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.
All articles
54 articles
Searches the whole text, including parts of words.
HACS 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.
An umlaut killed my frost warning
Three faults ran unnoticed for months, one of them in a protection function. All three were found in one evening — and two earlier findings had to be retracted.
Two water valves, and the shut-off is not the device's job
Hot water rules out almost every metering valve. Which one was left, what speaks against it — and why opening has two brakes while closing has none.
A guessed wait is not a check
The lock needs 38 seconds; my automation waited 20. The second command hit the motor mid-travel — and took the confirmation down with it.
The SD card is out — a day spent at the wrong end
Long-term statistics wiped twice, four corrupt database files. Moving to an NVMe cost a day, two bugs in other software and two wrong theories of my own.
For thirteen hours the shut-off hung on the cloud
A network outage, two new addresses — and the local path to both water valves was dead. Why fixed addresses matter most when you work locally.
What does a flat cool towards? Not the outside air
Seven hours with no heat in the circuit, and the question of how far to preheat. The answer hung on a figure I had assumed wrongly at first.
What a radiator thermostat measures is not your room
Three homes, three ways to a radiator: tado over HomeKit, Shelly over Zigbee, and once no valve at all. What each gives you — and what none of them can do.
The stove obeys again — for 55 instead of 299 euros
The pellet stove accepts heat level and target temperature again. It took a 32-euro converter, the right baud rate, and one line of code in the right place.
tado integrated locally — then six weeks of wrong diagnoses
The local route to tado runs through HomeKit, and HomeKit allows only one controller. What followed: four plausible diagnoses, all of them wrong.
Three rooms cooled down — and nobody had a window open
A home-built detector spotted ventilation in an empty flat. The interpretation was wrong, and the real reason called a whole measurement series into question.
Four buttons for six heating zones — the stove counts too
In winter it is always the same four states. Clicking each one by hand across six zones is the kind of work where you forget half — usually the toilet.
The weaker mast was the better one
After turning the antenna, reception fell from −71 to −87 dBm and I advised turning it back. Four days later throughput was four times as high.
The UPS shuts nothing down — and that is deliberate
Every guide says: shut down cleanly on power failure. Mine keeps the Pi running. The reason lies in a property no UPS puts in its datasheet.
The regulator's client, self-built — and then there were three
A second measuring method alongside Ookla: the regulator’s own client, packed into a home-built add-on. And three instruments that falsified each other.
My flat tells me the electricity bill in advance
At 23:50 on the last day of the month a notification arrives with consumption, cost components and the expected bill. What the forecast can do and where it ends.
Your remote access works — but you have not proved it
Three flats, three answers. Why a successful request from home proves nothing, why bans never expire — and why one location has nothing at all.
The sticker does not know who is there — the calendar does
The request was an e-ink display with a rotating QR code. What was built is a sticker with no power. Why that answers the same question better.
Bandwidth was never the interesting number
The bundled integration was off by a factor of four. The Ookla CLI showed the real finding — and the antenna web interface ended the search for a cause.
The name lives in three places, and you see only one
Locally no device has the name it has in the account, the firmware stores no umlauts — and the display hid the house power because of a setting in the cloud.
The maintainer replied — and corrected me, rightly
One of my measurements did not measure the camera but a default setting shipped with the project. The third error of the same kind in a single day.
This device has Wi-Fi — and still stays outside
A grill with a core temperature probe, a switch found on the water connection. I could integrate both. Why I did neither.
Three cities, three data sources, one question: when do I leave?
Departure boards in Merano, Kapfenberg and Vienna. The same idea built three times — and three times I got it wrong in a different place.
The switch says requested, not running
The pellet stove has no network. The relay only reports that heat was asked for — whether it is burning is revealed solely by the ignition spike in the power draw.
Blink answers with 202 — and nobody got in
The login failed in the version I tested. Three days later the project had three new releases. What lay in between was not code.
400 Bad Request, and my config had never been active
Remote access answered with 400 and nothing else. Three suspects cleared — until it turned out Home Assistant no longer reads that file at all.
The model with more physics was the worse one
Four years of gas use reconstructed from 71 meter readings. My temperature model was physically sound — and off by 110 cubic metres.
The power nets out, the energy does not
The house meter measures three phases. It nets the power against itself but adds the energy up — which makes its counters useless for the dashboard.
The washing machine reports in — if you let it
Programme, temperature and spin speed on my phone, locally and without a vendor account. And why the same brand could not be connected at all in Merano.
Four stars, no licence — and I was wrong
A project with four stars, built in a day, untouched since. My assessment stood in bold in my notes. Four days later I had to retract it.
Measure fast, set slow
The solar battery offers nothing locally. The trigger arrives instantly from the house, the action travels halfway round the internet — that decides the design.
A few drops, and my phone speaks up
A leak sensor under 20 euros passed a real water test in my Vienna flat: instant alert, all-clear after 30 seconds, battery warning included.
Two masters on the same light
The Hue bridge automates by itself, even when Home Assistant is off. Use the same sensor twice and you will later wonder why the light goes out on its own.
First 36 devices, then 15 — and nothing had happened
One network scan, two results, one false alarm. Why ping is the wrong measure and the router knows more than any sweep.
Port 554 stays closed — and that is not a fault
The new Tapo camera would not integrate. The reason is a protocol change you will need again at your next purchase — and that nobody prints on the box.
Kapfenberg was standing in one day
The third installation was the fastest — not because I had got better, but because the first two were written down. Plus one measurement with no occasion.
One convenience feature cost me nine devices
A camera would not join the Wi-Fi, and in the garden the connection dropped. Same cause — and after switching it off, nine more devices were reachable.
I checked 25 invoice lines — and my own device was wrong
Two years of gas bills recalculated line by line: largest deviation 0.016%. The number that was wrong came from my own meter reader.
Vienna: three integrations in one day, and a dead file
The second installation was the first to profit from the first. And on the same morning it wrote a configuration that never had any effect.
35 minutes of cooling, zero degrees colder — the proof run
The air conditioner ran and did not cool. "Cools badly" is not a finding. How a complaint became a measurement series the engineer confirmed.
The calendar knows in advance, the phone knows now
No tracker can predict an arrival, no calendar can safeguard a departure. Why both are needed — and where the eight and ten hours come from.
The fountain runs. It is not in Home Assistant.
Bruno needs water — does his bowl need Wi-Fi? Half an afternoon, a device that quietly swaps its key, and a verdict that comes in two halves.
Both came home — and the automation said nothing
Unlocking the door was supposed to produce a photo. None appeared. The trigger was waiting for a state change this lock never makes.
The current clamp sat differently from the plan
One meter in the distribution box, two clamps — and the assignment was swapped. A lamp proved it, its own reading only 1.2 watts away.
Signal does not notify you about your own messages
Home Assistant was paired as a secondary device and sent under my own number. The images arrived, the notification never did. Only a foreign sender triggers it.
Six valves move house — and the radio network improved
The radiator heads spoke Bluetooth through two gateways. The same hardware can do Zigbee — and after removing the gateways the weakest link got better.
Merano was the first — with nobody to look things up in
The first of the three installations. Two things came out of it that saved time later — one of them was a quotation mark.
The Raspberry Pi sat in a drawer for eleven months
Bought in September 2025, nothing achieved for a year. What changed after that was not the hardware — and the reorder date gives away the day.