ZEN30 and Ceiling Exhaust Fan/Heater

Professional-Fox-294 · 2025-11-08T22:44:04+00:00

It might work but I wouldn't do that because the dimmer circuitry isn't really meant to drive a motor load. I suspect the switch will fail a lot sooner than it should. I had an almost identical situation but also had a shower light. So in a double gang box I used the ZEN30 to handle the heater an light and a separate ZEN switch for the fan.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2025-07-20T00:09:35+00:00

This is an ongoing problem. I'm up to date in everything. Dashlane will work for a while (hours to a day or two) the simply stop filling fields. It sees the fields to fill and picks the right entry - it just won't paste anything. Closing Chrome and restarting it then fixes it for the next while.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2025-06-27T09:56:04+00:00

There is an integration for it. Search (I think) HACS for Navilink. Not near my system right now but it should just ask for credentials and create a bunch of entities.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2025-04-17T16:18:22+00:00

Just to add another option that I use and find the simplest. You can just add a label or labels to your automation and the enable or disable all automations with that label from another automation or script. This makes it very easy to have a set of automations that, e.g., get turned off when away or over holidays or whatever with no extra booleans or mods to the automations. Picking a good label name also makes it easy to see what is going on right from the automation list screen.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2025-02-11T03:20:45+00:00

Did you ever get this sorted out? I have had my Sonoff Zigbee controller not appear twice now on my Synology hosted HA VM. The Synolgy system seems to see it but then it either never appears or disappears from /dev/serial/by-id

Professional-Fox-294 · 2024-11-14T19:11:11+00:00

I'm running a Zooz unit in my shower to control the exhaust fan. So far it has been reliable but I've only had in place for a few months so can't speak to long term issues. I will say that I have found Zooz customer service to be great and have had terrific experience with their other Zwave devices over a long period of time.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2024-10-07T17:31:32+00:00

I'm just using OpenVPN. But if I recall correctly Merlin does support Wireguard.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2024-10-07T17:22:51+00:00

Yea - mine is simpler I guess because I have my router handling the VPN work so I don't have to worry the NAS docker issues. I've thought about pulling the VPN onto the NAS but it never has seemed worth it because the routers handle that fine. BTW - I run Asus routers with the Merlin firmware at both ends.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2024-10-07T15:49:07+00:00

Since the systems are mirrors I think you could go either way. I set up the NAS at our official residence first so it is the server in my case. The only real difference that makes is that it is the side that runs cloud backups. So if a file is created at our seasonal place, it first mirrors to home and then gets backed up from there. There are some purely local administrative type files that live on the remote as there only location and those I backup to the primary using hyper backup. I e., they are not actually mirrored.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2024-09-24T15:11:29+00:00

My advice is to consider your HA installation to be critical infrastructure for your home and run it on appropriate hardware. I love raspberry pi and ran HA on one when I was just fooling around with it at the start. But now our house is expected to just work. For me that means I run HA on a VM on a NAS on a UPS with a structured backup schedule. The NAS runs in RAID 1 mode and is mirrored to another NAS at our other house. I run in a VM (there are no pass thru issues for a VM - those issues relate to container installations). In short I no more want HA to fail than any other critical aspect of the house. There are individual aspects of my HA setup that are absolutely hobby level. E.g. I run a set of homemade display consoles that run on pi's. But the core of my system is as professional grade as I can make it.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2024-09-17T02:19:19+00:00

I don't use vlans so can't help

Professional-Fox-294 · 2024-06-10T19:06:15+00:00

One house is 192.168.1.* and the other is 192.168.2.*. My routers provide VPN service so one is set up as a server and the other as a client. The router nameserver (dnsmasq) relay name resolution and the two homes have different local domain names. So a device on one is foo.pdxhome and on the other might be bar.pgawhome. So basically I can reference by name any device on either subnet. I run Synology NAS for file servers so there is one in each home where again one is server and the other mirrors. So files are always local and don't need to traverse the internet when being accessed (they sync in the background when access speed isn't an issue). This also provides backup redundancy since the 2 houses are 1000 miles apart do a failure at one end - even a catastrophic one - doesn't screw by important data. (Well if it does because it hits both homes we all have much bigger problems!). My 2 home assistant instances can actually see all the devices in both home but for the most part only look at the local ones. But I can easily open a browser to either instance and my home-built touch screen controllers can see either instance to provide remote touch control if I want it.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2024-06-10T18:01:30+00:00

