- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Title text:
It’s important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.
Transcript:
[A store salesman, Hairy, is showing Cueball a dehumidifier, with a “SALE” label on it. Several other unidentified devices, possibly other dehumidifier models, are shown in the store as well.]
Salesman: This dehumidifier model features built-in WiFi for remote updates.
Cueball: Great! That will be really useful if they discover a new kind of water.
Source: https://xkcd.com/3109/
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welll… devils advocate… i could see the wifi being used so the device can be incorporated into the home automation system [climate control]. its not about dehumidifying, its solely about engaging the dehumidifying as needed.
Yeah, or the manufacturer bricks the device bcz they want to sell you a new one.
That’s why projects like this are great: https://github.com/Hypfer/esp8266-midea-dehumidifier
My Midea Cube dehumidifier can never be bricked and will never send data outside of my home. It talks to Home Assistant via MQTT and nothing else.
A dehumidifier that doesn’t have any wifi can’t be bricked either.
Yeah but I want to control it with the average humidity from sensors across my house
It’s almost like you can just set the dehumidifier to a certain humidity level and fan speed and then never touch the settings again. That’s what I did with my humidifier. It’s as dumb as a box of rocks, but it quits working during the summer when the humidity goes up and then turns back on the rest of the year with zero interaction besides adding more water
You can, but it only measures the humidity at the (de)humidifier. I want it to account for the state of the whole house.
1st world problems
Ones that have first world solutions
Wahhh
Lmao
I mean, yeah. I wouldn’t have found that project and gone to the effort of using it if a simple dehu was all I needed. I wanted something I could control with my local home assistant install, and you can’t just hard power cycle a dehumidifier, it kills them.
Ok
What is “hard power cycle” a dehumidifier? Have you never used a normal dehumidifier before or something?
Literally nobody is doing this shit.
“Nobody” like in “SONOS literally bricking its old devices and telling you to buy a new one”? https://www.whathifi.com/news/sonos-explains-why-recycle-mode-bricks-old-speakers
They didn’t brick anything. They gave a button for you to get a discount if you did it yourself
But they can close their server and render the device inoperable, just like what happened to a water sensor I had.
That’s why it’s important to make sure the device can also run purely locally (e.g. via HomeAssistant).
(Not meant as a rebuke, just good advice for the future)
Exactly this. The device either needs to be open enough that it can easily integrate to HA without internet access.
Or dumb enough that I can mod it with an ESP.Anything that has to go through the manufacturer’s servers goes in the bin, the risks of data theft/rent seeking are too damned high.
They didn’t brick it, but the Nest thermostats that customers bought before Google acquired the company will be offline only now. No opening of the firmware, so they’ll become useless at some point, and already have lost major functionality.
Literally false and you’re retarded.
Hey bud, no need to attack someone’s intelligence. You can pick apart their argument with sources like a big kid but nobody logged in to see you be a butthead online today.
Bullshit asymmetry principle, been there done that. Name-calling serves a small but real purpose in the right contexts.
Doofus.
Hey bud, no need to attack someone’s intelligence. You can pick apart their argument with sources like a big kid but nobody logged in to see you be a butthead online today.
Dehumidifiers already do that. They’re equipped with hygrometers that kick the machine on or off depending on the relative humidity. It’s old tech and it’s pretty reliable, wifi isn’t really necessary for it.
The built-in hygrometer’s not necessarily going to be as good as a well-designed home automation system, especially if the fan’s not running all the time, so it has to wait for damp air to diffuse into the machine. It also lets you do other things, like not bother turning the dehumidifier on if there are open windows if you’ve got some way to detect that, or report the humidity to something that will graph it. It’s not stuff that most consumers will care about, but a microcontroller with WiFi like the ESP8266 or ESP32-C3 costs less than an accurate hygrometer chip, so it doesn’t make much, if any, difference to the final price, particularly if the product was going to use a microcontroller anyway.
It’s ironic that you can implement all this cool automation for a device but in the end still have to manually lug water to it.
