Home Assistant waters my plants

https://finnian.io/blog/home-assistant-waters-my-plants/

291 134 4 months ago

Nice! For the hardware, why didn't you considered using a Raspberry Pi?

H8crilA4• 4 months ago

I used to run HA on an RPi, but eventually migrated it to a similar NUC. The RPi eventually just wasn't powerful enough (peak compute needs), while the NUCs are still quite cheap. And you can run a surprising amount of Proxmox VMs and LXCs on barely a few cores and gigabytes of RAM.

davemp4• 4 months ago

I use an RPi 4 w/ 4GB of RAM and a 1TB usb 3.2 SSD and it flies through all my workloads. Though I don’t do any video encoding things.

mytailorisrich2• 4 months ago

Wow, not sure how to interpret your experience that a RPi wasn't powerful enough to manage watering a few plants. I can only suspect the overall software setup is massively bloated.

belthesar• 4 months ago

Cost-wise, there's a solid chance that the Pi would have been more expensive. Jeff Geerling ran some numbers (^1) on this last year, before the current chip crisis we're in, and it was bad enough already.

Home Assistant does a surprising amount of Disk I/O, if for nothing than for logs. Sibling commenters are also advising not running it on the SD card to avoid wearing it out, so there's definitely some truth here. This means we're adding a Pi M.2 hat + SSD into the mix. The Pi5 SSD kit for 256 GB, when it was available, was around $60 USD. A Pi5 with 8 GB of RAM is $130 USD. Now we need a cooler, a case that will fit the Pi5 with said M.2 hat, and a power supply. We're already well north of $250 USD, encroaching on $300, and we're not even using the core benefits of the Pi's platform. No need for GPIO pins, tightly integrated cameras or other sensors, none of that.

For all we know, the blog author did this assessment (or trusted the assessment of others, eg: Jeff) and came to the came conclusion - it wasn't worth the price of entry.

^1: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/intel-n100-better-val...

PetitPrince2• 4 months ago

I think I need more Zigbee repeaters to get a reliable mesh network, but to date I haven’t found any consumer-grade devices certified for use in NZ.

Since many devices are also Zigbee router (it's a mesh network after all), maybe some additional lightbulb for exterior would suffice ?

theshrike792• 4 months ago

Pretty much all mains powered Zigbee devices also act as routers in the mesh.

calgoo• 4 months ago

Exactly! I prefer the small power plugs that lets me control fans and other power systems as relays. Family has a habit if switching of light bulbs using light switches and i have not gotten the change approval to disable the physical switches in the house :)

richardlblair• 4 months ago

This - the move is to grab some zigbee smart plugs. Once you have HA up and running there are so many applications for these.

I have a door sensor that monitors my kids bedroom door, and when it opens it turns on a desk lamp in my room. This allows me to get to him before he gets to my partner who's sleeping with the new born.

zerof1l• 4 months ago

I wanted home assistant compatible plant watering solution that works on a solar panel and does not require being connected to the water line and is Zigbee compatible. Unfortunately, I could not find any. So I did a DIY solution: a big barrel which I manually fill with water, a 12V pump (usually sold for camper vans), some rechargeable batteries, 10W solar panel, a solar charging controller, and Tuya ZG-2002-RF switch.

atoav2• 4 months ago

An art student of mine once needed a way to electrically control precise small amounts of water. We solved that using:

  1. Water tank and gravity  
  
  2. Medical IV flow regulator¹  
  
  3. Servo hooked up to that IV flow regulator via a 3D-printed part

It worked very well. In medical applications off must be really off, so it was also quite safe in that regard as well. Her 3D-printed part had a little bit too much flex in it, but in principle this works quite well. If it is really, really safety critical I would still recommend a mechanical fallback that protects in case of power loss or when the servo fails open (e.g. bending the hose with the force of a spring if electricity is gone).