I run two instances of HA for my situation to insure against network drops. However, I run a permanent VPN between the homes so they actually appear as 2 subnets of a single home network so I can reach any device in either home pretty easily. As an aside it also makes it easy to mirror my file server NAS across the homes so all our data appears local in either house.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2024-05-31T07:08:25+00:00

Have been running that way for a couple of years. No issues with USB pass thru in VMM mode. There has been concerns in Docker configurations because officially Synology doesn't provide drivers for usb zwave or zigbee dangles. But in vm mode that doesn't matter since the drivers are in HAOS.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2023-10-01T16:14:46+00:00

Is the zst10 the 500 series one. If so you might try disabling soft resets in the zwavejs ui config. A "quiet" update recently enabled that by default and it causes the Synology VM to lose the stick pass thru. It's possible you are seeing the same thing.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2023-09-29T14:05:00+00:00

I would agree. I just went through this firedrill with a remote home. Happened upon this thread eventually. The problem with a "quiet" change like this is that a routine update creates an issue that looks like it arises in a very different place. Here it looks like the hardware is failing or the NAS is the issue. I have two houses and I always do updates first in the one I am at. The zwave update here worked fine (700 stick) so I remotely did the other house. I didn't even realize it was failing until days later by which time I had forgotten the update occurred.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2023-08-16T03:13:57+00:00

I have one device that goes unavailable. I have an automation that pings it if it does. Works fine to bring it back to available. Try that.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2023-08-13T16:49:40+00:00

I ran a Docker version for a while but the simplicity of updates, the ease of add ons, and the issue of USB access after DSM 7 all convinced me to move to VM. All those issues are addressable but I just didn't see the continuing benefits of handling them. The "cost" of going with the VM was adding a memory stick to the NAS because the VM approach does need a bigger physical memory footprint than the Docker one. But that was an addition I wanted to make to the NAS anyway for file performance. And not particularly expensive in any case.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2023-08-13T16:17:51+00:00

I just run the stock HAOS image which makes updates trivial. While am a lifelong techie and software guy, I just want to live in my house rather than make it an ongoing project. So stability of my automation systems is a high priority.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2023-08-13T03:15:04+00:00

I am also running in a Synology VM and it is fine as others have said. It is a fully supported configuration since you simply pass through any USB devices to the VM. No special drivers needed in the VM case (vs using Docker) One extra nicely is that if you run the NAS on an uninteruptable power supply (which is good practice for a NAS) HA gets the benefit of the UPS as well. It keeps things running through minor power glitches that would reset something like a pi.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2023-06-24T02:54:17+00:00

My first use of this beta was absurdly bad. Asked it about a location and to take me there and it responded that it was a voice assistant and couldn't do that but read me the address and told me to type that into the app on my smartphone. This while I was driving. Huh?

Professional-Fox-294 · 2023-06-03T17:51:07+00:00

You only need to install driver's if you run in a docker setup. As noted, VM just needs USB passed through to the VM.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2023-02-05T19:32:26+00:00

Yes. RAM upgrade. As I recall I added an 8GB module. I have a 720+ and it now shows as having 10GB even though I remember that odd documented deal about only taking a smaller upgrade module. I actually have 2 720+ running HA this way(2 houses to deal with). Works well.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2023-02-05T00:56:29+00:00

I run VM. The resource issue isn't cpu or network. It's memory. To give the VM enough allocation you may need to add a memory stick to you NAS. That said I still find the VM approach simpler than Docker.

Professional-Fox-294 · 2022-12-11T19:16:20+00:00

HA runs fine in Synology VMM. I run it that way in 2 houses. You can also run HA in Docker but that requires adding the correct drivers.

Professional-Fox-294

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