Well it’s a **de-**humidifier. You need to lug water from it. For the dehumidifier in my basement, we have it hooked up to a hose that takes the water right down the drain.
But I do take your point, it is pretty funny.
Like how every source of power is still steam since before the industrial revolution.
Just most sources of power. Photovoltaic, wind and hydro aren’t steam based.
Almost no cars, trucks, or tractors are steam based anymore. I believe most ships are ICE as well, not to mention rockets, and animal/muscle power. As such I’d need a very deep analysis of the situation to believe any claim. (deep because in an ICE a large part of the power comes from burning fuel producing steam, so we can start debating how much of an ICE is steam - have fun).
In any case my local electric utility generated more power from wind than all customers used last year, so I can make a good claim most of my power isn’t from steam. If your utility isn’t in the same situations or close you should be demanding they get with the times.
And your moms power is hip based.
I’m not going to knock her putting them to good use! It’s done well by her so far. 👍
a microcontroller with WiFi like the ESP8266 or ESP32-C3 costs less than an accurate hygrometer chip
No it doesn’t. Those micros go for $1-2 bulk, but capacitive hygrometers are 10x cheaper.
I can get a board from AliExpress with an ESP32-C3 on it with free shipping for £1.10, so I’m not inclined to believe the £0.765 unit cost for a 5000-part reel from Mouser is really the cheapest way to get them in bulk as the other parts on the same board and the shipping have to cost something.
The cheapest hygrometer that Mouser sell is £0.748 per unit for a 10,000-part reel, and its datasheet says not to leave it for more than 60 hours in greater than 80% relative humidity (which is a pretty likely scenario for a dehumidifier) as it’ll drift, and if it happens often, it’ll age faster. You need to spend more to get rid of that restriction. I’ll concede that the accuracy penalty if you cheap out isn’t as bad as I thought - I’d not actually looked at a datasheet to see how badly modern hygrometers would drift, I just knew that they did - so plenty of manufacturers wouldn’t care, but the parts are still comparable prices, not a factor of ten like you’re claiming.
but a microcontroller with WiFi like the ESP8266 or ESP32-C3 costs less than an accurate hygrometer chip
Ok, two things.
First, the cost of the Wi-Fi chip is clearly not the issue here. The real expense/concern is the effort and software mechanisms needed to secure that network connection. Connecting to the Internet is easy, securing that connected device is hard.
Secondly, at some point you still need the hygrometer, there’s no way around that. Either your dehumidifier is tracking humidity, or your home automation system needs to track humidity. And you can’t like… get that data from the web somehow, you need a local sensor, and it will generally only make sense to have it in the same room as the dehumidifier (meaning not necessarily where other smart home components are set up).
So, first off, smart devices shouldn’t need to connect to the internet, only the local network. I have everything connected to Home Assistant, and then for access outside the house I have HA connected to the internet, meaning I only have one point I need to secure.
On your second point, I think the poster above was talking about having both an in-built as well as wifi-accessible external sensor. It makes it possible to have a more powerful dehumidifier in one space, running to a lower humidity than needed based off what’s going on in other rooms. Then have that air circulated by other fans, etc.
You’re missing my point. It’s likely that the cheapest way to design and build a dehumidifier these days will already include a microcontroller interpreting results from a digital hygrometer because these components are cheap and easier to work with than purely electronic/electromechanical designs with no microcontroller. The cost of switching from a non-WiFi/Bluetooth/Zigbee microcontroller to one with one or more of these networks is negligible, and once you’ve got it, it’s not meaningfully more expensive to pay a software engineer to expose the on/off switch and hygrometer readings via that network and have the marketing people write Smart! Now with WiFi! than it is to skip it and pay the marketing people to come up with some other nonsense to put on the box. If you care about security as little as the average IoT vendor does, then it’s nearly free to turn a dumb device into a smart one, so if it makes a handful of extra people buy the device, manufacturers will make things smart. For a dehumidifier, there are reasons why a handful of people will prefer a smart one, so smart dehumidifiers get made.
