Occasionally someone (me mostly) will forget to hit the start button on the washer only to come back an hour later to a washer full of dirty clothes. An automation watches for the power draw on the washer to remain above the “powered off” but below the “running” wattage for a few minutes and sends a “Washer not started” notification if that occurs.
Roku loves to push menu updates while the TV is turned off and we would randomly find a new menu entry for “Zombie Housewives of Beverly Hills” when turning on the TV. An automation turns on OpenWRT firewall rules blocking Internet access when the TV’s are turned off, and automatically disables those rules when the TV’s are turned on. Menu updates still happen but they don’t seem to happen as often and the automation works so well no one notices it. It also blocks the constant stream of data Roku sends to the company’s servers except when the TV’s are actually in use. Roku has voice activated remotes that are probably always listening (no matter what the company says) and it blocks that traffic too. Between that and Adguard Home’s blocking of all other UI ads the TV’s are almost completely deshittified.
I have a couple of old but high quality pieces of audio gear that are used with Spotify Connect. An automation powers on whatever amp / receiver Spotify is playing on using an IR blaster or wifi smart plug and powers them off when play stops. One receiver draws 80 watts when powered on and it was annoying when it was accidentally left on for a couple of days. This automation alone saves us a whole dollar or two a year.
Bonus 4th automation: I bought some Kasa smart bulbs that are really unreliable and randomly will stop responding to wifi commands. Usually 1 bulb out of the 3 in a ceiling fixture will remain on when an automation had sent a command to turn them all off. 3 different redundancy automations watch for mismatches between bulb states and when the offline bulbs wake up again (usually in 30 seconds or so), it resends the command to sync the bulbs. These automations have made the Kasa bulbs usable when they otherwise would have been trashed.
Occasionally someone (me mostly) will forget to hit the start button on the washer only to come back an hour later to a washer full of dirty clothes. An automation watches for the power draw on the washer to remain above the “powered off” but below the “running” wattage for a few minutes and sends a “Washer not started” notification if that occurs.
Roku loves to push menu updates while the TV is turned off and we would randomly find a new menu entry for “Zombie Housewives of Beverly Hills” when turning on the TV. An automation turns on OpenWRT firewall rules blocking Internet access when the TV’s are turned off, and automatically disables those rules when the TV’s are turned on. Menu updates still happen but they don’t seem to happen as often and the automation works so well no one notices it. It also blocks the constant stream of data Roku sends to the company’s servers except when the TV’s are actually in use. Roku has voice activated remotes that are probably always listening (no matter what the company says) and it blocks that traffic too. Between that and Adguard Home’s blocking of all other UI ads the TV’s are almost completely deshittified.
I have a couple of old but high quality pieces of audio gear that are used with Spotify Connect. An automation powers on whatever amp / receiver Spotify is playing on using an IR blaster or wifi smart plug and powers them off when play stops. One receiver draws 80 watts when powered on and it was annoying when it was accidentally left on for a couple of days. This automation alone saves us a whole dollar or two a year.
Bonus 4th automation: I bought some Kasa smart bulbs that are really unreliable and randomly will stop responding to wifi commands. Usually 1 bulb out of the 3 in a ceiling fixture will remain on when an automation had sent a command to turn them all off. 3 different redundancy automations watch for mismatches between bulb states and when the offline bulbs wake up again (usually in 30 seconds or so), it resends the command to sync the bulbs. These automations have made the Kasa bulbs usable when they otherwise would have been trashed.