Everything is working perfectly today!

Anyone else want to tempt fate?

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LOL. ba**sy. I dare you to go throw your main breaker off on 3 times fast.

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What will you do with all that free time?

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congratulations, your WAF will now be negative when you wake up

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Unacceptable! You MUST try harder, here are some recommendations -

you'll need to get:

  • a bunch of Zooz 4-in-1s, 5-10 depending upon the size of your mesh.
  • an old Schlage lock or two off of eBay.
  • maybe some poll-able Z-Wave (non-plus) GE devices.
  • Non Zigbee 3 Tuya stuff is always good.
  • Don't use smart switches! Buy lots of GE or Cree (no Sengled or Zigbee 3!) smart bulbs, replace everywhere, especially in high use areas.

Hub/Network recommendations:

  • use S0 security everywhere!!!!
  • Match your WiFi and Zigbee channels as closely as possible.
  • Store hub in warm dry plastic container inside a metal rack mount enclosure.
  • Double NAT your home router and WiFi if different, if you don't have a separate WiFi router then buy one and leave the home router's WiFi on as well.
  • Recommend frequent rebooting of hub by yanking out the power cable at the hub. NEVER shut down using the UI.
  • For device reporting the more frequent the better.. Also large history log values are good too.

Failure is ALWAYS an option!

:rofl: :scream:

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The problem is if you've done your setup correctly your partner/family may not realize things are actually automated or tech-ified, they just work. The best automations get incorporated into the daily routine with little or no effort or thought.

When everything is working, it means there's more automation to be done, even if it is not necessary. So I search for something to automate or a new rule to write so it breaks and I can keep busy. If all that fails then I do a firmware or software update on some critical piece of equipment (like my meshed network) and PAF gets reset to zero.

(PAF is a gender-neutral term)

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Yeah I prefer PAF too.. and you are correct, if things are working smoothly you clearly haven't automated enough.

My wife does complain about automations from time to time but then also complains if I take them away. She has a far more nuanced take on this then I do. She's great for keeping me grounded and thinking about how to incorporate things properly in the "real" world.

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I have tried to make the automations as "invisible" as possible. There are a few "double taps" of buttons that aren't as intuitive as a single button press but that in mainly for outlier automations. I would say in the last two years the only complaints I have heard from the Wife at home or my Mom is the late night weather alerts (necessary evil), and why did the low battery alert go off at 2:00 am.

I think the biggest thing is what happens when the hub goes down and what made me switch to Hubitat. I was out of town and my SmartThings hub decided to just do a factory reset. Even though most of what I automate is background and convivence, not having the lighting adopt at night and other things put me into hot water.

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Yep - I switched a few years ago due to the random but increasingly frequent cloud outages that temporarily stopped my routines from firing. It was incredibly frustrating and unsolvable from my end - an unreliable automation is worse than no automation. Local is definitely the way to go..

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All good suggestions!

I did finally get the new potty fan and light installed.

I had fun all morning setting up several Sonoff temperature/humidity sensors in the bedroom off the bathroom to get a stable, possibly sort of accurate, reference humidity using the Average app.

Then I created Rules to turn the fan on for:

  1. Motion in the shower enclosure.
  2. Motion in the potty closet.
  3. Humidity in the bathroom more than 3% points above average bedroom humidity.

and turn the fan off for:

  1. No motion in the potty closet.
  2. Humidity in the bathroom less than 3% points above average bedroom humidity.

This required quite a bit of activity and degraded WAF during the process. She actually used a physical switch to turn the light on in the bathroom against all standing procedures and admonitions to the contrary.

Does anyone have a good Rule to sound an alarm when someone uses the physical switch? I know I can disable that function but an alarm or siren seems more appropriate.

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It would seem to me that WAF increase in reverse proportion to the volume of loud screeching noises used to provide feedback.

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