We got balanced ventilation installed last year, and have been very happy with the system 🙂 But we quickly found that we needed to expand it into two more rooms — the 1st floor bathroom, used as the laundry room, and the play room, which will be a bedroom at some point.

Time to fix that 🙂

I’m using a Raspberry Pi to communicate with the power equipment in my homelab rack; the UPS, ATS and PDU. For the UPS, I’m using NUT (Network UPS Tools), and for the ATS and PDU; my own PowerWalker Python library.

In this post I’ll be going through how I’ve set up the NUT server to communicate with my PowerWalker VI 1500 RT HID UPS, and NUT clients running on all other physical machines in the rack.

We’re using Tibber as our electricity supplier — we have the Tibber Pulse reading our power usage and making it available in Home Assistant, through an integration.

But Tibber also controls our heat-pump, by interfacing a Sensibo Sky. Tibber’s smart heating control takes multiple factors into account; outside temperature, power price, thermal inertia. A clever algorithm, made by clever people — it works really well 🙂

I found an easy way to “hook into” this heat control, using a simple Home Assistant automation.

We recently got balanced ventilation installed, and I have interfaced it with Home Assistant. However — the ventilation unit have three “special modes” that can not be enabled through the Modbus interface; fireplace, kitchen, and override. These can only be set on the touch panel, mobile app, or through inputs terminals on the controller.

So I repurposed an old project and made a three-relay Wi-Fi controlled module, using MQTT to send commands and receive statuses.

Then used Home Assistant to automate it 🙂

Using a few cheap sensors, a wireless keypad, Zigbee2MQTT and Home Assistant; I was able to get a basic security alarm up and running during a free afternoon 🙂