Home Automation

Home automation may seem overkill on a boat, but being able to automate the dehumidifier, monitor bilges for rainwater, or turn on the heater before entering the boat have all been great additions. It’s also nice to prototype with ESP Home and create a tachometer, check airflow, or any device we are thinking of. All of these are of course “nice to have” features, and we don’t run any of them off the main “starter battery” system. Only house batteries for things we are fine to live without.

Home Assistant

We use a Home Assistant Green as our home automation server. We started with a Home Assistant Yellow but with our slow internet, it somehow got corrupted just installing the necessary software. This was a huge pain to debug, and after we had it working for a few months, we woke up to the board charred and fried for unknown reasons. The Home Assistant Green has worked flawlessly in comparison, though is a little slow. For the protocol, we use Zigbee instead of wifi. There are slight power savings, but the main reason we use Zigbee is so that things still work with the wifi router off. We have many Ikea Stybar buttons throughout the boat, and these control the lights, heater, dehumidifier, and turn the wifi off and on (to save power).

As for the Home Assistant OS itself, it has grown in leaps and bounds around since we’ve started in 2023. Previously we found it incredibly buggy, but now it’s at a state where everything works and is possible. We have scripts to wake each other up on long passages, use the community store, have built various ESP Home devices, and are in general bought into the software. It will always be heavy, but makes things easy enough that it’s worth committing to the software.

Switches

In order to turn devices off and on, we use Shelly 1 Gen 4 switches. These came out summer 2025, and are by far the best solution if using Zigbee. They consume about 1 watt of power on standby (which does add up), but have good support and form factor. Previously all we could find were these Zigbee switches and they had poor documentation and were flimsy. Wiring these kinds of switches isn’t very intuitive (you need to put a jumper between the 12v and “I” port on most installs via a 3 way WAGO), but they otherwise have worked flawlessly. When looking for appliances to use with them, but sure to find appliances which will keep their settings even when power is cut. This is particularly important with the dehumidifier, and even with a heater, they need to be wired to control the “power switch” rather than cut power to the entire system so that fans can run. In order to control AC loads, instead of wiring directly, we wire the switch to our Victron Phoenix Inverter and turn that off and on. These inverters include a jumper on the inverter itself, so they don’t require a jumper on the switch install.

Remote Monitoring

Victron and Home Assistant both offer remote monitoring systems, but we’ve found it easiest to monitor Home Assistant through the Cloudflare Tunnel Plugin. To monitor Victron bluetooth devices, a “Xiao esp32c3” is used to forward values to Home Assistant. This exposes a bit more data than is available in the “Victron Connect App”, and has a good enough range to pick up all the Victron devices in the boat. The Home Assistant app is then deployed on a subdomain, and secured with Cloudflare Access in addition to the Home Assistant login. If the domain is already under Cloudflare, it’s a super quick process. For the “Cloudflare Tunnel” addon, we’ve just gone with the “local” setup which has been sufficient for our use case.

The monitoring itself isn’t that helpful, but as stated in the intro, being able to start the heater when heading home is a great luxury. Also it doesn’t happen often, but we’ve left the heater, lights, or dehumidifier on accidentally, and it’s well worth it to be able to check without hopping in the dinghy. With how easy it is to setup, remote monitoring is well worth it. It does take some extra power needing to keep the wifi router on, but this can always be turned off remotely (while losing access until getting back on the boat of course).