When we built our passive house 8 years ago, we unfortunately neglected to put a photovoltaic system on the roof. During the construction of the house, we had to make an unbelievable number of decisions in a very short time, in addition to our extensive personal contributions. Sometimes it is good to start some projects a little later and to be able to plan them in a more relaxed way.

In the last article, I covered how I measure and save power consumption and production in our Smart Home. However, the effort is only worthwhile if the recorded data is not only stored on a hard drive but is also used for visualization and analysis. The use cases for displaying and analyzing the recorded data of our Smart Home and the tools I use for this will be addressed in the following article:

Since we live in our passive house, I became interested in the power consumption of our house. It began with the fact that I wanted to know the percentage of the heating costs of our heat pump in our total power consumption. Besides, I also found the evaluation of load peaks and the analysis of the constant current consumption very interesting. When we built our photovoltaic system, an unbelievable number of possibilities came together to analyze the output of our system.

I recently wrote about how I integrated cheap WiFi spots from Novostella into Loxone, turning our garden illumination into unbeatably low-cost smart-lighting. The instructions described in the article also apply to other lights. For example, E27 light bulbs which are used in many lamps. In the post below I will briefly explain the differences to the implementation described earlier:

Unfortunately, our non-smart garden illumination was defective, so I started the search for a replacement that could ideally be fully integrated into our home automation system. I found a lighting system that was not intended to be integrated into our home automation system, but it can be perfectly integrated with a few tricks and is also much cheaper than any competing system I have found so far.