This repository is the live, version-controlled configuration that runs the house — every automation, dashboard, integration and helper, committed to git and backed up nightly. The whole setup is deliberately local-first: lighting, alarm, cameras, voice and heating keep working without the cloud, the more involved logic lives in Node-RED, and long-term history is kept in InfluxDB well past Home Assistant's recorder window. It's public so anyone can borrow the ideas or patterns for their own setup.
| Component | Detail |
|---|---|
| PVE | Proxmox VE — 2× Beelink S12 Mini PC (Intel N100, 16GB DDR4, 500GB SSD) |
| HA | Home Assistant OS — Proxmox VM |
| NAS | TrueNAS SCALE — N100 Mini PC (32GB DDR4, 500GB SSD), MainPool (2× mirror, 4× 8TB, ~10.88 TiB usable) |
| Network | MikroTik router + 6× managed switches/APs; wireless managed via MikroTik CAPsMAN |
| VLANs | Home · IoT · Work · Guest · Mgmt · Stack |
| DNS | Pi-hole × 2 (Proxmox LXC primary + TrueNAS app replica) |
| Cameras | Frigate NVR — Proxmox LXC, recordings on USB 3.0 RAID 0 enclosure |
| Monitoring | Zabbix — TrueNAS hosted; InfluxDB + Grafana — TrueNAS apps |
| Prox3 (Daire) | Intel NUC (i3-7100U, 4GB RAM, 256GB SSD) running encrypted Proxmox — connected via WireGuard |
| Integration | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Alarmo | Multi-zone alarm with Zigbee sensors |
| Zigbee2MQTT | Zigbee device bridge — all household lights, dimmer switches, motion & contact sensors |
| Music Assistant | Multi-room audio — TuneIn (radio), Subsonic/Navidrome (local music), gPodder (podcasts) |
| Frigate | Local AI camera NVR — person/cat/fox/vehicle detection |
| go2rtc | Low-latency camera stream server (built into Frigate) |
| Reolink | Doorbell camera — doorbell press events only; recording and detections handled by Frigate |
| Immich | Self-hosted photo library — Proxmox LXC, data in TrueNAS dataset |
| LLM Vision | AI camera analysis via Google Gemini |
| Integration | Purpose |
|---|---|
| MikroTik Router | Router stats, interface monitoring |
| Proxmox VE | VM/LXC status monitoring |
| TrueNAS | Pool health, disk temps, dataset usage |
| Pi-hole | DNS query stats for two instances |
| MQTT | Message broker — Proxmox LXC, underpins Z2M, Frigate and Alarmo |
| Nextcloud | Self-hosted cloud — Proxmox VM, data in TrueNAS dataset |
| Collabora Online | Self-hosted office suite — Ubuntu Docker, WOPI integration with Nextcloud for in-browser document editing |
| InfluxDB | Long-term time-series store — TrueNAS app; see the Long-term Data section below |
| Node-RED | Flow-based automation — Proxmox LXC; see the Node-RED Workflows section below |
| Integration | Purpose |
|---|---|
| SolaX Modbus | Solar inverter and battery read locally over RS485 — battery charge and health, per-string production, grid and house load |
| myenergi | Eddi hot water diverter — solar sent to the immersion, the only source for this |
| Netatmo Smart Thermostat | Controlled locally over HomeKit; heating logic runs in Node-RED (see below) |
| Met Éireann | Weather warnings — custom REST sensor polling the Met Éireann open data API; automation fires immediately on new alerts |
| Forecast.Solar | Solar production forecast |
| Electricity Maps | Grid CO2 intensity |
| esbn-to-mqtt | HA add-on — official smart meter readings (HDF export), two days in arrears; feeds long-term history and tariff comparison |
| Integration | Purpose |
|---|---|
| NVIDIA Shield TV | Living room media player — IoT VLAN |
| Google Cast | Kitchen display, Google Home & Chromecast Audio devices — whole-home audio — IoT VLAN |
| Samsung TV | 65" sitting room TV — IoT VLAN |
| Android TV | Aoife MiBox S + Cian MiTV + Kitchen MiBox — IoT VLAN |
| Logitech Harmony | 2 hubs — IoT VLAN |
| Navidrome | Self-hosted music streaming — Proxmox LXC, data in TrueNAS dataset |
| Calibre-Web | Self-hosted ebook library — Proxmox LXC, data in TrueNAS dataset |
| Paperless-ngx | Document management — Ubuntu Docker, data in TrueNAS dataset |
| Wallabag | Read-it-later — Ubuntu Docker, data in TrueNAS dataset |
