How Mike is making heating smarter with Home Assistant

Industrial data pro Mike joins Phil and Rohan to unpack his Home Assistant setup. We dive deep into Node‑RED flows, mmWave presence, actionable dashboards, and AI‑assisted automations—including recognizing his own cat and verifying the right bin is curbside.

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Show notes for this episode are available at https://homeassistant.fm/HA230

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Chapters

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:28 - Mike’s background and location

00:03:43 - From OpenHAB to Home Assistant

00:06:11 - Cloud vs local pragmatism

00:09:40 - Zigbee, Thread and Matter lessons

00:12:17 - Distributed hardware and Docker setup

00:16:08 - Family UX and presence ethos

00:20:26 - PIR, mmWave and context signals

00:24:41 - Automations with Node‑RED

00:29:50 - AI‑assisted automation building

00:34:44 - Dashboards and notifications

00:43:42 - Cameras, AI and the cat

00:50:59 - Smarter heating and preheating

01:03:33 - Actionable notifications philosophy

01:05:40 - Evangelizing at work and wrap‑up

This episode was made possible thanks to our sponsors

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Hosts

Phil Hawthorne

Website

Twitter: @philhawthorne

Bluesky: @philhawthorne.com