It’s likely that the cheapest way to design and build a dehumidifier these days will already include a microcontroller interpreting results from a digital hygrometer because these components are cheap and easier to work with than purely electronic/electromechanical designs with no microcontroller.
Well this part is definitely not true. A microcontroller and Wi-Fi chip are definitely more expensive than a wire, a variable resistor and a knob, which is all a purely electro-mechanical system would need in addition to the hydrometer.
The fancy digital version wouldn’t be a lot more expensive, but it certainly wouldn’t be the cheapest way to go.
That said, I think you’re right that most companies will opt to go the fancy digital route to try to sell a “smart” product with more features. But then I expect there will also always be companies that manufacture simpler, cheaper products as well.
The cheapest hygrometers these days only have a digital output, and a wire and a potentiometer aren’t going to be able to query an i2c bus to ask the hygrometer what it’s measured without the help of a microcontroller (and the microcontroller might be cheaper than the potentiometer anyway depending on the specific model of each - have you actually looked at the 2025 prices of things before making assertions about what they cost?). The analogue component of a hygrometer that actually does the measurement gives fairly small changes to the resistance/capacitance (depending on the kind of hygrometer), so the results need amplifying. If you’re measuring on the same chip, you can get away with a simpler amplifier and digitally compensate for any nonlinearity, whereas to get a strong enough signal to make it to the rest of an analogue circuit without much degradation, you’d need an amplifier that ends up being more complicated than doing everything digitally.
Look, I’ll be honest with you, I’ve never built a dehumidifier (I’m sure you’re shocked). I don’t know what exact components tend to be used. What I do know is that I have a fairly new dehumidifier and we have another one from probably the early 80s. Somehow they both work. Again, I’m not sure what components were used in the older model, but given the age I’d be very surprised if the electronics it uses would be more expensive to manufacture than the newer one.
Really, I think the idea I’m trying to get across is just that you can always aim lower. Sometimes the goal isn’t achieving perfect precision, but rather achieving something good enough. Take toasters for example, most toasters don’t have a timer at all. They have a little piece of metal almost touching a contact. When you turn the toaster on, that metal heats up and it bends until it touches that contact, ding toast is done. And when you turn the little dial from light to dark it just moves that piece of metal slightly further from the contact. My point is, it’s not exact, it won’t be the same on every toaster, and it will probably shift over time. It’s a low tech solution for something that could absolutely be done in a more modern, more precise, and still inexpensive way (a simple timer). But it’s cheaper and simpler to just do it the old way, and for many applications, that’s fine.
Hell, I’m certain there are dehumidifiers on the market that don’t have any kind of humidity sensor at all. Even simpler…
And how does a well designed automation system measure how much moisture in the air? There must be some kind of measuring device that measures moisture, a moisture scope! Ooh wait let’s latinize it to make it sound more impressive and sophisticated a hygro…me…ter… oh… uh… this is embarrassing.
In the UK, it’s common for electric showers to be on a separate isolator that needs to be turned on before they’ll heat up, and it also activates an extractor fan, and most people turn it off again when they’re done showering. It’s pretty simple for a home automation hobbyist to swap the regular isolator switch for a smart one, and then their system can know when they’re about to shower and activate the dehumidifier immediately. This can be much better than waiting ten minutes for enough humidity to diffuse into the dehumidifier for the humidistat to activate then waiting another ten minutes for the cold side to cool enough for any dehumidification to start.
I didn’t say a home automation system would be measuring the humidity and reacting. The opportunity to do better comes from the potential to be more proactive if you can figure out a way to tell a computer about impending humidity.
But dehumidification doesn’t need to be proactive, it’s entire point is to kick on when there’s too much humidity and turn off once it gets to where it’s set to. This is the kind of building a solution to a problem that doesn’t actually exist.
