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.
Series
What went wrong?
Failures, false conclusions and what they cost.
15 articles
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.