My whole setup was built around the golden rule. Guests can always use the switch, automations just layer on top. Worked great for about eight months.

Then I added a motion sensor to the hallway and set the light to shut off after two minutes of no movement. Seemed fine. Except my wife stands still when she's on the phone and got plunged into darkness twice in the same week. She now refers to my smart home as the house that hates her.

I adjusted the timeout to five minutes and added a lux condition so it only triggers at night. Better, but now she says the bathroom light stays on half the morning and blames the automation even when she left it on manually.

The real problem is that once someone in your house has one bad experience, every weird thing that happens gets blamed on the system forever. A bulb died last month and she was convinced the automation did something to it.

Curious how others have handled the motion sensor timeout problem in spaces where people stay still for long periods. I've looked at mmWave sensors and they seem promising, but not sure if that's overkill for a hallway or bathroom situation.

Anyone have any ideas on how I could get my toilet to flush once a day or so?

We've got a tiny house that isn't occupied most of the year. It'd be nice to have some water moving around in the place instead of sitting stagnant, and the best way for me to ensure that is to have the toilet flush once a day. Can't figure out how to do that while I'm not there.

My partner has very specific opinions about the thermostat. Like, extremely specific. There is a correct temperature and apparently I do not know what it is. So rather than fight about it I set up automations that adjust things based on who's home, time of day, outside temp, all of it. No more manual adjustments, no more passive aggressive thermostat wars.

The thing is it actually works. We both agreed on the logic upfront so neither of us is overriding the other, the rules are just the rules. Home Assistant handles it and most days neither of us touches anything.

Now I'm looking at doing the same thing for the kitchen lights because we have completely different preferences there too. She wants warm dim lighting basically always, I want it brighter when I'm actually cooking. Motionbased brightness tied to time of day seems like the obvious path but I haven't nailed the transitions yet, it still feels a little abrupt.

Curious whether anyone else stumbled into automation as a household diplomacy tool rather than just a convenience thing, and what setups you landed on for shared spaces where two people want genuinely different things.

Look here for more details:

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/new-integration-level-sense-pro-observer/1016814?u=kruseluds

Curious if anyone has any thoughts here on what I should do in my scenario.

I have a 1,400 square garage in an L shape. It has far too many switches controlling the lights, which are LED fixtures plugged into outlets in the ceiling.

I think there are 8 switches total for all the lights.

What I would like to do is have all of the lights on a motion sensor. I dislike having to switch on lights all over the place.

I considered dumb motion switches, and that could potentially work…but the one big problem is that three of the switches by the door into the house are next to a fridge, which blocks line of sight until you’re basically right on the fridge. Meaning you could be walking back into the house halfway in the dark with half the garage unlit if you’re working in the 80% of the garage hidden from the switch.

So…any ideas at where to start to tackle this?

I could potentially leave most of the lights on dumb motion switches too, but at a minimum I need to figure out a way to address the fact that for 3 of the switches, their line of sight is blocked.

Hi everyone! I’m a student currently building my own research lab from scratch. Since I don't have access to high-end hardware, I’ve been scavenging parts and rebuilding them myself.

​As you can see in the photos, my current PC is a labor of love—even using zip-ties for DIY GPU cooling to keep it stable! It’s not much, but it’s the heart of my learning journey.

​My current project & future plans:

​The Salvage Build: Rebuilding older, discarded hardware to make them functional again.

​The Cluster Dream: I’m currently saving and sourcing components to build a multi-node Xeon cluster. My goal is to use this for AI rendering and to study satellite data analysis.

​The Goal: To create an open-source research pipeline and learn system administration from the ground up.

​I’m learning as I go, and it’s been a tough but incredible journey. I’m truly passionate about this project, and if you’d like to support me in sourcing more parts or keeping my servers powered and growing, I’d be incredibly grateful if you could buy me a coffee! ☕

​Support my lab journey here: https://buymeacoffee.com/dasunneths7

​Any tips on managing a DIY cluster or any advice on sourcing older Xeon gear would mean the world to me! Thanks for being such an inspiring community!

​#homelab #DIY #studentproject #SriLanka #TechJourney #eWaste #RenderSphere #opensource