| AirTrail | Flight and travel history tracking — Ubuntu Docker |
| Linkwarden | Bookmark manager — Ubuntu Docker |
| Stremio | Streaming media |
| Dawarich | Location & travel tracking — TrueNAS app, fed from HA Companion App on Android |
| Waste Collection Schedule | Panda Waste bin collection — calendar alerts for upcoming collections |
| CalDAV | Calendar integration |
| HA Companion App | Mobile app on all phones — presence, notifications, location |
71 automations across the home. Key highlights:
- All lights on Zigbee2MQTT — every room migrated off the Hue bridge to Zigbee2MQTT, with HA-native scenes per room (bright/dimmed and colour moods)
- Dimmer switches — per-room Hue dimmers (paired to Zigbee2MQTT) toggle and step brightness for each room
- Occupancy lighting — hallway, landing, and rooms via Zigbee motion sensors + lux thresholds; scene-based (bright/dimmed), fade-to-off on exit
- Sunrise/sunset — scene transitions throughout the day
- Sitting room power off — turns off all Harmony devices after 30 minutes of no presence
- Alarm — Alarmo multi-zone (house + shed); strobe all lights on trigger (saves/restores state). Arming, disarming, NFC tags and notifications run in Node-RED (see below).
- Cat alarm — protects Cian's cockatiel when cage is outside; NFC-toggled, Frigate cat detection → TTS alert; enabling it turns the kitchen TV lightstrip green (restored when disabled)
- Morning security report — summary of overnight person detections delivered at 07:00; also notes any cats, foxes, dogs or birds spotted overnight
- Patio door — NFC-toggled gate suppresses Frigate rear door & shed alerts when patio door is open; auto-disarms on door close
- Morning forecast — daily weather summary pushed to all phones at 08:30 with emoji-coded conditions; if Colm or Olivia is more than 100km from home a second block is added for their away location
- Evening forecast — tomorrow's forecast pushed at 21:00 each night with the same away-location logic
- Frost warning — each weekday morning at 07:30, if the outdoor temperature is at or below freezing a push goes to Colm and Olivia to allow extra time to scrape the car windscreen
- Fog warning — each weekday morning at 07:30, if either weather source reports fog a push goes to Colm and Olivia to allow extra time on the commute
- Parcel delivery — Smart Parcel Box sensor triggers a mobile notification + TTS announcement on delivery
- Low battery — monitors all Zigbee devices, notifies when battery low
- Weather warning — Met Éireann official warnings → immediate mobile alert
- Bins out — the night before a Panda Waste collection: a 19:00 reminder of which bin types are due, then at 22:00 a check of Frigate's
waste_binobject on the Front Van camera — if no bin is detected at the kerb, it announces a TTS reminder on the speakers and sends a second phone alert with a camera snapshot - Appliance notifications — washing machine, dishwasher and tumble dryer; notifies on cycle start and finish with energy cost; TTS announcement on completion; 22:00–07:00 quiet window
- Printer auto power cycle — checks every 15 minutes (07:00–21:00) and power-cycles the Brother printer socket if it goes offline
- Hello Olivia — Frigate face-recognises Olivia at the doorbell on weekdays 1–2pm → LLM Vision (Gemini) writes a short, witty compliment about how she looks that day from the doorbell snapshot, spoken on the kitchen + sitting-room speakers after a short delay (volume boosted then restored, falls back to a generic greeting if vision fails)
- Colm's Grand Return — Frigate face recognition detects Colm at the doorbell after 3+ days away; plays a trumpet fanfare and announces his return on all speakers
- TTS — queued announcements with volume save/restore (
script.tts_announce) - Today FM — one-tap play on kitchen display via Music Assistant
- Heating — the house heating runs in Node-RED, driven by House Mode and the time of day (see the Heating Control flow below). The Netatmo thermostat is controlled locally over HomeKit and holds a flat baseline; Node-RED sets the comfort, evening, overnight and away temperatures on top.
