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.
Location
Merano
Second home: prepare before arrival, costs from afar, limited supply capacity.
17 articles
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.