Ten cameras, one account — and the model decides
Five of my Blink cameras deliver an image every day, three almost never. Not location, not battery, not signal strength separates them — the product line does.
Three homes, one daily routine
Smart home that actually helps
I run Home Assistant in Vienna, Merano and Kapfenberg. This is what genuinely saves work, what only burns electricity — and what a solution really gained me in the end.
New here? Start with these
- 1The Raspberry Pi sat in a drawer for eleven monthsWhere it began — and why nothing happened for eleven months.
- 2tado integrated locally — then six weeks of wrong diagnosesHow the work goes here: six weeks, four diagnoses, all wrong.
- 3My flat tells me the electricity bill in advanceWhat it all adds up to: the electricity bill before it arrives.
Latest articles
All articlesHACS is built in now — and my hand-installs were invisible
Home Assistant 2026.11 leaves nothing of HACS to install. What changes, what breaks in templates, and why manually installed integrations do not show up.
50 cubic metres out — and still counting correctly
My gas meter has two data sources: an accurate one days behind, and a current one with a wrong starting value. Only together are they worth anything.
252 scripts later: what Claude could and could not do
Three flats, three instances, 252 tool scripts — built with Claude as a working partner. How the chain looks, and the one rule without which it does not hold.
Ten hours without water, and the watchdog said nothing
A valve closed at midnight and never reopened. The monitoring built for exactly that stayed silent — for a reason that affects every alarm in the house.
Flatness was the proof — two lines, two wrong suspects
Two radio links, two months of measurement. In Kapfenberg the culprit was my own automation, in Merano the measuring tool itself.
Two identical buttons, and "long" means different things
One button at the door, one in the bedroom. Both identical, both with three gestures — and the most important gesture does something entirely different on each.
What is in here
Not a grab bag: every article belongs to one of six recurring questions and plays out in one of three homes. Here is the outline before you start reading.
- 54articles
- 3homes
- 6series
- 31terms in the glossary
The series on this blog
Every article answers one recurring question.
Smart or pointless?
One device, one real test, one clear verdict.
8 articles
This saves me …
Which steps, trips and running costs actually disappear.
7 articles
What happens if …?
Pull the trigger and watch what really happens.
8 articles
What went wrong?
Failures, false conclusions and what they cost.
15 articles
What lands on the bill?
Meters, standby load and forecasts made understandable.
6 articles
Three places, one routine
Comparisons and ongoing projects across all three homes.
10 articles
Three locations, three starting points
The same need meets different buildings, tariffs and devices. That is exactly where the comparisons come from.
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