- Top days — solar production and grid export top 5 best days tracked independently; both leaderboards update automatically each evening at 23:59
- Morning energy stats — daily solar and energy summary pushed each morning
- Grid-free day — notifies both phones at 20:00 if no grid electricity was imported after 8am; includes export total and estimated earnings
- Peak/evening-rate nudge — if the washing machine, dishwasher or tumble dryer starts a cycle between 17:00 and 23:00, both phones get a push naming the rate actually in force and pointing at the real saving: tomorrow morning's solar when the forecast is worth waiting for, otherwise the cheap overnight rate (notification only, no announcement)
- Inverter not generating — the inverter reports its own running state and that state holds steady around the clock, so anything else means a real fault or a lost link; alerts after 15 minutes with the sun up and sends an all-clear on recovery
- Modbus link unhealthy — watches link health, polling success rate and any register the inverter has stopped answering; needed because the gateway keeps accepting connections even when the inverter has gone quiet, so a simple port check cannot see this failure
- Inverter over temperature — a warning stage and an urgent stage, both set above the measured sunny-day peak, clearing lower down so it cannot flap between states
- Battery depleted early — alerts only if the battery reaches its reserve while electricity is still at the day rate; reaching it later, once the cheap rate has started, is normal and stays silent
- Battery health check — monthly state-of-health reading compared against the month before, kept as a slow-burn record for warranty purposes
- String imbalance — the two roof aspects sit on separate strings, so their daily peaks are compared; alerts only after several qualifying days of one trailing the other, which points at shading, soiling or a panel fault rather than weather
- Good time to run appliances — the appliances are ordinary machines that cannot be started remotely, so this is a nudge rather than a switch: when the battery is full, the water is hot and real surplus is going out to the grid, whoever is at home is told it's a good moment to put a machine on, one at a time, or to take a shower while the panels and battery are carrying the load. Silent when the house is empty, held back until morning if everyone is asleep, and once per person per day
- Inverter clock sync — the cheap-rate battery charge runs to a window held in the inverter's own clock, and the inverter has no daylight-saving setting, so the clock is resynchronised on the last Sunday of March and October; without it the spring change would leave the tail of the charge running at the day rate
- Infrastructure health & backup alerts — migrated to Node-RED for more complex workflows; see the Infra Health & Alerts flow below.
- Zigbee2MQTT watchdog — auto-restart with 2 attempts, notifies on outcome
- Update Tuesday — generates the monthly homelab update report on the Monday before the 2nd Tuesday; notifies Colm with a link at 19:00
- Update alerts — Update Manager stages updates and decides when each one is safe to install; Colm gets a push when one is scheduled, installed or fails
- Maintenance mode — a toggle on the infrastructure dashboard opens a maintenance window that silences infrastructure alerts during planned work, and mirrors itself into matching Zabbix and Uptime Kuma maintenance windows (auto-expiring after 12 hours) so no monitoring layer raises planned-work noise
- Post-maintenance report — marking Update Tuesday done on the dashboard is refused while alerts are active; otherwise it ends the maintenance window and generates a maintenance report (windows, reboots, versions), shown in place of the update report until next month's arrives
- Backup freshness — daily check that every offsite backup dataset ran recently; alerts if any goes stale
Complex, multi-input automation runs in Node-RED (Proxmox LXC). The full flows and config are open source at colfin22/node-red-config.
