Soooooo…. I got bitten by the automate-your-living-environment bug, too.
Actually, my reasons for home automation started off a little bit differently. My house is heated with a Vaillant EcoCompact unit. Most of the time, this thing works pretty reliably. Unfortunately, some of the times, it just decides to get into a fault state and stops heating. More unfortunately, this is usually sometime in the morning and I discover the problem when I get only cold water in the shover. Without precise information how often and when this issue occurs, the maintenance company just comes to my place, tells me that they cannot find any fault and leave me with yet another bill.
The low-tech and works-for-everyone way of logging this information is simply putting a sheet of paper next to the heating unit and write down the dates, but what self-respecting geek would go with low-tech solutions?
Instead, I plan on setting up something that:
- is fully automated
- keeps logs for the maintenance company
- notifies me before I get into the shower
An appropriate high-tech solution which appeals to my geeky sensibilities would be to add home automation functionality to my already overloaded server in the basement. Therefore……..
Enter “openHAB” 🙂