1. Get the sonoff and z2m and go zigbee wherever possible. It’s worked very well for me, and the devices have to be local so no cloud bullshit. Z2M has a good page with supported devices listed, so you can check what works before you buy. I use mainly smart plugs and go on/off only but use bulbs where smarter control is needed. Plugs are mostly tuya from aliexpress for lights, with domesticly bought higher quality (aquara and hue) for higher demand loads. Bulbs are all Ikea, they are cheap and work well. You should literally never need a hub with zigbee, thought some devices might loose some features without the hub.
2. I have an ikea blind, the battery lasts a long time but there are guides online for hacking them to be wired. They do have some QC issues, i had to take min apart to fix a loose setscrew but it’s worked perfectly after that. From what I’ve seen it’s an assembly issue and not a design issue, so i would have no problem buying more.
3. How hard is it to replace the outlets? Here it’s illegal to DIY so quite expensive, therefore I’ve gone all zigbee smart plugs. If you can DIY changing the outlets that is not an issue, and smart outlets may be a better option. I always try to think of what happens if something fails, some things can get very expensive at a later point. YMMV…

WeatherFlow Tempest

Nice, I’ve been looking for a local weather station and had not seen this one. Shame the price triples by the time it gets over here, but at least it’s available (contrary to most other options I’ve found). Might go for it anyways…

I don’t have a camera, no need for one.

Guess I’ll have to look into what phillips has been up to… Edit: The usual idiotic cloud crap i see… Good thing we are on the home assistant forum, where not needing the stupid hubs is half the point ;)

I use the brightest ikea smart bulbs in mine, I just leave the switches on (they are on three separate swithches in various locations) and control everything in home assistant. Motion sensors are phillips hue outdoor sensors, they work well and double as my outdoor temperature sensors and light sensors. I’d mount the camera and sensor up under the roof, that makes them less prominent and puts them out of easy reach of anyone with bad intentions.

That reolink camera is fucking ugly! No way I’d put that on my wall…

Can grafana do bar and line graphs in the same card? That is the main advantage with apexcharts for me, I can show hourly electricity price with and without grid tariffs as steplines, hourly power consumtion as a bar graph and hourly solar production as a area stepline, all in one compact card. I don’t think I could make a clear and easily readable graph like that without combining different graph types. Not that is’t perfect in any way, apexcharts has some bugs and issues so I’ll happily try something else if it can do what i need.

I have one of these too, works well. Pretty sure it phones home, but it only needs internet for initial setup so it can be blocked in the firewall after that.

In Europe red are usuallly the cheap PVC ones while black has higher quality insulation and last much longer, well worth the price difference.

My solar is going up next week, so I’ve been experimenting a bit with working it into my current setup. I have import and export data from my smart meter, hourly electricity price from entso-e and a simulated solar production based on the lux reading from my outdoor pir sensors. To get real time production I specced an elko smart tag energy meter on the fuse for the inverter, as the solis is not easy for an amateur to get data out of. I also have smart relay on my water heater, and have been controlling this based on electricity price for a while now. I’m also working on adding the heat pump and bathroom heat, they will be set a couple of degreees lower when power is most expensive, and a couple higher when solar is produsing to “store” heat. Not sure how all this will work out yet so I’ll not share the details before I’m sure it works, but I hope it gives som ideas.

For visualizations I use apexcharts, i can fit solar production, consumption and price with and without grid tariff in a single card, althought it’s not quite perfekt yet.

Like he said, no need to use the shelly for switching if you only need power monitoring.

Or you can use a Shelly EM.