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.
Topic
When something goes wrong
Mistakes, silent failures and error messages that say the opposite of what they mean.
15 articles
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.