¹: see https://www.gvs.com/en/catalog/iv-flow-regulators

stinos• 4 months ago

If it is really, really safety critical

Your suggestions should be fine for hardware failure but I'd be more concerned about software failure: what if a bug in your software makes it unresponsive and stuck in the state with the flow open? Maybe a watchdog or some other system running in parallel checking for a heartbeat or a max amount of time water can be flowing?

mmsimanga• 4 months ago

I dabbled in hydroponics for some years. Due to my inability to get my Rasberry Pi and Arduino working I ended up using a 12V pump and one of those cheap $10 electric timers on Aliexpress. I estimated how much time it took for my hydroponics system to drain and that's what I set on the timer. Other people I followed had all sorts of sensors rigged up, which I would have done if I had the time and skill but I failed, so in the end it was just the timer. I too had single solar panel and battery and the system worked for over 7 years with no issues. I just replaced the pump once or twice.

kjkjadksj2• 4 months ago

There are also irrigation controllers that use a ball valve and will work fine under gravity pressure e.g. raised rain barrel. Powered via battery that lasts months and months. No home assistant of course but water usage can be estimated from expected flow and programming.

SwtCyber5• 4 months ago

This feels like one of those cases where DIY ends up being simpler than waiting for the perfect product to exist

denkmoon2• 4 months ago

Cron waters my plants :)

H8crilA4• 4 months ago

HA is essentially a better cron. It unsurprisingly uses the cron syntax where appropriate.

denkmoon2• 4 months ago

HA is monstrously complex. cron just works. The same can’t be said for my homebrew esp32 pump relay controller, but at least scheduling is never the problem.

davemp4• 4 months ago

Fun project. Though it’s kind of unreal how complicated it is to set up HA and I literally do this for a living, both embedded sw and backend web dev.

Docker compose with a zwave management server, reverse proxies for TLS, vlan isolation for the server, macvlan for HA container so it does see the host network, etc, etc. All to turn on and off a lightbulb with the sun. All the while AI is telling me to configure things insecurely.

I think when I get some more spare time, I’d like to write a statically linked program that handles a zwave controller and basic automation scripting. No IP networking needed for my lightbulbs. Then it wouldn’t feel risky to just make a system user and udev rule to give it permissions to the controller, and run with systemd.

briHass2• 4 months ago

You're making it complicated with all the VLANs. HAOS in a VM (proxmox helper scripts for one-line install), and HA has plugins for all the other things.

Just deny WAN access to the IoT junk you don't trust at the router, or for things like cameras, a separate switch for those. That usually makes sense, since they're one of the few devices that must be powered with PoE and doesn't require gig+ bandwidth. A cheap 100mbit PoE switch will handle a good number of cameras.

davemp4• 4 months ago

I’m not giving untrusted devices unfettered access to my lan and an airgapped network sounds more complicated tbh. VLANs aren’t really that bad with good networking gear.

randusername2• 4 months ago

I also feel overwhelmed with HA homelab stuff.

HA on my RPI is just not reliable, requiring a reboot 4-6 times a year for reasons I don't understand. Frustration at being in the literal dark doesn't translate to the right mindset to root cause.

What I need is an opinionated guide on minimum viable virtualization, but so much of the resources online are from folks that are homelabing maximalists.

I feel the same temptation as parent to create a spartan solution.

benmanns• 4 months ago

Same. The complexity of HA also leaves my family with a bus factor of one re: keeping the lights on.

_flux• 4 months ago

I got myself a NUC. It's been worth it: tiny, has 16 GB of memory and 504 days of uptime.

I have servers for running VMs and containers but I felt like it would be nice to have this one as a separate device. It's also easy to plug in radio devices.

xolox• 4 months ago

If you are at all comfortable with Linux system administration, manually setting up one or a handful of KVM/qemu powered virtual machines is not actually that hard at all (in my experience). If you like a GUI to guide your initial steps, "virt-manager" is pretty okay. I've been running 3-5 virtual machines for several years now based on a pretty vanilla Ubuntu Linux install (Debian would work just fine as well).

