Sean Blanchfield - page 3
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Automating Heating with Home Assistant
I’ve been on a mission to use Home Assistant to optimize my home heating, with the dual goals of reducing gas usage and increasing comfort. It’s worked out very well - I’ve mostly eliminated wasteful overheating, and I now have much more consistent temperatures throughout the house. Thanks to the power of Home Assistant, I managed to do this without having to invest in new smart devices. In fact, I ended up selling my Google Nest thermostat! I thought I’d share some notes on the process.
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Automating the HY367 / HY368 Smart Radiator Actuator in Home Assistant
The HY367 and HY368 Smart Radiator Actuators are relatively cheap smart thermostatic valves that you can attach to the radiators in your house, effectively turning each room into an individually-controlled heating zone. They seem to be on sale rebadged as Hysen, Blinli, Moeshouse and Tuya (I think Tuya is probably the real manufacturer). As of February 2020, you can get these for as little as $22 each on AliExpress. Unfortunately, the instruction leaflet that they come with is pretty cryptic and omits some important information. After hours of experimentation, here are some notes that may be useful for anyone else trying to integrate these into Home Assistant.
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The road to native ES6 SPAs
TL;DR. In this post I go on a major rant against the Javascript/Babel/Webpack/Node development stack, and then talk about the problems I’m facing in my attempt to jettison that stack and instead make my javascript application run natively in web browsers. (Run javascript in a browser? Revolutionary, I know!)