- House Mode — the single source of truth other flows react to:
input_select.house_mode(Home / Away / Sleeping) plus overlays for storm (auto from Met Éireann) and maintenance (blocks Away, silences infra alerting, auto-expires 4 h). Away = both adults out with no indoor motion remaining, so it never trips with someone still inside (Cian has no phone — the motion sensors cover him). Sleeping = 22:00–07:00, TVs and sitting-room lights off and 20 minutes without motion, at least one adult home. Home resumes on the first morning activity. - House Alarm — follows house mode: Away arms away, Sleeping arms night, Home disarms. Guest mode suspends away-arming only (guests indoors would trip it) — night arming still happens, and switching guest mode off re-arms to match immediately. A welcome-home announcement plays on return from Away. Every alarm event across house and shed — armed, disarmed, triggered, cleared, failed-to-arm — is pushed to both phones and announced on the speakers, however it was changed (phone, NFC or automatic).
- Alarm NFC Tags — the front-door tag disarms the house; the back-door tag stands the shed down for up to two hours, re-arming 15 minutes after the door closes (left open at the cap → stays disarmed and sends a push + spoken reminder). At 10pm the shed auto-arms if still disarmed with the door closed.
- Heating Control — sets the local HomeKit thermostat from
input_select.house_mode+ time of day (the Netatmo holds a flat baseline; Node-RED only ever raises above it). Home → comfort, warmest 7–10pm. Sleeping → cooler overnight, warming from 7am — pulled earlier on cold mornings by a nightly Met Éireann forecast check (below-freezing forecasts also push a heads-up the night before). Away → baseline, dropping further after a full day empty (a toggle disables the deep setback for absences with pets or plants) — but pre-heats toward comfort when someone is driving home (within ~10 km and getting closer; latches once triggered so a GPS wobble can't bounce the setpoint). Boosting — from the dashboard controls or by nudging the thermostat above the schedule — holds that temperature for two hours; turning it down just cancels. Guest mode keeps the Away setback off while visitors stay. The target is re-asserted every 30 minutes and survives reboots. - Camera Concierge — all Frigate alerting: grouped 3-stage pushes (instant text → snapshot → GIF) to both phones, per zone (Front / Doorbell / Rear) and object type; tapping opens the event clip. Doorbell persons also cast to the kitchen display and Shield TV; couriers and the postman get spoken announcements (silenced while Sleeping — pushes unaffected); rear cameras mute while the patio-door switch is on. While Sleeping, a person at the cars strobes the lights and warns over the speakers; while Away, pushes escalate to a high-priority
⚠️ “Cameras Away” channel. (Replaced seven former HA notify/alert automations.) - Infra Watchdog — escalating alerts off Uptime Kuma (service reachability), quiet-hours aware; TTS only when Colm is home. Silenced while maintenance mode is on — still logged, and anything still down when maintenance ends re-alerts on its next reminder cycle.
- Infra Health & Alerts — all homelab health and backup alerting in one flow: server/NAS/app health (CPU, memory, disk, pool, temperature, offline, updates), a daily 07:30 audit that every Proxmox backup ran, config-backup and Restic failure alerts, and Zabbix relays. Notifications go to Colm tagged Health / Backup / Monitoring, with a 22:00–07:00 quiet window flushed at 07:00; silenced (logged only) while maintenance mode is on.
One of the Node-RED tabs — the House Alarm flow: house-mode-driven arming and disarming, guest-mode handling, NFC overrides, low-battery nudges and spoken event announcements across house and shed.
The wider fleet — the Proxmox nodes, every LXC and VM, and the MikroTik estate — is managed with Ansible from a dedicated control container, with Semaphore as its web front end (config in a private repo). Around twenty push-button templates cover the lot, with run history and logs, and the read-only reports run themselves each morning and commit anything that changed.