Now I do like a challenge every now and then, so I'm currently setting up Proxmox to gain live migrations and high availability for virtual machines, because I've become quite dependent on all of these services in virtual machines actually running successfully :-) even in the face of eventual hardware failure (like what happened to me in the past months).

eurekin• 4 months ago

Few years on an OrangePi - zero issues. Few months on an N100 Odroid - no issues.

vablings• 4 months ago

I have had the opposite experience; I have an old trash intel NUC with a decent SSD and a moderate amount of RAM and it runs several services (on proxmox).

- Smokeping - Nginx proxy manager (with tailscale and - copyparty - home assistant - regular samba fileserver

zer00eyz2• 4 months ago

What I need is an opinionated guide on minimum viable virtualization

Get a nuc or a mini pc: i5-8500 or better (used, ebay https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic... for a baseline of what's out there)

Ram is your friend (but prices are gross). Dont be cheap on storage.

Get an external USB drive (3/2/1 rule).

Install proxmox on said device.

Use the proxmox community scripts to install HAOS as a VM. https://community-scripts.org/categories?category=operating-...

Pass through what ever USB devices you need (or spring for POE devices ).

Enjoy your HA setup.

Proxmox is the way to go here. Once you have a working install dont over commit before you learn to: 1. back up, 2. restore. These should both be local and remote (HA can enable this to various sources).

As a bonus you now have a runtime (proxmox) that can do tons of other things (see the whole community scripts link).

I have been running HA for years now, and this method makes things a pleasure and is easy (at least if you're a nerd) and cheap (the solutions are lower power).

Larrikin• 4 months ago

The minimum viable setup is the Home Assistant Green. I run it on a slightly better ODroid, since the green did not exist at the time. Any heavy task, like using Ollama, are passed over to my far more main computer.

jabroni_salad• 4 months ago

1.get a cheap used miniPC from ebay

2. Buy a relevant dongle/antenna for the protocol you want to use. I recommend the ones from Sonoff or from the Home Assistant foundation (I started with the sonoff for zigbee, but added the ZBT-2 for matter/thread. they are both good)

3. install proxmox to the metal.

4. use tteck's install script to make the HAOS vm. Don't make the containers, make the HAOS VM specifically: https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/#home-assistant-os-vm

5. Plug in your dongle(s) and don't forget to assign them to the new VM. You should now be able to start using home assistant. If you're using zigbee, choose zigbee2mqtt rather than ZHA, it's more reliable overall.

My setup is around 2 years old and I haven't had to administrate it at all.

paranoidrobot5• 4 months ago

While you can run HA as a container. I think it's a mistake - Its more complicated and has reduced features.

I would instead recommend people use HAOS instead - either running on dedicated hardware OR as a VM. Just dont run it from an SD card if you go down the Raspberry Pi/SBC route - it will kill the card from IO cycles.

I have an IOT VLAN on my network that all the IOT bits sit in, including WIFI devices. What internet access it gets (if any) depends on the device profile.

I tried splitting things up into multiple VLANs but a whole lot of things assume just a flat network, so things stop working if you get too fancy.

93n3• 4 months ago

I go the container route, and have only had one issue: allowing HA to access my system's Bluetooth adapter. I had some ESP32s lying around, so I used ESPHome to make a Bluetooth proxy, which solved that issue.

I don't run addons though, which might be part of it.

zikduruqe2• 4 months ago

it will kill the card from IO cycles.

It might not. I have a Raspberry Pi 2 that has been running a weather station for over 12 years, and it has been on the original SD card. I have other RPi's doing dumb things around the house and I have never had an SD card failure.

YMMV and all that.

zer00eyz2• 4 months ago

While you can run HA as a container. I think it's a mistake

Just because you CAN run something in a container, does not mean you should.

