = £6.50/month (I think).

Numbers were never my strong point, so please feel free to check these figures! But as far as I can tell, this box was costing me the best part of £7/month just to sit idle, not even considering the peaks. So there is just no way I'm turning that thing back on to play with.

Roll-up Raspberry Pi.

Apparently the RPi4 uses ~ 2.85W @ idle. So we'll call it 3W for good measure. Let's re-apply my questionable number work:

3W * 24 (Hours) = 0.072kWh @ 18.08p/kWh = 1.3p/day
0.013 * 30 = 39p/month

39p... per month!

I've already got one of these sat behind the router running Pi-hole, so technically I could get it doing this to but I think I'd rater split it up. Hang the expense. So, that's the hardware decision taken care of, I need to order another RPi4. Even if I don't continue to use it for this, I'm sure I'll find another use for it.

Operating System

For ease of setup, I think I'm just going to run with their Home Assistant Operating system. By doing this, it's all integrated in to one and I don't have to piss around trying to figure out what I've missed if I choose something else.

Integrations

This is obviously something that is going to change over time but here's a couple that I'm interested in using straight off the bat:

  • Nginx Proxy Manager
  • Git Pull
  • DuckDNS
  • Grocy
  • Matrix
  • Traccar
  • Wireguard

I'm also going to be looking in to some temp/moisture sensors too. But one step at a time. There are so many integration options to look through to see what can be done.

Do you use Home Assistant? What do you use it for? Come and discuss it with me over on Fosstodon.

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