By recording the electricity use in my house I noticed a 1500 watt spike at a semi-regular interval. It would happen every 50 minutes and lasted for a few minutes. While overall not that much of a draw, it sort of drove me crazy not knowing what it was…

Then I discovered that it was our septic system’s effluent pump (the leach field is up on a hill). The pump was turning on way too often because ground water was leaking into the pump chamber. It’s not supposed to do that. The tank was about 45 years old, so not a huge surprise really.

Basically, my home automation (or tracking, really) lead to an $8k concrete tank replacement (more or less, as we had the guy do some additional stuff while he was here).

That’s not really a bad thing though. Maintaining your house is very important. Our well had failed a coliform test the previous year, and I’ve yet to get it re-tested to see if the new tank fixed that little problem. I’ve been giving everything some time to settle down.

There’s an add-on and an integration, yeah.

Oh interesting. How fast things change. I’ve only been using Frigate for around a year and I’m already behind the times.

The Home Assistant mobile client? Or is there a Frigate app, too? I have the Frigate webpage bookmarked and used that. It’s also available in the HA front end, but I prefer using Frigate directly.

Frigate for software. Add a Coral to your computer (they come in M.2, Mini PCIe, even USB) to handle the object detection. Configuration is slightly complex, but the documentation is very good.

I’m using a couple of Amcrest cameras which I have on a VLAN that can’t access the internet, so no spying from the manufacturer.

I also added a hard drive specifically for the recording. It stores a ton of days worth of footage and Frigate handles deleting old footage to make room for new. I figure that hard drive will probably fail sooner than my other drives which is why I got one just for that.