Garage Doors, E‑Ink Dashboards, and Entity Chaos with the Evil Genius Dave Slusher
Home Assistant Podcast
Using Calendar‑Driven Automations to Beat Peak Pricing
Dave explains his utility's peak-hour pricing and how he uses calendar-based automations to avoid charging during expensive windows.
Podcaster Dave Slusher joins Phil and Rohan to share hard-won smart home lessons: building a reliable mesh, solving a 100m mailbox sensor with Z-Wave Long Range and the ZWA2, and retiring MyQ with RATGDO + ESPHome. We also cover using an e‑ink terminal as a Home Assistant dashboard.
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Chapters
00:00:00 Welcome
00:01:23 Guest intro: Dave Slusher’s podcasting origin story
00:04:59 Discovering Home Assistant
00:07:20 Hardware journey: Raspberry Pi 3/4, SD crashes, backups, staying on Pi
00:09:40 ZWA2 portable capability
00:11:10 Zigbee mesh realities
00:13:56 The mailbox quest
00:19:16 Power monitoring the lawnmower + adding Z‑Wave plug to the mesh
00:20:31 Beating peak electricity pricing with calendar‑driven automations
00:24:50 Buying for Home Assistant
00:31:26 Audi e‑tron HACS
00:33:00 ‘Terminal’ e‑ink display
00:41:11 Fun APIs: Domino’s throwback and accidental developer‑friendly brands
00:44:25 Update strategy + restoring from backups when an upgrade breaks boot
00:46:26 Entity naming conventions, device vs entity IDs, and maintainability
00:49:18 The router kill‑switch: renaming a plug and unintended automations
00:52:19 Ping watchdog automation for internet recovery (8.8.8.8)
00:54:58 Labels, documentation, and making a smart home family‑friendly
01:00:00 Selling a smart home: what stays, what goes, and account handoffs
01:02:16 First device nostalgia: Sonoff relay, app sprawl, and converging on HA
01:07:52 Next projects: buying with purpose, reliability over novelty
01:10:00 Mac mini (Linux Mint) homelab, Synology vs Docker, consolidating services
01:12:18 Package tracking with 17Track, long strings, and dashboard rendering
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Hosts
Phil Hawthorne
Twitter: @philhawthorne
Bluesky: @philhawthorne.com
Rohan Karamandi
Twitter: @rohank9
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