And you’re vastly underestimating how quickly diffusion works, especiallu for water vapor in air. When I take my shower in the morning the air very quickly saturates with humidity. I don’t have a very dry half of the room and a very humid half of the room. The entire room is humid. It doesn’t take 10 minutes for the humidity to diffuse into the dehumidifier. And then I leave the bathroom door open after which the humidity very quickly dissipates and equalizes the relatively high humidity of the very small bathroom into the comfortable humidity of the very large everywhere else that the small amount of humidity will have a negligible impact on.
I’m failing to see how putting more unnecessary stuff between the hygrometer and the cooling loop of a dehumidifier makes it better.
I was going to share a graph from when I put a DHT20 hygrometer in my bathroom to prove to my family that the humidity was the cause of the mould and they should stop turning the dehumidifier off when its built-in hygrometer said it should be running, but unfortunately, it was long enough ago that Home Assistant decided I no longer need my one-every-ten-seconds readings and now only shows hourly readings, which aren’t enough to prove my point here. You’ll just have to take my word for it that when I did this test, I was surprised to find that although the humidity at the other end of the room started rising quickly after the shower was turned on, it peaked fifteen or twenty minutes after it was turned off again because diffusion without something like a fan or a draught moving the air around can be really slow.
My bathroom’s a weird shape as it’s long and thin and has a weirdly high ceiling at one end, so it’s not going to have typical airflow, but it is a real bathroom that really exists, and I did have data in the past showing it dried out faster if I manually turned the dehumidifier to maximum (so it would run even if its hygrometer said not to) ten minutes before turning the shower on than if I did it immediately before turning the shower on. Whether I’m going to shower in ten minutes is something I can know but a hygrometer can’t. This isn’t even really related to whether the dehumifier is smart as mine isn’t and I can operate its switch as easily as I could operate a smart switch, and my shower isn’t electric, so there isn’t a switch I need to operate before using it that could be made to do two jobs
It sounds to me like your problem is human error, not the lack of a smarter machine. You can’t engineer your way around people being morons. The greatest engineering minds have figured that out years ago.
To steel-man the argument some more, if you have variable-rate electricity, it could turn on when electricity is cheap.
This can be done with something like Zigbee. Or even simpler: you hook a non-connected device up to a “smart” power socket. No need for the device itself to talk to the outside world.
The solution to too many unnecessarily-connected devices is more connected devices?
The solution is not more but different connected devices so I can decide for myself what needs to be connected and by which protocol. Get the dumbest device on the market, no wifi, no internal clock, maybe not even a humidity sensor and then, if and only if I need to remote control it, for example to put it on a schedule, I can use the cheapest “smart” device on the market to connect it to an in-house machine that can turn it on and off.
Now you’re getting it!
deleted by creator
You still have to have some device connected to the internet. This just transfers the problem from the humidifier to the outlet.
Zigbee is local and if you really wanted to you can use Home Assistant 100% offline it will be just neutered and basic.
im not sure why all these people jumped from ‘wifi’ to ‘internet’ as if they were the same thing. no one should be exposing their automation devices directly to the interwebs
Sadly, many wifi-enabled devices only work with some proprietary cloud-service and even if not, they’re only one configuration error (or intentional backdoor) away from talking to the outside. Better have something that isn’t physically able to talk to the internet no matter how badly I fuck up its configuration and my firewall.
Clearly I just trust my abilities to disable a devices internet access in my router more than you. I also know that my risk factor is really low, because I’m not a journalist or a politician.
As well, I only buy smart devices that I can lock down, brands like LIFX & Shelly that have cloud services, but don’t require you to connect to them for the device to function over LAN.
Honestly, having any of these vulnerable devices on your network is exposing your whole network, assuming the network is connected to the web.
Your best off using either a separate network for your smart devices with its own router, or setting up a vlan to keep your smart appliances and actual computers separate.
In this case the OP was explicitly about internet connectivity
I run home automation with lights, switches, outlets, heaters and some more and not a single device has internet access. They all use Zigbee (a simple radio protocol) to talk to homeassistant which is open source and hosted on a machine that lives under my desk.
