Looking back to year 2024

Once again a year has passed and it’s time to look back in the year 2024. This year I did not add anything huge like last year when I installed the solar panels. But what did I change or added this time in my smart home and how was the blog doing? And what about the future? Read on to get a summary of the last year 🙂

Off we go from Conbee II and Deconz

This year was no exception and my house got bunch of upgrades. The move from Deconz to ZigBee2MQTT was one of the best upgrades so far. The device support of ZigBee2MQTT is much greater than Deconz. At the same time I also changed the ZigBee coordinator to Sonoff ZBDongle-E running with ember firmware.

During upcoming year I will be make one more transition and move my ZigBee mesh to the SMLIGHT SLZB-06 that I reviewed recently. I found the device to be superior compared to any other coordinator in the market. It’s just not a small task to re-pair everything, so that’s the main reason I’ve not done it just yet.

New devices

Lots of new devices were installed in the house and few in the summer home. These new devices include devices like Frient Air Quality Sensors, AduroSmart Eria ZigBee Sockets, Fibaro Water Leak Detector, Few Ikea Symfonisk Gen 2 ZigBee controllers to control my house audio, Aqara FP2 Presence Detectors, SwitchBot Auto-Refill Humidifier [Review], SwitchBot Pan/Tilt Cam 3k [Review] and last but not least SwitchBot S10 Robot Vacuum [Review]. Most probably still plenty of more, but really can’t remember all the small things got during the last year!

But still one big one: as our old dump fridge broke down suddenly, I just couldn’t resist of getting a new one that with some smart features: LG InstaView Fridge

You can check my full list of devices at the device list page.

Arrival of the second electric car

At the end of summer a second fully electric car, Peugeot E-208, entered our household. This of course meant a need of a second EV charger. My old WallBox Pulsar Plus was working fine, but as it did not support configuration of two chargers, load balancing and solar charging I had to replace them both.

I ended up getting two Go-e gemini chargers along with go-e controller for load balancing. So far I can say that the choice was a spot on! Go-e supports Home Assistant through MQTT straight out of the box and has also many other great features to make it truly great. You can also checkout my review from last year!

A few words about the Peugeot E-208 and its smart features. The e-208 can be configured for Home Assistant using PSA Controller Add-on, but the whole e-208 connectivity in its current state is just awful. I truly cannot believe that a big car manufacturing company can’t get their servers and software to work. The connectivity fails many times and the mobile app for Peugeot cars is just terrible.

Energy management

Energy management theme seems to be going strong now as the energy prices seem to be bouncing around with huge difference between low and high prices. I was not able to automate my solar panel production fully last year, but the saga will continue.

Speaking of that, the Nord Pool cheapest hours implementation gained once again a new iteration and became a fully functional integration with a name of AIO Energy Management . The integration is now much easier to configure, develop and publish for users. No longer copy-pasting and changing tons of parameters through the yaml code. Anyhow, this also enables me to develop the solar panel automation as I can ‘easily’ combine cheapest hours support with the solar panel production. 🙂

The matter saga..

Matter (over Wifi) entered in my household mostly through SwitchBot devices. Matter is a good idea in paper as it defines the standard. So if the smart home hub supports matter, the matter enabled device can be integrated on it. That’s the ideal case. What I noticed during the last year is that even if the device is marketed as Matter compatible, it might not provide all its values through Matter.

Few examples: SwitchBot S10 Robot Vacuum is said to be matter compatible, well in theory that’s the case, but it only supports status (cleaning/idle) and turn it on/off. That’s only marginal amount of the features it can do. Another bad example is the Matter supported Meross Smart Plug with Energy consumption: it provides on/off functionality through Matter, but not provide energy consumption at all.

Some of issues are currently in the Matter standard itself. The standard seems to be progressing very slow. For example the energy consumption is not in the Matter specification yet at all and neither are most of the robot vacuum features either. So device manufacturers can’t really expose all the entities until Matter has specified these features into the standard.

The blog

Again, a record breaking when year measured in the amount of readers. Even though the first part of the year was a bit silent, the fall finally broke the record. On October the AU30 (active users per 30 days) finally broke through 10k. 🙂

But again stating the same as I’ve said in the previous year summaries, I’m writing this blog as a hobby and I do not have tight schedules or amount of posts I ‘need‘ to write per year/month. I write when I have time and inspiration.

Ps. I would like to hear from my readers the kind of articles you would like to see in the future? More product reviews, Home Assistant stuff, Guides or something else? Please leave a comment below and tell what kind of content you would like to read more.

What’s next..

The most important automation to continue is still the energy management, including flexible energy prices and solar power support. That compares directly to the amount of money I’ve paying to my electric company.

More automations as that’s what this is all about, making the home to match your needs automatically without any interaction. This is a constant task and usually things that could be automatised comes when needed.

My Home Assistant tablet dashboard needs a huge revamp as the section support was release last year. Another thing to do is finally finalise the blueprint dashboard.

What comes to the blog, the writing goes on obviously and hopefully I get another guest writer very soon! Can’t wait to get new sentiments about the smart home, Home Assistant and energy savings.