this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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homeassistant

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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Hello! I'm eyeballing an Ecowitt weather station and would like your suggestions as to what to do with it. Are there automations you do with it? Just displaying a weather dashboard? Mostly using it for the inside temp/humidity sensors?

Please help me justify buying it to myself!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

As someone who moved from condo life into having a significant amount of deck plants, you just need an irrigation system and it doesn't need to be smart.

I use the b-hyve as a water timer, it's on my WiFi and tied into home assistant but it's fully self sufficient on its own. It's only job is to turn on the water. It is smart enough to not do it when it's rained recently.

The water runs to some fat black pipe that runs around my deck, with smaller hoses plugged into it that go into the plant pots. In the pots are either drip emitters, or what's better is an emitter hose that releases water every few inches. This is called drip irrigation and outdoor pots have holes in the bottom, so you can't really over water. Mine runs for 20 minutes every morning at 6am and everything thrives.

Lawn care you'll need some sprinklers or something, but before you invest make sure you look up your local regulations for water restrictions. Where I live you can't water a lawn during peak summer, at all. Drip irrigation is always allowed because it's very water efficient.