Separating tasks between the dehumidifier and outlet has the advantage that each individual device can be a lot simpler, leaving less attack surface. My power outlet can’t read the humidity sensor, it doesn’t need to talk to an external server, it doesn’t even need to know that the thing connected to it is a dehumidifier. It’s just a chip that receives a radio signal and toggles a relay on or off. That’s it.
Separating the two concerns also lets me replace the devices separately if one breaks or my requirements change. If I suddenly need wifi or bluetooth instead of Zigbee or if it’s for some reason no longer supported by homeassistant, I can just replace a 9€ outlet instead of the whole dehumidifier that could get bricked by the proprietary app losing support.
Home automation is still a dark art as far as the common person is concerned. Full of fear mongering from the media.
Much like 3D printing was very mystical and full of “oh no 3d printed guns!” We have gone full appliance with 3d printing and it’s no longer gatekeeped by geeks in their basements.
I’m glad I still have at least one hobby that hasn’t gone mainstream and I can still geek out on ESPHome.
You could do all that without internet connectivity, just sayin.
who said anything about internet connectivity? wifi != internet
🙄
Because times when electricity is cheap coincide with the need for lowering humidity?
Some places do electricity costs in 30 minute periods. If you know cost will spike when everyone gets home, and the sun sets, then running early makes sense. Other times, holding off for an hour might be more useful.
That’s the feature they sell. But, its real purpose is to monetize your data and/or lock you into some sort of ridiculous subscription service and/or run ads.
That’s pretty much ubiquitous for “smart” devices.
That’s right, this would mean that the device has an api to activate or deactivate it through WiFi by sending it commands and I can make it unable to connect to the outside internet right?
Or I can only activate it with the proprietary app that doesn’t even have a working schedule?
Connecting to WiFi is good when I have full control but not when the manufacturer does
Yeah, devices that can run fully local are the best. They can be integrated into Home Assistant (or similar), with full control over them. No reliance on a remote server or proprietary app.
Johnson. You’re hired!
Dehumidifiers aren’t there to make your house more comfortable though, they are there to keep (usually basements or garages) from growing mold. In fact they usually heat up the space they’re in. So unless you want to have a log of humidity, there’s stop no reason to automate it over WiFi, since the humidity setting on the unit is automatic.
As others have said, an alert if the tank is full would be legitimately useful, for a model that doesn’t have a drain line.
deleted by creator
dont be dictatatin’ my humidity comfort level.
But he is right though, you should be using your air conditioner not dehumidifier for climate control, it works better for that purpose. Watch this video to learn why
and youre both wrong for assuming the temperature and humidity are the only reasons to want to control this device. It literally generates water as output… god forbid my home automation wants to manage that output.
Better solution: smart plug
Meanwhile here I am installing ESP32C3’s into everything in my house to automate everything.
I can turn on my floor heat, hallway light, or even open a vent from an app on my phone. And bonus, no shady manufacturers to spy on me. Just China.
that vent thing is surprisingly clever, thumbs up 👍
Hey thanks, I’ve got tons of cool projects and gifs like these, and I love to share them and read the comments, but I don’t know where to post them on Lemmy. I used to post them to Reddit but they started shadowbanning my github for some reason. Didn’t even find out until the ESP32 mod messaged me and was like “we can’t even manually approve your posts”.
What about [email protected]?
Or if you are using Home Assistant you could post in [email protected]
There is a Lemmy community search function here if you want to check other options: https://lemmyverse.net/communities
What about [email protected]?
I tried there but my posts never showed up. Tried twice. Not sure what I’m doing wrong. I’m on old.lemmy.world so it looks like old reddit.
That’s odd. How far did you get? Any error?
Federation from your instance Lemmy.world to the instance the community is on (programming.dev) is healthy, so that doesn’t seem to be the issue.
My guess would be that you’ve tried to upload an image that is over the size limit - I think this is imposed by your own instance (Lemmy.world), and I’m not sure what the size limit is but I think 5MB per image is pretty common. If you drop the image size or upload elsewhere then link it, does that work?
