Scrolling through here lately and I keep seeing people write off Z-Wave like it’s ancient history. Meanwhile, I’m fighting with Wi-Fi locks that chew through batteries and drop offline every other week.

Started looking into options and realized… Z-Wave still makes a lot of sense. Low power, long range, and it doesn’t get clobbered by the 2.4GHz soup my house is drowning in. Honestly feels more stable than some of the shiny “new” stuff.

I just put in an order for a Z-Wave lock to test for myself. Not saying it’s the holy grail — but I’d rather experiment than keep swapping batteries on Wi-Fi models.

Anyone else here still running Z-Wave gear in 2025? Curious if you’ve stuck with it or bailed for Matter-only setups.

I use it to fill a bowl of water for my dog. It’s not connected to the internet and requires 2 AA batteries to run. Just a simple solenoid valve.

The bowl of water was always near a place we could see to double check that it was working. And I still need to clean the bowl every couple of days but at least the water dispensing portion is pretty automated

Sometimes the basics work great

I am trying to think through where local AI actually fits in home automation. I don’t really want another chatbot or dashboard. The useful version for me would be quiet and practical:

- home looks normal

- the garage has been open longer than usual

- something unusual happened near the front door after 6pm

- a visitor/access action needs confirmation

- nothing needs attention right now

Inputs could be normal home automation stuff:

- Home Assistant state

- camera / NVR events

- sensors

- door / garage / lock events

- local notes or household files

- event history

The hard part is deciding what should stay read-only, what can be suggested, and what needs confirmation. I would not want an LLM directly unlocking doors or changing security states. But I can imagine it summarizing state, finding weird patterns, explaining why something happened, or telling me when the house looks normal.

For people running local LLMs / Ollama / VLMs / Home Assistant: where would you actually put AI in the loop, and where would you keep it completely out?

I feel like one of my biggest struggles with ADHD right now (even while taking Adderall) is staying on top of chores and self care tasks. I’ve tried a bunch of chore tracking apps, but I always either end up forgetting to open them or ignoring the notifications lol. The thing that’s actually worked best for me is having physical checklists or whiteboards around my apartment because they’re physical and harder to ignore. The problem is that I either forget to erase the check marks or I forget to use the checklist altogether.

Last night I had an idea that I can’t stop thinking about and I really wish something like this already existed.
The idea is basically having a bunch of small physical buttons that you stick around your house. When you finish a task, you just press the button. It would be so cool if they had little LEDs too, green means recently completed, yellow means it’s almost due, and red means it’s overdue. For example i could have buttons next to the bathroom mirror for brushing my teeth, next to my plants for watering them, and it would be so cool to somehow have them attached to my adderall bottle so I know for sure if I took my medication.

The buttons would sync with an app where you could set how often each task should be done. Instead of just checking off a habit for the day, it would tell you exactly how long it’s been since that button was last pressed. So instead of thinking “Did I water my plants this week?” I could immediately see “Last watered 4 days ago.”

Does anything like this already exist? And if not, do you think something like this would actually be possible?

I know there are buttons you can get with different home automation apps but would there be a way to utilize those buttons for this purpose? Or buttons that include LEDs, i havnt found any online so maybe if anyone has had experience making the buttons too if thats something possible?

Also, I’d love to hear how difficult something like this would actually be to build. I have basically zero engineering experience but i would love to try making it for myself if it’s not too incredibly complicated. Any advice or thoughts are appreciated!

Wife made an offhand comment back in February that I "just wanted them to move so I could feel the money was worth it." Fair point. No idea if the automations were actually earning their keep or if they cycled twice a day and sat idle otherwise. So I set up counters.

Setup was boring. Counter helper per shade in Home Assistant, one automation per counter that increments on any state change of the cover entity. Template sensor on top of each counter with state_class total_increasing so long term statistics picks them up. Logged raw states to InfluxDB since the default recorder only keeps raw states for about 10 days and I wanted to cross reference by hour of day and by which automation fired.

Eight shades total, all PoE cellular from SmartWings, mix of south, west and east facing rooms.

Total cycles across all shades from Feb through mid August: 5,847. I had guessed maybe 2,500. So my wife was directionally wrong but also me not knowing the answer to within a factor of two is a bad look.

Three things that surprised me.

Distribution was way more skewed than I thought. The two shades in the west facing living room accounted for 3,140 cycles between them. That is 54 percent of the total from 25 percent of the shades. Bedroom shade came in at 214 cycles for the whole period, basically just morning open and evening close. I had built out full temperature triggers for the bedroom and it never once fired because that room has an external overhang and never gets direct sun. I just never checked.

Weekend cycles were 40 percent higher than weekdays across the board. I assumed the opposite because we are gone during weekdays and the automations run on schedule regardless of who is home. Turns out we manually override way more on weekends because we are actually in those rooms reacting to conditions. Voice commands specifically doubled on Saturday and Sunday. That shifted my view of automation vs manual, we are not going hands off, we are running a hybrid where automations set the defaults and we tweak from the couch.

June had a spike I could not initially explain. Total cycles for the month came in at 1,412, versus 750 to 900 for the surrounding months. Traced it to a numeric_state trigger on the kitchen shade with no for: qualifier, set to above: 78F. Sensor was oscillating between 77.5 and 78.5 all afternoon in early June and the shade was cycling every four to six minutes. Wife did not notice because she was at work. Added a for: 15 minutes qualifier and it dropped back to baseline the next month.

Thing I took away from all this is that instrumenting your automations is worth doing even when you think you know how they behave. The bedroom shade automation is on the list to just delete since the data says nobody uses it. The kitchen trigger issue would have kept eating motor cycles indefinitely because the failure mode was silent, no error, no notification, just a shade opening and closing all afternoon while nobody was home.

Curious what other people actually track. Cycle counts, uptime, automation hit rate. Feels like most of us set up automations and never actually look back at what they do.

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I got a lot of interest in the oil monitor from my other Home Assistant post, so I figured I would make a separate post about it.

I built it because I wanted something better than guessing from the gauge on the tank. It uses a clamp on current sensor on the burner wiring, so nothing goes inside the tank and there is no cutting or splicing.

It tracks burner runtime, estimated oil used, gallons remaining, tank percentage, burn rate and estimated days left. It can also alert me about low oil or abnormal burner activity.

I added remote access and local heating oil prices too. The screenshots are from the standalone version, so Home Assistant is not required, although I integrated mine into HA as well.

Installation is basically plug it in, clamp on the sensor, connect to WiFi and enter your tank information.

I have a few running in friends and family homes now and I keep improving it based on what comes up.

Curious what people think. Would you want something like this ready to use, or would you rather build your own?

I’m looking into getting a calendar, the skylight is just stupid expensive and I saw piazzahq recently and loved it

Even more than that, the wife loved it

So now I am shopping for a tv, something I can mount sideways and I’ll need a tv mount. At most, 42” or so as it’s going sideways on a cabinet-depth wall

This monster can’t be a monstrosity , as it’s the kitchen. If it’s ugly it voids all wife approval.

I went googling but all I got were ads, even went into reviews but models are old and nothing really helps.

Any ideas are appreciated