HAOS exists because it is a docker run time. It is a whole ecosystem, not just the home assistant software itself.

grvdrm• 4 months ago

What router and associated configuration software are you using? I have a Eero mesh network that leaves a lot to be desired for a fiddler like me.

cameronh90• 4 months ago

Sounds like the complexity is somewhat self-inflicted?

I set up HA from scratch on a new mini PC with Proxmox and HAOS in about 30 mins having never touched either before.

For VLANs, I just used port-based VLAN to attach it to the IoT VLAN, with firewall rule to allow UI access, but Proxmox has tagging support if preferred.

davemp4• 4 months ago

There’s like 10 replies telling me it’s not actually that complex then describe an equally or more complex solution that’s probably missing some of the security or features I have. I guess I wrote “complicated to set up” when I meant “complicated stack”.

A heavyweight blob of python running in a container talking to other containers running node-js on a Linux VM on a Linux host behind layers of networking to toggle 1 bit of information over a UHF link is really complex even if it only took 1 button click. My solution just removes the linux VM.

I’m not even saying I struggled, it took me like 1-4hrs depending on if you include the non HA stuff. I can clone the repo I made, populate the secrets/gateway, and type ‘make’ to rebuild my setup on a new machine. Everything is “zero-trust” with signed SSL certs, dynamic DNS+wireguard to tunnel in from a stable url, and room for more services. It’s cool, but it’s only toggled 1 light for years.

dewey• 4 months ago

The happy path is to buy https://www.home-assistant.io/green/ and then go from there. That's what I did and it was a very smooth setup for everything. I've long resisted HA as I thought it's one extra thing to fiddle with but the whole process, the updates, adopting my devices was much nicer than expected.

I've since also bought https://www.home-assistant.io/connect/zwa-2/ and got rid of all my third party bridges (Ikea, Hue etc.). I also feel good about buying devices from them as it supports the project and the work they are doing on it.

MintPaw• 4 months ago

I've never heard about "Home Assistant Green". Seems like another step down the slippery slope of "work on my machine". First docker, than a dedicated OS, now dedicated hardware. I wonder why is Home Assistant so complex as to require all this.

Rebelgecko• 4 months ago

I went through a similar process with Home Assistant. And the kicker is that months or years down the line, you'll hit some feature that doesn't work with the Docker version (I've ran into a couple)

aconsult1• 4 months ago

I've tried using HA a couple years ago and gave up. It was too complicated to run it in a Pi4 - I'm an experienced software engineer, familiar with containers and Linux.

I was trying to get some of the IoT I have at home like pool equipment, lights, HVAC, blinds, etc. Some of the setup were an uphill battle looking for more information in forums and trying to figure out what was broken.

Recently I decided over the weekend to use Claude and write a small app that controls my pool equipment and then deployed it using Cloudflare Zero Trust (kind of a reverse VPN). What a joy! Not only I had lots of fun reverse engineering my pool equipment API (I didn't want to depend on existing libraries - which I know exist) but I managed to create a fun and custom UI with React that my kids and wife love using. For example, whenever the pool heater is on, it adds an animated flame to the UI and change the background to a red-ish color. Plus it has a bar chart that shows the pool temp progression (takes hours to heat it up) with an animated volcano colors. The theme of the app is beach/pool vibe.

I don't think anyone here would be that excited if we were using the lower-denominator that HA turns out to be. I know it's a very cool automation tool, but just not very exciting and pretty obscure to configure every equipment I have at home.

I've been thinking about writing a blog post with the details of my fun project, let me know if anyone is interested in this. So far I've done the blinds and pool equipment. Next will be HVAC and lights. Took me 1-2 weeks total for each using Claude in my spare time.

amluto2• 4 months ago

HA is an absurdly heavyweight pile of Python and Docker. Get it a real computer — a used “thin client” with 8 GB of RAM is probably less expensive than an RPi4 plus case and power supply.

finniananderson2• 4 months ago

I've been thinking about writing a blog post with the details of my fun project

I'd love to read more about this!

turtlebits• 4 months ago

"pretty obscure to configure every equipment I have at home"

HA actually makes configuring every piece of equipment and integrating them easy. If I have only 1 thing to control, then yeah, it's probably overkill.

steezeburger• 4 months ago

I run an HAOS vm via VirtualBox and then use Tailscale for a secured network.

