50 cubic metres out — and still counting correctly
My gas meter has two data sources: an accurate one days behind, and a current one with a wrong starting value. Only together are they worth anything.
Topic
Local over cloud
What stays in the house and what does not — and what "locally controllable" really means.
21 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.
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.
For thirteen hours the shut-off hung on the cloud
A network outage, two new addresses — and the local path to both water valves was dead. Why fixed addresses matter most when you work locally.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The switch says requested, not running
The pellet stove has no network. The relay only reports that heat was asked for — whether it is burning is revealed solely by the ignition spike in the power draw.
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.
The power nets out, the energy does not
The house meter measures three phases. It nets the power against itself but adds the energy up — which makes its counters useless for the dashboard.
The washing machine reports in — if you let it
Programme, temperature and spin speed on my phone, locally and without a vendor account. And why the same brand could not be connected at all in Merano.
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.
Measure fast, set slow
The solar battery offers nothing locally. The trigger arrives instantly from the house, the action travels halfway round the internet — that decides the design.
Two masters on the same light
The Hue bridge automates by itself, even when Home Assistant is off. Use the same sensor twice and you will later wonder why the light goes out on its own.
I checked 25 invoice lines — and my own device was wrong
Two years of gas bills recalculated line by line: largest deviation 0.016%. The number that was wrong came from my own meter reader.
Vienna: three integrations in one day, and a dead file
The second installation was the first to profit from the first. And on the same morning it wrote a configuration that never had any effect.
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.
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.