- Baseline — every Linux host gets the same treatment: timezone, base tooling, and key-only SSH (password authentication disabled fleet-wide). Applied canary-first, and safe to re-run at any time — a second pass changes nothing.
- Updates — a rolling update that refuses to run unless maintenance mode is on, so Zabbix, Uptime Kuma and Node-RED alerting are guaranteed silenced. It reboots only the guests that both need it and allow it; reboot-sensitive hosts (the MQTT broker, Node-RED, the NVR, the uptime monitor) report a pending reboot instead. Hypervisors are never rebooted automatically — that stays a deliberate manual step at the end of the window.
- Docker estate — Watchtower is gone; container updates are deliberate instead. A read-only check compares every running container against its registry digest and reports current, outdated or pinned; a maintenance-gated update pulls only the stacks explicitly opted in (the NVR and photo stacks are deliberately untouchable); a prune pass reclaims superseded images afterwards.
- Reports — read-only sweeps rendered as Markdown, with git history as the archive: a full inventory of the estate; pending updates for Linux and RouterOS alike; backup freshness, checking every guest's latest snapshot on both backup stores against its expected cadence; and right-sizing, weighing a week of real processor and memory use against what each guest was given, so the starved and the over-generous both surface.
- Network & records — the gateway serves time to the whole house, pushed out fleet-wide as a single task; and a sync job keeps NetBox populated from live sources — cluster inventory, DHCP reservations, VPN peers, serial numbers and cabling — writing only to NetBox, so it is safe to press at any time.
- Housekeeping — a safe fleet-wide disk cleanup, and one-press onboarding for a new guest: keys, host records, inventory entry and baseline in a single run.
| Tab | Contents |
|---|---|
| Home | Room summary, security status, motion, presence |
| Climate | Heating, Netatmo thermostat, temperature sensors |
| Weather | Met Éireann warnings, forecast, outdoor conditions |
| Security | Alarm panel, camera feeds, activity logbook |
| Solar | Solar production, import/export, Eddi diverter, top 5 solar days & top 5 export days |
| Floorplan | SVG-based downstairs + upstairs with live entity overlays |
| Appliances | Washing machine, dishwasher and other appliance monitoring |
| Map | Device tracker map — household presence |
| Network | Embedded infrastructure status page — hosts, storage, network and app health at a glance |
A separate "How it Works" sidebar dashboard (visible to all users) holds a full, plain-language household guide — house modes, guests, heating, lights, alarm, cameras, announcements and playing music — served from www/how-the-house-works.html. It's the family reference: kept up to date as the setup evolves, so whenever a setting is adjusted or a new feature is added, everyone can simply be pointed to the guide to see how it works.
HA's recorder purges after 7 days. InfluxDB (TrueNAS app) stores everything long-term; Grafana (TrueNAS app) provides dashboards on top of it with Zabbix as a second data source.
| Measurement | Source | Range | Fields |
|---|---|---|---|
myenergi_daily |
Nightly from HA; corrected from official CSV exports | 11-06-2025 → present | Solar generated, grid import, grid export, green energy, Eddi divert |
autarco_daily |
Local inverter (measurement name is historic) | 11-06-2025 → present | Solar production, export, import, consumption |
esbn_daily |
ESB Networks HDF (official meter) | 28-05-2024 → present | Import, export (about two days in arrears) |
esbn_halfhourly |
ESB Networks HDF | 28-05-2024 → ~2 days ago | Half-hourly import/export profile |
| All HA entities | HA InfluxDB integration | 28-05-2026 → present | Most kept 90 days; solar, power, weather and climate data kept forever |
Home Assistant keeps its own hourly statistics indefinitely, separately from InfluxDB. When a data source is replaced the old readings are kept as standalone statistics, so the energy dashboard holds its full history rather than restarting: solar and battery back to 11-06-2025 from the previous inverter integration, and grid import and export from the official meter. They are copied into InfluxDB each night as a second, independent copy that only ever gains new readings, so a fault in Home Assistant cannot overwrite the good one.