I just hit submit and it spat me back out to the new posts, but mine wasn’t there.
I wasn’t trying to directly upload an image, just directly link to an imgur gifv.
maybe the frontend is buggy. did you try with the default frontend?
Hmm odd. Maybe just try again?
I just installed motorized dampers in my crawl space using Shelly smart relays! Now I have an automatic schedule so I’m not cooling rooms that aren’t in use (like the bedrooms during the day and the lower level of the house at night). Already seen significant power savings!
It would be a lot more difficult to hide a backdoor on a bare ESP device, than a proprietary Tuya one, just putting that out there. Regardless, I still block internet access from my ESPHome devices, because I don’t want to feel like I need to constantly be on top of updates, that can cause things to break at times. I do them every couple months when I have the time to sit down and make sure everything’s still working, or roll it back where it’s not.
Can you flush toilets tho
I can do that but I don’t wanna - Bart Simpson
I got new appliances a couple weeks ago and they’re all “smart”. Turns out a smart microwave just sends you a phone notification when it’s done. By default.
As someone with multiple people living in the house, I can confidently say this is the dumbest “smart” feature ever. Promptly disabled.
Any appliance with IoT is a value-subtract.
They do it so in the future they can monetize you in perpetuity in some way
I can see value in HVAC IoT. Away from home and there’s a cold spell? Turn up the heating so your pipes don’t freeze, but also run it higher when electricity is cheaper (if you have variable pricing).
I don’t think I’d want my microwave, washing machine, or toilet to have IoT features though.
My toilet sings when I lift the lid or sit down. I kind of wish I could upload a new song after all these years
Wtf
For that price, does it at least wash and dry your ass automatically? I can’t imagine paying 10k for a toilet for lights and music lol
American toilets get Singing toilets before bidets.
I want my washing machine to notify my phone when a cycle completes… But maybe not quite that much
Mine chimes a quaint little song. It’s enough because it can be heard pretty much anywhere in the house unless I’m in the basement. If I’m not home, the notification wouldn’t be particularly useful - I might as well just check when I get home.
I mean the idea isn’t the absolute worst. I just don’t think it’s a huge QoL improvement either.
Any decent heating system will have a thermostat which will activate the heating when it’s getting cold. Also no need for internet to be able to setup the time when electricity is cheaper. It’s not like it’s something you need to do regularly. Setting this all up directly on the heating system works well enough.
With day ahead pricing it changes… Daily.
Most people tend to stay in the same room (or a neighbouring room) when they’re microwaving something. They could probably save on the cost of having a full-blown computer with wifi inside the microwave by just having the noisy thing from an alarm clock. But, ah, the fuck do I know?
Some 90’s microwaves actually used some chips to measure humidity and using a little reference table adjust how long certain foods need to cook for, for instance, popcorn can be popped perfectly without burning and almost without leftover kernels if you can measure how much water is being released. The same goes for cooking frozen meats, vegetables, and so on.
But what we get in modern ones instead are horrendous touchscreens, simple timers that never quite match the food they promise to work on, and Wi-Fi.
You gotta spend for the moisture sensors and other fancy shit that actually works. We moved into a place with one of those microwaves and we are dreading when it breaks (I think it’s like 3k for a new one)
a full blown computer, depending on how one defines the term, is so cheap that they are available in disposable pregnancy tests. This shouldn’t be a thing because of the E waste and inefficiency but it’s how things are.
My appliances are ‘smart’ but I didn’t bother actually connecting them to my WiFi. I guess preheating the oven remotely could be cool(?) but nah.
The stuff I do use…
The microwave above the stove can talk via Bluetooth(no app or phone involvement at all). Turn on a burner and you can set it to turn on the light and/or vent fan. Another nicety is being able to set the clock on the stove with the full keypad and it just syncs to the microwave.
The only smart thing I’d want an oven to do would be to turn itself off. That’s it, really. Did I leave the oven on after I left the house? Easy fix. Otherwise everything else is pretty much useless.
