The only thing I can see really shifting it, is people saying they’ll support trump to stay in with their communities, then making excuses why they stayed home on election day.

And if I’m honest, that’s a hell of a hail mary pass.

z-wave may be easier than expected, as I think the devices stay linked to the hardware dongle used. (This is just from memory, mind!). But if you need to change the dongle, perhaps less fun.

imo, it will be a bit of pain to get everything inside HA, but once it’s done, you’ll be inside a platform that is pretty open, and commonly used, with lots of other people (hopefully) posting up solutions to problems before you encounter them!
And because it’s software that will run on pretty much anything, you have the reassurance that even if something crazy happened, you could just reinstall an old version.

If it were me, I’d clear an entire weekend day, power off the old kit, and work away at getting HA controlling everything.

Nice to see NC becoming involved with the board.

I don’t run that much z-wave due to cost, but I’m all for improvements and tighter integration.
Especially since when I do want to spend money, ZW works very well.

Or maybe something like this:

https://www.securemeters.com/uk/product/room-thermostats/hrt4-zw-asr/

The unit with the buttons on is a simple relay, which hass can control to turn things on and off, and use a heating control with a temperature sensor.
But if you hit the button on the front, it also gives 30 minutes of on, which can be handy if the system had issues.

Or you could have a hass controlled relay, but also leave the old controller wired in on a manual switch.
So if there was a failure, you could go back to the old control by manually flipping it over.

A low-wiring way to do it would be to replace the bulbs with hue/similar bulbs, then just put a battery powered button in the location you want to have the controls. £10-ish for each button, plus however much the bulbs are.

Then just have the button set to toggle the lights on/off (you can also call different presets like dim etc by pressing and holding).
Then hass just directly sends the on/off commands to the bulbs.

My first integration is going to be putting my standard “going out” dashboard by the front door.
Being able to glance and see UV index, temperature, rain probability is dead useful.

Or just the one king.

I guess it simplifies the game plan. If there is only one outcome to prepare for, it’s easier to organise what you’re going to do.
Plus, it gives him a face save.
“NO, we did not lose that FRAUDULENT ELECTION. I told the GOOD people not to vote, and they did not. I will be holding my OWN, FREE ELECTION in florida on friday.”

Channel 4 had ice sculptures standing in for the Conservative and UKIP Brexit Reform parties at a climate debate after both leaders declined an invitation to take part.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50596192

Don’t be too confident of that: She could become a widow.

It’s pulled from my main router using it’s metric for it. It only updates once a minute or so, but it’s a nice metric.
Once I switch over to more powerful gear, I’ll probably have to start using SNMP, which I don’t look forward to!

I’m currently using the PoE doorbell from Reolink, and regularly use it for intercom, because I don’t like wasting delivery drivers time while I run to the door. I can definitely recommend it. It’s worth the effort running the cable to have something that just works.

The default Reolink integration can raise events on:

• Button press
• Person detection (adjustable sensitivity)
• Motion detection (same)

Recording can be on-device with a micro SD, on network (recording the incoming stream), or by FTP.
Recording can be set like a dashcam too (only save when needed, and overwrite after a certain time)

By default it lights up around the button when it detects movement, I do not like this, so I turned it off.

If the area outside your house isn’t busy, you can do cool things like getting the person detection to alert you as someone approaches, rather than waiting for them to press the bell. Can make the postman jump the first few times.

There are also some features like doing TTS replies if you don’t acknowledge the doorbell inside a certain time.
I haven’t gone through the effort of setting up return audio from Homeassistant, and just use the RL app.

One of my key buying points for hardware is “will this run without any internet, and could I set it all up again without internet?”.

This is why I’m so happy to finally have Hue on my zigbee controller. And it’s why I’m always on the lookout for a second hand Valetudo compatible robovac.

You could also set up a local NTP server, and block them entirely.
Currently, I have mine set with an invalid gateway, and blocked from the internet to be sure.

I’m a bit late, but if it helps, I’ve had good results with the Sonoff and Tuya zigbee sensors. I prefer the Tuyas, just because they use AA instead of CR2032 batteries.
$50 will easily get you everything you need to start.

You might also want to think about getting a 433MHz radio for the system.
If you live in a built up area, you’d be surprised how many people have equipment transmitting on 433MHz already (free data!).
And a lot of generic wireless temperature sensor kits use it as a standard, making it a good value way to get weatherproof gear.
I got a generic fridge/freezer kit for about £10 that works perfectly with this. Again, $50 or so for a DVB-T2 receiver. Just be aware that it’s a little more technically involved than pairing zigbee devices.

Bother me with DMs if you like, I’ve been fiddling with just about every protocol I can get my hands on for under £100!

Someone else already raised the mains wired safety/budget issue, but I may have a side suggestion for you: Bulbs as repeaters.

I’ve added hue bulbs directly to my zigbee network, where they also act as repeaters.

The problem then was people switching off at the switch. This has been resolved by adding a little zigbee button by the switch (as people can achieve the function without the mains switch).
Which gives the bonus of being able to do different taps.

(So for example, I have one click as toggle on/off, two clicks is daytime+bright, press+hold is evening+dim)

This is the reason I haven’t gone down the smart light switches path yet.
Anything that I’d trust enough on 240v is out of budget!

It definitely threw me the first time I was out of the house.
I decided the best solution was just to limit alerts to non-sensitive things.
While I’m generally very big on privacy, I really don’t give a monkeys if Apple/Google is relaying a message that says “Cat in garden!”

I’m not sure if there is a way to quickly find this. The best bet is probably trying the bigger instances, and seeing if it’s accessible through them.

You’ve made me think now: it might be a nice project for a some instance admins to flag when an instance they had received posts from goes offline. (I should probably check what I have from feddit.de!)

I can absolutely see that happening in vsphere.