Aurornis• 4 months ago

Though it’s kind of unreal how complicated it is to set up HA and I literally do this for a living, both embedded sw and backend web dev.

I had the same thought after I joined a local group for Home Assistant users.

Everyone always talks about a happy path where you pick the right choices, use the right setup, and everything just works immediately. More often when people come to this local group's shared Slack channel it's because they're 10s of hours into trying to set up something that appeared to be simple. Then all of the old timers remember that they, too, suffered through something similar once and share what they can remember.

I think HA can be a lot of fun for people who like to experiment and debug, but if you're not the kind to be entertained by debugging your home's operation then it can feel like a chore. Some have an easy time setting it up and then get trapped when an upgrade breaks something or they try to add a new device with less than mature support.

bravoetch• 4 months ago

HA on R-pi running for almost a decade without issues here, including moving house a few times. Sounds like you're making it difficult with that setup. Mine is connected to light switches, alarm, duckdns for outside network access, motorized blinds, garage door opener, hvac, landscape lighting. It's magically awesome and takes none of my time to maintain.

SwtCyber5• 4 months ago

This is a pretty common experience with Home Assistant

troupo2• 4 months ago

Though it’s kind of unreal how complicated it is to set up HA and I literally do this for a living, both embedded sw and backend web dev.

I just bought Home Assistant Green: https://www.home-assistant.io/green and a z-wave dongle

estimator7292• 4 months ago

I spun up a VM on my proxmox server and loaded HAOS. Job done. The only added steps involved giving the HAOS IP to my reverse proxy, now it's reachable from the outside net.

That's about as easy as it gets.

sloped• 4 months ago

I have been using HA to water my garden for 4 summers. I setup a Tempest weather station this fall, and will have some fun experimenting with using rain and temperature data collected in my back yard to make watering decisions.

butz• 4 months ago

More of this, please. Let's automate all tedious chores.

tootie• 4 months ago

I'd think most people enjoy watering their plants. Growing a garden or even just some nice indoor plants is a hobby unto itself.

barbazoo• 4 months ago

It's nice to know the plants are getting the water at the right time when they need it, when the temp is right, etc. But agree obviously it does automate some of the fun.

finniananderson2• 4 months ago

It also makes it easier to lock and leave the place without relying on neighbours :)

allenu• 4 months ago

Watering plants is also super easy once you do it regularly. You get a sense of how much water a plant needs just by looking at it and testing the soil (via moisture meter or just by touch). It's quite rewarding realizing how each plant differs.

marcogarces• 4 months ago

I love HomeAssistant, and my second time on a new home, i'm slowly getting what i want in terms of interface and devices; doing it slowly helps you plan better and execute it perfectly. I've also been watering my garden (sprinklers) and i even built my custom ESPHome device: https://github.com/mgarces/open-esp-sprinklers

julianozen• 4 months ago

Seems like a really cool thing to have hooked up to openclaw

m3kw9• 4 months ago

Don’t try that indoors

cityofdelusion• 4 months ago

After years of doing this, I determined that dumb controllers are superior for my uses. A once a week irrigation with a simple rain sensor results in the same quality lawn/beds and better can run with pretty much zero maintenance burden on the sw/hw side. The vegetable garden is even dumber, just drip lines, a hose bib, and a dumb timer that flips daily in the morning powered by AS batteries. In my apartment days I just used an elevated water container and the same dumb timer to gravity feed my garden.

I find home lab stuff has far more return on investment for like automatic blinds, lights, etc. It’s not like you can just stay inside anyways and get amazing vegetables, you still need to be on top of thing like checking for pests and disease. The automatic garden is a myth.

kjkjadksj2• 4 months ago

Yeah when I got to the point he was building a PC for this in the article it was a little shocking given the task at hand. I make do with a little $30 programmable dual zone unit that has lasted several seasons now. All I had to do was add a water hammer arrester.