I don’t know, I wouldn’t mind also being able to tell it to start to preheat while I’m on my way home. Would save a chunk of time if I could literally walk in the door and throw the food in the oven without the extra wait for it to preheat which is usually long enough to be annoying but not long enough to do anything else.
Remote preheating sounds like a terrible idea. What if you mistakenly left something in there?
we need to add cloud connected cameras! oh and AI detection, that prevents you turning it on even if it’s empty, but also if there’s no network or if you need to do your yearly password update
Who mistakenly leaves things in an oven?
Well, there was at least that one time
My stove won’t preheat, I guess because it’s a safety issue. Apparently you can set a remote start capability ahead of time that gets reset if you open the over door. But I’ve never tried it, since that seems like a lot.
How long are people microwaving things to the point where that is useful??!
if it don’t complete under a Tiktok I ain’t waiting!
/s
You joke but attention spans are so pitifully short after the brain rot exacerbated by rapid-fire on-demand content that I’m sure plenty of people have started a microwave, wandered away, and completely forgot about it.
As someone who hates appliances beeping, I love push notifications
I’m so tired at things beeping at me
I’ve looked into many WiFi dehumidifier’s and the one thing I wanted from it was to notify my phone if it’s full. None of them do that. All they do is let you change speed and stuff. Nothing that is important to me. I just want to know if I need to go to the basement and empty it or not.
Right? Like half of what I want from these things is when is the battery low? When is the outbox full? When is the feeder empty? And metrics to verify the device is generally operating safely.
Controlling the device? We’ve known how to do that for 50+ years. Help me maintain the device.
I put mine on a zigbee plug into my home assistant (docker on nas), and created an automation to notify me when the power consumption drops below 1 W or so (lower than when it’s only running the fan when the hunidity is near setpoint). All local, works so far.
That’s really interesting, i was looking into Zigbee plug documentation, could not find if i can program them myself. Do i need to use their propritery app for whatever it does ?
How did you integrate the plug into existing home automation system ?
I’m using “home assistant” and add them there via the zigbee integration.
Edit: I have the Nous zigbee sockets, never used any other app than home assistant to do anything with them. They also have a small button with a light so you can still switch them on/off without any app. Via home assistant you can read out various info like power, current etc
I feel you, trying to find a smart gadget that is actually smart in 2025 and not just a data collector is nearly impossible. Learning to DIY a lot of these projects. Throw one of these or similar in there with a little control board set to email you if 0 changes to 1 or w/e
I need to look into this and see if I can have it send me a text or something when it’s full. Another diy project to add to the list.
This is the around the long way method, but it’ll start you on a crippling hobby to instrument your entire life.
Raspberry Pi home assistant zigbee USB zigbee water sensor.
you could stop here at notifications.
or
Descend into madness, put a small ac submersible pump into your dehumidifier tray with a smart outlet. When the sensor trips full, have it run the submersible pump for x minutes.
Jokes on you I have like 5 raspberry pi’s that aren’t doing anything labeled future projects.
Hey if your list of projects isn’t insurmountable what are you even doing with your life?
Most carriers have an email to sms gateway address Usually your [email protected] or similar.
https://aeotec.com/products/aeotec-water-sensor-7-pro/
This little thing is a beast :)
Do they at least tell you how wet your wifi is?
Haha no they don’t which is why I went with one that didn’t have WiFi to save like 20$
Pet Wirecutter, Midea and Frigidaire both have smart options that have full bucket notifications. It’s baffling that they don’t advertise that feature in their product listings, though.
Welp if they don’t advertise it I’m not going to buy it. I bought the “dumb” Frigidaire because the smart features they list are just turn on and off and fan speed. Why wouldn’t they list full bucket ffs. Oh well time to diy solution it.
Do they have a model with AI?
Shh shh shh, don’t give them ideas.
Or Alexa?
But does it have AI?
You joke but my dehumidifier has an automatic comfort mode of some sort.