Energy — Current — Live solar and import/export running totals; latest complete day summary stats.
Energy — History — Daily energy timeseries, half-hourly profile, monthly summary, top days leaderboard.
Network — Infrastructure services, network metrics, Zabbix-sourced host stats.
Energy — History: daily energy (solar, grid import/export, home consumption, Eddi hot water), the half-hourly ESB-meter grid import/export profile, and monthly totals across the last year.
Network: WAN download/upload throughput plus CPU and memory utilisation across servers, LXCs and Proxmox nodes over 24 hours.
| Person | Phone | Notification priority |
|---|---|---|
| Colm | notify.mobile_app_np3 |
All alerts |
| Olivia | notify.mobile_app_pixel_6a |
Security + presence |
| Cian | notify.mobile_app_pixel_7a |
Selected |
| Daire (visitor) | notify.mobile_app_pixel_9a |
Only when at the house |
All alert automations respect a 22:00–07:00 quiet window — overnight events are held and delivered with the original trigger time in the title.
| System | Method | Repo |
|---|---|---|
| Home Assistant | Git — selective .storage files |
colfin22/ha-config (this repo) |
| Home Assistant VM | Proxmox hourly + daily snapshots — 24h/7d retention | — |
| HA long-term statistics | Nightly copy into InfluxDB; only ever adds, never overwrites | — |
| MikroTik | Proxmox cron → API export nightly at 02:00 | colfin22/mikrotik-config |
| TrueNAS Config | Proxmox cron → API config/save weekly Sunday 02:00 |
colfin22/truenas-config |
| Frigate | Git — config.yml |
colfin22/frigate-config |
| Immich | Git — docker-compose.yml |
colfin22/immich-config |
| Ubuntu Docker | Git — all docker-compose.yml and env files, systemd timer daily 02:00 |
colfin22/ubuntu-docker-config |
| InfluxDB + Grafana | Git — dashboards + provisioning config | colfin22/influxdb-grafana-config |
| Node-RED | Git — flows, settings, palette + docker-compose; systemd timer daily 02:30 | colfin22/node-red-config |
| Proxmox VMs & LXCs | Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) — nightly snapshot sync to remote PBS at Prox3 (Daire) | — |
| TrueNAS Datasets | restic — 6 datasets (photos, nextcloud, paperless, influxdb, zabbix, claude-memory) → Prox3 (Daire) daily via sftp; failure alerts via Node-RED | — |
| Claude Memory | rsync every 6h → TrueNAS encrypted dataset (AES-256-GCM) → Prox3 (Daire) daily | — |
This repo (ha-config) and the Node-RED flows repo are public. All other config repos (MikroTik, TrueNAS, Frigate, Immich, InfluxDB+Grafana, Ubuntu Docker, Ansible) are private. HA backup includes: dashboards, helpers, Alarmo, zones, persons, tags, energy config, areas.
- alarmo — alarm management
- area_occupancy — area occupancy detection
- browser_mod — browser control
- frigate — camera NVR
- immich — photo library
- LLM Vision — AI camera analysis
- mikrotik_router — network monitoring
- Music Assistant — multi-room audio engine (integration + Jukebox addon)
- myenergi — hot water diverter (Eddi)
- proxmoxve — hypervisor monitoring
- solax_modbus — solar inverter over local Modbus (battery, strings, grid)
- truenas — NAS monitoring
- update_manager — staged updates with community verdicts
- waste_collection_schedule — bin collection
- vserver_ssh_stats — SSH-based stats collection from VPS/remote servers
- webrtc — low-latency camera streams
Running on Proxmox · TrueNAS SCALE · MikroTik · Ireland 🇮🇪
Built by Colm, with Claude as a hands-on assistant for code, config, and debugging.
MIT licence — copy whatever is useful.
Built by Colm, with Claude as a hands-on assistant for code, config, and debugging.
MIT licence — copy whatever is useful.