SwtCyber5• 4 months ago

There's a difference between automation for reliability and automation for tinkering

ternus2• 4 months ago

I have almost everything in my house HA-automated, but anything touching the water supply is all on dumb physical valves and electrical timers. If my light switches don't work, that's annoying. If a robot vacuum doesn't run, that's frustrating. If a water valve is stuck open, that's catastrophic.

NoPicklez2• 4 months ago

Catastrophic! Calm down you're not working in a chemical plant

tamimio2• 4 months ago

I love HA, after setting it up I used an old tablet as the dashboard to control and monitor the house, plus the app. It’s very easy to setup and work with, maybe a bit convoluted in the initial setup but once done, you barely do anything until you add new sensor. You can setup a whole SCADA-like system with it, controlling your garden, power grid/solar and monitoring it, integrating CCTV and all, and it’s free. A similar industrial project I did before, SCADA and RTUs that monitored and controlled many actuators and solenoid valves and sensors, cost wise was ~$9M, and all the functionalities were implemented can be done with HA on principle.

SwtCyber5• 4 months ago

Ten years ago a lot of this would have required expensive proprietary systems or a lot of custom engineering

tamimio2• 4 months ago

Pretty much yeah, that SCADA system was in 2012 and the complexity was off the charts: electric panels, Allen Bradley expensive hardware and software, ladder/C#/MSSQL/historianDB/etc tech stack, modbus/profibus/hart protocols, it is a nightmare to maintain, even editing the HMI was a process by itself. If that project would be done now, probably won’t cost 25% of the original cost.

SwtCyber5• 4 months ago

"Find a problem for Home Assistant" is a dangerous starting point. Next thing you know you've built a small distributed system to water parsley.

lolcw• 4 months ago

A glorious feature when you need an equivalent of sixteen cray-3 supercomputers to water plants is here.

cynicalsecurity• 4 months ago

How to spot a man without wife.

My home assistant also waters my plants. She generally enjoys working in the garden.

Peanuts99• 4 months ago

Seems pretty disrespectful to your wife and women in general to be honest.

KaiserPro• 4 months ago

If you want to do this yourself

1) install HAOS, running it any other way is a step towards madness

2) get a decent zigbee controller

3) https://sonoff.tech/en-uk/products/sonoff-zigbee-smart-water...

Job done, the rest is all up to taste using either sensors or public data to infer water state.

zarmin• 4 months ago

home assistant is designed by terrorists who love cortisol. i can't believe it's by far the best home automation solution available.

russdill• 4 months ago

I use Irrigation-V5 in combination with a flow meter to manage my sprinklers. Irrigation-V5 basically tracks the amount of moisture in the soil based on humidity, the amount of sunshine, temperature, rainfall, and of course when the sprinklers turn on and add water. It feels like magic. They can go for months in the winter without running, all on their own and then pop back on when things warm up and dry out, slowly decreasing the intervals between watering as summer approaches.

Really makes me want to integrate the whole thing into an ESP32 with a display so such a thing doesn't require HA.

davebranton• 4 months ago

I made such a thing ten years ago with an ESP8226 and a basic iOS app built using HTML and javascript. It still works perfectly.

The valves were 12v solenoids from ali express, and the plumbing was from the hardware store. I almost guarantee it was far, far cheaper than this project.

bsder• 4 months ago

Automation to water the plants is okay.

Automation to determine that the thing watering the plants has failed is crucial.

This is especially true if the system is some form of setup in which there isn't a bunch of soil to buffer a couple of days of not watering correctly (like hydro- or aqua- ponics).

iosifnicolae2• 4 months ago

If you'd like to find more boards where you can flash your firmware, you can check out: https://openhardware.directory/devices/search/home-assistant...

Home Assistant waters my plants

Related Stories