[Tech1] Home automation.

[Alan Taylor]

I’ve got some comparable smart sockets made by Meross and some very cheap branded ones.  It was good to use an app to control them, but they really came into their own once I used home automation to control them.  I used Homekit, but I would assume that the same ideas are possible using other automation platforms.

As some of the lights are in different rooms, I set up an automation for bedtime, which turns on the living room lamp for a minute, a kitchen lamp for two minutes and a bedroom lamp for four minutes.  We can take teacups back to the kitchen and go upstairs to bed without bothering with light switches, which is handy if you’re carrying stuff.  At the end of four minutes, it switches off every smart socket so that things like the HiFi are turned off even if they had been left on.

The other useful automation is to switch on a light in the kitchen for a couple of minutes just before one of us arrives home while it’s dark ( it senses when you’re within range of the WiFi ).  No fumbling around in the dark feeling for the light switch.  There’s also an automation to turn it on for a minute when we are leaving the house. I changed the automations to turning lights on for a finite time after discovering the lights left on one night after I first drove to a neighbour's house and then past my house, the lights came on and stayed on.  At any time you can also use voice commands such as telling it to switch on the desk light or turn off the HiFi.

The big advantage of the automation is that it’s done by stuff I already have and makes better use of the smart switches I bought. My project for next summer is to build smart water switches which will control the garden micro irrigation systems.  At the moment, they come on and off every day at preset times, but I should be able to make them operate only when it hasn’t rained.  HomeKit supports checking the local online weather forecast and then making other actions conditional on what the weather is expected to be. For instance cancelling watering if significant rain expected, but giving longer watering during a heatwave or during June when the strawberry plants need extra water.  Any other times it will water for the normal duration during dry weather.

During the summer I had a fan on the bedroom windowsill with an automation which checked the weather forecast and if the temperature was above a certain point, it switched on the fan during the early evening to suck hot air out of the bedroom so that it wouldn’t be too hot at bed time. It switched off automatically whenever we triggered the ‘off to bed’ automation which progressively turned on lamps as we made our way to bed.

Alan



> On 26 Nov 2022, at 16:21, Philip Tyler via Tech1 <tech1 at tech-ops.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> I have been looking for a replacement timer for our lounge light. It was an aged clockwork one, so completely useless if you had a power cut.
> 
> I ended up with the Tapo TP100, a plug/socket combination with a 2.4 GHz wifi receiver in it.
> 
> Like all things in life now there’s an app for it, called erm.. Tapo.
> 
> You initially connect to it via Bluetooth and then it goes off and finds your 2.4 GHz wifi. Setup was pretty easygoing.
> 
> Once set can have various timer modes. The sunset or sunrise settings are for the location of your phone by the way!
> 
> You can set any number of on and off times and what days as well. There is also an ‘away’ setting where you can set a start and end time and it will randomly switch the connected device on and off.
> 
> They also do LED bayonet and ES bulbs which offer the same function and also dimmable.
> 
> There are cameras in the range as well.
> 
> I have been running the lounge floor lamp off one for a while and it doesn’t get hot. Any loss of power and it will automatically reconnect and carry on as if nothing happened.
> 
> So while away in some far flung corner of the world, I can happily turn a light on and off at home with a tap on the phone screen :))
> 
> A single TP100 is just under £10.
> 
> Philip and Bee
> 
> https://www.flickriver.com/photos/philthebirdbrain/popular-interesting/
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