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.
Field Notes
Founder notes from real setup, maintenance, and ownership friction behind the buying guides.
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NFC Tags: The Dumbest Smart Thing That Actually Stuck
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.
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Smart Locks and the Tyranny of the Aluminium Sliding Door
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.
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Double Brick and the Slow Death of Wi-Fi
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.
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I Let Zigbee2MQTT Into My House and It Repaid Me With Blinds That Don’t Move
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.
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Meet Greg
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.
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Your Motion Sensor Thinks the Gym Is Empty
A Sonoff TS0202 costs about four dollars, and it is simultaneously a small miracle and a four-dollar liar.
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Running an American Smart Home in an Australian House
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.
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The iPad on the Wall: A Cautionary Tale
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.
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Hue Outdoors Is Just Electrical Work in a Nicer Box
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.