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?
You can buy the sensors of aliexpress and link them with esp8266 via esphome (a home assistant addon) if you’re into it.
It’s fairly easy if you’re a tech savvy and will cost you next to nothing like 3 dollars each node which can have multiple sensors (temp / humidity / light / relay / etc).
It’s better to make dumb devices smart yourself to avoid being locked out. I literally cannot change the water level in my vacuum mopper if the server in china is down.