Solar, Fronius, and the IP Address That Refuses to Be Found
In South Australia we have so much rooftop solar that the grid occasionally pays people to *use* power, which is the closest this state gets to a personality.
Founder notes from real setup, maintenance, and ownership friction behind the buying guides.
In South Australia we have so much rooftop solar that the grid occasionally pays people to *use* power, which is the closest this state gets to a personality.
I have spent genuinely alarming amounts of money on things that promised to make this house smarter and then quietly died or sulked or asked me to disable.
Everybody approaches a smart lock as a software problem. Which app, which assistant, does it do auto-unlock, will it nag me about a subscription. All.
The first thing this house taught me, long before any of the clever stuff, is that it does not want me to have Wi-Fi in the back rooms.
Here is the thing nobody tells you in the honeymoon phase, when you’ve just plugged in your first Sonoff coordinator and you feel, briefly, like.
Every serious home automation setup eventually grows a server, and somewhere around the third week you realise you’ve started referring to it by name.
A Sonoff TS0202 costs about four dollars, and it is simultaneously a small miracle and a four-dollar liar.
The smart-home internet is American. The deals are American, the reviews are American, the “I automated my whole house for $200” videos are filmed in.
There’s a stage in this hobby where you have an old iPad in a drawer and a Home Assistant install that’s finally pretty, and the two facts collide and you.
I do the books for a living, which means I have spent my whole career being paid to ask one unglamorous question: *what’s the actual exposure here?* It.