I guarantee that next run will have that button with screen print AI something something above it instead.
If I can turn it on remotely, that’s a good feature. I have solar, I want it to work when the sun is out and I’m producing excess energy.
Yes, I know I can use other peripherals to do this (sometimes) but its always nicer if its just built in so I don’t need to waste carbon on other things.The only thing I want when manufacturers add wifi to these things is to appeal to open source principles like allowing us to connect to it and communicate with it openly and not tie it down to some cloud service they run.
Why not plug a dumb dehumidifier into a Home Assistant controlled outlet?
Yes, this is generally what can be done. Disadvantages include:
- having to buy yet another device
- knowing which dehumidifier will start working as soon as it gets electricity. The ones sold in my country are all no name brands with little information if they will work or not and few spec sheets.
I feel like I’d benefit from a smart dehumidifier.
I’m on a Time Of Use tariff where my electricity is very cheap at night. I’d like to be able to schedule for it to come on for those 5hrs in the winter to take the moisture out of my shed-office. It achieves nothing to put it on a smart meter as you have to physically press go on the dehumidifier
Unless you have an even dumber dehumidifier that starts working the moment you plug it in.
Yeah, I wish I did but alas not
Just use a smart timer with a dehumidifier that either doesn’t have a switch, or has an analog one that can stay in the on position when power is off
Just use a power timer or whatever those devices are called.
They just said the smart timers/meters don’t work. Maybe a non internet one with some regular timers. I have grow lights that have 12, 6, or 3 hour timers that repeat the start time daily as long as a power outage doesn’t reset them.
Lower tech solution that would probably work for them, but someone would still have to make it. Not sure if they exist but wouldn’t be surprised if they do.
You need a smart button pressing device. Something like :
I have not used this personally, but I have a home assistant setup that does operate based on real time energy prices and it’s awesome.
Hah, that’s a cool solution [no pun intended]
I guess you have one with a digital on switch? Because every appliance I’ve ever owned with an analogue power switch can be left in on state for things like this.
Yup, spot on, I didn’t explain it clearly enough but how you articulate it is better: it does indeed have a digital “On” switch so just giving it power doesn’t achieve what I need
There must be some way to remove the “smart” controller from a device and replace it with a dumb one, like an arduino or something. I want to lobotomize these devices.
I bought a washer that has wifi connectivity. It want to texts me or something when the cycle is finished and doesn’t even seem to have a ‘play a loud beep when done’ option. How does this make any sense at all?
My brother in christ, you bought the machine
I think we aren’t yet used to machines fucking us over in unexpected ways for that sweet sweet spying/ad revenue.
Like, who would have asked 10 years ago “will my TV show extra ads?”. Now it’s hard to get one that doesn’t have them. And dishwashers are next
How does this make any sense at all?
I bought a washer that has wifi connectivity.
Ok sure. What I really did was buy a new washer that was on sale and I got $100 off. Maybe I will have it connect to my neighbors WiFi, since they never secured it.
I’m still trying to figure out my network settings so that I can have my IoT one one network while still being able to access my home assistant from the other network.
Unfortunately, my ISP is also my cable company, and I have to use their modem/router combo else the cable boxes won’t accept the cable signal. I’m using my own wireless access point (which also doubles as a switch for the handful of Ethernet devices I have), and it can split off a separate SSID, but that’s not really doing much.
I have a separate IoT network. It’s basically just a guest wifi for IoT. Anything coming in on that network gets a VLAN tag and only previous & established connections can get out. Honestly, it’s kinda a pain in the ass with homeassistant because I keep HA on the other network so I have to manually find devices. It might be easier to just block it at the ip level or blacklist outgoing ip ranges to Tuya or whatever.
I have HA on a separate VLAN from IoT devices and have set up mDNS reflection so it can find them.
I mean there’s heavy water
which we already know of, innit ?
I work at a dispensary. In theory this could actually be helpful for my job.
In theory the IoT could be secure. -In theory.
There really is an xkcd for everything.
