More snow. I'm looking at winter attachment builds for the mower.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmCYMVjXh5I

#LawnMower #Mower #Snow #Build #YouTube

Coroner issues warning after girl, 7, run over by mower in Hawke’s Bay farm accident

His report comes with a warning to the rural community “of the dangers young children face while accompanying…
#NewsBeep #News #Headlines #7 #accident #after #bay #by #Coroner #farm #girl #hawkes #in #Issues #mower #NewZealand #NZ #over #run #warning
https://www.newsbeep.com/299337/

Honda’s robot lawnmower needs you to train it before it works alone. #Honda #Lawnmower #Mower #Robotics

https://gadgetbond.com/honda-prozision-autonomous-lawnmower/

#Gardening : compost is good. Particularly when we learn that the collections of some classes by privatised services ( eg Thames Water) are poisoned by adding toxic collections to clean ones, and then returned to farmland, one might keep it at home.

So, a heap.
Munch it up with the lawnmower to avoid a painful back later and speed composting.

#heap #mower #compost #PotatoPlants #photography

#Gardening : compost is good. Particularly when we learn that the collections of some classes by privatised services ( eg Thames Water) are poisoned by adding toxic collections to clean ones, and then returned to farmland, one might keep it at home.

So, a heap.
Munch it up with the lawnmower to avoid a painful back later and speed composting.

#heap #mower #compost #PotatoPlants #photography

**Severe weather alerts and automations in Home Assistant**

(link to blog)

Yesterday we had a severe thunderstorm with strong wind gusts, hail and torrential rains in my area.

The storm developed quickly.

While I was observing the falling hail, I saw the mower still mowing. Because of the fast storm development, it didn’t have time to detect rain and return to the docking station.

Nevertheless, we had luck, the hail was small and wet and only partially destroyed some cucumber leaves. Roof, panels and mower are intact. Nearby villages didn’t have that luck, the hail there was egg-sized.

Severe weather alerts in Home Assistant

I started thinking it would be nice if Home Assistant informed me somehow the weather will be severe in my area.

I found an integration(s) and HACSs add-ons that reports severe weather and can be used to trigger some events in HA:

Meteo alarm

Meteo Alarm is a binary sensor that can be added to Home Assistant. It provides weather alerts for EU and UK. Unfortunately, only manual setup is possible. So I edited configuration.yaml and added the following code:

Where did I found country and province?

Finding ‘Country’ attribute was easy. Went to Meteo Alarm RSS feeds and searched for Slovenia feed URL: https://feeds.meteoalarm.org/feeds/meteoalarm-legacy-rss-slovenia. I copied the last part: ‘slovenia’.

What about the ‘province’ attribute? I found it in RSS feed. I opened the feed and searched for region names. I found it in <title> tag, after ‘Slovenia / xxxx’

After HA restart, there is a new entity available:

The meteoalarm entity switches the states from ‘unsafe’ to ‘safe’. Great, now I can create an automation that reacts to the state change.

But firstly, I need to show it on my dashboard.

I found another HA add-on in HACS: Meteoalarm Card (by MrBartusek on GitHub) which is compatible with MeteoAlarm (and other weather alert services) entity:

I installed it directly from HACS addon.

Adding this card to HA dashboard is easy: Just add new card and search for Meteoalarm Card. The configuration seems very simple:

I like the option ‘Hide when there are no warnings’. My main dashboard now shows the card only when it is weather alert.

Weather alert automations

For now, I came up with three automations (which was the main reason I added MeteoAlarm to my HA):

Mower should return to docking station immediately when weather alarm is detected. Moreover, it should stay on the docking station and ignore mowing schedules (‘party mode’).

With everything in place, creating automation was easy:

And when the alarm is over, the party mode is off and normal mowing schedues are active again:

The next automation is pushing notifying my and my wife’s phones. This one is pretty obvious, so I’ll skip the description.

TL;DR

As I found out, HA can be used to avoid the damages, protect the property, reduce costs. That’s what I like in HA: I add automations and add-ons when it’s necessary.

Is it useful? I can not protect the garden, roof and other major things with it, but at least I can protect little things. And play with what the technology currently allows.

Thanks to all developers of this nice add-ons. At the end, everything works at it should.

The configuration of HA’s Meteo Alarm integration is not very straight-forward. It would be better if there was an UI to add and configure it. Especially selecting the country and the region. It’s clunky to search for regions in some RSS streams and then to manually add it to configuration.yaml.

https://blog.rozman.info/severe-weather-alerts-and-automations-in-home-assistant/

#alert #homeassistant #landroid #meteoalarm #mower #weather #worx