Monitoring of all windows and doors of our Smart House. This is the main purpose of my self-made project DI2MQTT. While part 1 was about hardware for the project, this blog post is dedicated to the software ..read more

Are all the windows closed when leaving the house? Is the skylight closed when it starts to rain? I asked myself these questions many times after moving into our passive house and looked for a technical solution to automatically detect and evaluate the status of our windows, doors, and locks. The article below deals with the most reliable, convenient, and inexpensive evaluation of these window and door state conditions ..read more

It has always been a concern for me to see which commercial providers I entrust my private data to and pay money for regularly. I’m not alone in this, because the search term “self hosted” brings up several blogposts describing the path away from commercial providers to self-hosted open source services. In the following, I describe my (still not fully completed) journey towards a self hosted digital life ..read more

Down when it’s dark, up when it’s bright - what’s so difficult about automated shutter control? That were my first thoughts when I started to program our shutters in the house. But when does it exactly get dark? And how do I deal with the shift of that time during the year? Can I also use the blinds as heat protection during the day in the summer? And how do I prevent a closed shutter of the living room window from locking me out on the terrace in the summer ..read more

When we built our passive house 8 years ago, we unfortunately neglected to put a photovoltaic system on the roof. During the construction of the house, we had to make an unbelievable number of decisions in a very short time, in addition to our extensive personal contributions. Sometimes it is good to start some projects a little later and to be able to plan them in a more relaxed way ..read more

In the last article, I covered how I measure and save power consumption and production in our Smart Home. However, the effort is only worthwhile if the recorded data is not only stored on a hard drive but is also used for visualization and analysis. The use cases for displaying and analyzing the recorded data of our Smart Home and the tools I use for this will be addressed in the following article ..read more

Since we live in our passive house, I became interested in the power consumption of our house. It began with the fact that I wanted to know the percentage of the heating costs of our heat pump in our total power consumption. Besides, I also found the evaluation of load peaks and the analysis of the constant current consumption very interesting. When we built our photovoltaic system, an unbelievable number of possibilities came together to analyze the output of our system ..read more

I recently wrote about how I integrated cheap WiFi spots from Novostella into Loxone, turning our garden illumination into unbeatably low-cost smart-lighting. The instructions described in the article also apply to other lights. For example, E27 light bulbs which are used in many lamps. In the post below I will briefly explain the differences to the implementation described earlier: Components Instead of the WiFi spots from Novostella used for our garden illumination, I am using a E27 WiFi RGB bulb from essentials Smart Home this time ..read more

Unfortunately, our non-smart garden illumination was defective, so I started the search for a replacement that could ideally be fully integrated into our home automation system. I found a lighting system that was not intended to be integrated into our home automation system, but it can be perfectly integrated with a few tricks and is also much cheaper than any competing system I have found so far. Features What requirements did I have for our future garden lighting ..read more