Mattia's Blog

I am the unfortunate owner of a house whose connection to the drains works well until rain level exceeds about 20 mm per hour then the drains simply close (thanks to valves we put in order not to have water from the street coming in). This usually happens a couple (ten at most) times per year, with peaks of as much as 50mm in half an hour during summer storms (northern part of Italy, not far from the Alps). This means that when it does rain the street in front of the house get like this: and that the area in front of my garage (and my garage and basement) get like this: in the years I have worked to avoid this from happening but it has always been a trial and error process where when in error I get to work half a day cleaning the mess up. Things I have tried: Modify access to the street so that excess water stays in the street Add one (and later a backup) sump pump in a drain that collect water when the main drains aren't working. Each pump has a flo...

Open Energy Monitor and home automation With this post I would like to start putting some content online again, and what better argument than what has been occupying my (really scarce) spare time in the last months. I'll start with what I wanted to achieve with my home automation project: Have fun :) Monitor home energy consumption Detect 'Rogue' energy usages Have an early warning system for my flood pumps in the basement/garage because when they fail I have anywhere from 5 to 50 cms of water inside when all is said and done. Avoid spending thousands of Euro to accomplish the project Mainly because of the last point, but also because of the potential complexity of finding an existing system that would allow me to achieve all my stated goals, the choice on what hardware and possibly software could be used left the project in a "Would like to do it but it costs too much" state for some time, until I stumbled on the OpenEnergyMonitor web site, that ...