Hi! I’m new to home assistant and I’m wondering what would be worth the cost. A lot of the “smart” appliances seem overly expensive and automating them would only save me a handful of minutes each day. I live in canada where power is cheap, so things that save power aren’t particulary useful. A way to open/close the windows and doors sounds useful and would save me the most time, but costs thousands. A way to keep track of what is in the fridge and propose recipes to avoid food waste would be nice but I’m not entirely sure how I would setup such a system.
Does anyone have ideas of worthwhile things I could setup that would be worth the cost?
Doing temperature monitoring in each room of the house. It really lets you work out where you’re losing heat, or failing to cool in the summer, and keep things more comfortable.
I bought a 5 pack of xiaomi temp sensors from Ali express… They were like $5 each? They’re Bluetooth but you can bridge to HA using an esp32 with esphome. Really cheap way to get some resolution on how and where and when the house is heating/cooling.
I was surprised at how poorly I understood how to manage the temp of my home. Knowing really is half the battle.