I love playing with my HA and associated devices. I suspect that most of you reading this get a bit of a jolt every time you add and incorporate a new sensor, camera, integration and get to play with it.
I have all the door/window sensors and locks/covers, every angle of my exterior covered with cameras, alarm, network devices, appliances, sprinklers, household devices covered.
Any ideas for a new thing I can play with?
Bathroom fan connected to a humidity sensor is my (and my family’s )absolute favorite automation. I spent so much time on my system setting up sensors, configuring things, etc, but nothing gives me more delight than when I’m taking a shower, the fan kicks on automatically and then shuts off automatically.
I haven’t had to deal with foggy mirrors in years!
What does your logic look like for the humidity uptick? I tried the trending integration (or something like that), but couldn’t get it to work properly. Does the fan trigger on a sudden spike in humidity? Do you compare “ baseline” values with another sensor in another room?
I originally completely over engineered it by tracking the YTD humidity and adjusting for the difference between the current average and last year’s and then someone mentioned just putting a second humidity sensor outside the bathroom. So I just do that. If the bathroom humidity spikes about 10% over the humidity outside the bathroom, it turns on and then it turns off at a static number.
It sounds wasteful, but I already had a sensor in my primary bedroom, and the thermostat is right outside the kids bathroom so I didn’t have to install anything new.
I then added a cooldown to make sure it doesn’t end up in a loop where it keeps turning on and off (that’s never actually happened but it seemed like a good idea).
I also use it as a way to control the lights. I use motion detection to turn on the lights, but they used to turn off while someone was in the shower. Now it checks to see if the fan is on and if it is, resets the motion detection timer.