Blog entries from November, 2024

I am finally getting around to some of the larger projects around my house. So far I have tried to DIY most things (in terms of time that has been mostly gardening) but I do have a limit.

The bricks above my garage door that are tipping out? It took a while but I happily paid someone to take it all apart and then rebuild, that had the expertise and equipment to get it done over a couple of days. Replacing the roof of said garage? I am still getting quotes for that job.

A fair amount of my time over the last three days has been taken up by rebuilding my side gate. In terms of elapsed time I am going to say it took 18 hours, this includes the time going to pick things up and also the time waiting for paint to dry.

In terms of money I spent almost $600 across seven trips to Bunnings, but not all of that is directly for the gate:

• Material for the gate (eg metal frame, timber posts, timber cladding) – $280
• Material that was partially consumed (eg needed 8 screws for the hinges but they come in a pack of 20, leftover paint, etc) – $180
• Tools that I didn’t yet have (eg sawhorses, painting drop sheet, drill bits, paint brushes) – $140

How does that compare to getting a company to do it? I had gotten a couple of quotes for different options:

• Timber gate with galvanised frame – $1010 to $1700
• Aluminum slatted gate – $1980 to $2530

Note that the timber gates would not have been painted, I would still have to do that, so there was no way I would go for the $1700 quote.

The aluminum slatted gate option was appealing, because this would already be coated in the right colour, so no painting required, but the much higher price is what made me attempt it myself.

However when I decided to DIY this project I hadn’t quite added up all the potential costs. I had seen the cost of the gate frame and the cost of timber, but I didn’t add it all up and I didn’t yet know how many other items (eg different types of screws) I would need.

So how did it turn out? This is the before and after:

Apart from general gardening and sanding back my deck earlier in the year, this is my largest DIY project. I am in the process of getting quotes to replace my garage roof and to paint my eaves as I do not want to tackle anything that needs a ladder, but repainting the stair railing and the garage door are now much more achievable.

Addendum: I have realised an additional cost of the DIY option that is normally included in a quote, the disposal of the old gate and rubbish. I now need to work out how to get rid of the old gate. Do I find pay someone to come take it away for a fee? Do I get someone I know with a ute or trailer to take it to the council tip where there is a fee? Do I cut it up and gradually put it out in my regular rubbish bin?

For a while now I have had a couple of AirGradient Air Quality Monitors as part of my home automation. One has been mounted to the wall near my desk and has been quite interesting seeing how the CO2 levels change throughout the day, especially when I have the study door closed. The other is the outdoor model which I got to have a more reliable outdoor device and also so I can compare the levels of particulates between my study and the wider world.

The first thing I did when I got them was to reflash them with ESPHome as I wanted them to report to Home Assistant, not to the cloud service. This always felt a bit clunky and I was using different config, one using ajfriesen/ESPHome-AirGradient and the other MallocArray/airgradient_esphome.

A few months ago they announced that the latest firmware would have direct integration with Home Assistant. This weekend I finally got around to checking that out, but it had a few rough edges.

Reverting to the latest stock firmware was easy, it was possible to do over USB directly from the browser. The only tricky part is that I didn’t want to take down the outdoor unit, so a long cable and my laptop was the answer there.

Once they were reflashed I could see in their log that they were working, but I was a bit stuck as there was no obvious next step. They were connected to my network, but there was no automatic discovery in Home Assistant.

I am running Home Assistant in a non standard way (via docker so I only have core features) so having to add devices manually is not unexpected, but if I tried to go to the web interface the devices exposed all I got was:

Not found: /

Was this correct? Did it not reflash correctly?

The first thing I came across was that there is MQTT support. Ah, maybe that is how they communicate with Home Assistant?

However the information on enabling MQTT said it was via the dashboard, but my devices are not connected to the cloud dashboard, I don’t even have an account there…

More stumbling around led me to a forum post and the Local Server API documentation. Now I knew to hit the /config endpoint I could see and change the settings and now they were reporting to MQTT.

Still no auto discovery in Home Assistant… so I did something I should have tried earlier, adding the integration manually with the ip addresses of the devices. This worked.

It turns out that I didn’t need to enabled MQTT, but I have left that enabled as I log all the MQTT messages, so it might be useful for debugging.

I also need to raise a ticket, that Not found: / was not helpful. If a device exposes a webserver then hitting to root endpoint should give something useful about the device, it doesn’t need to be a fancy status page, it could simply be a static link to relevant documentation…