The actual UniFi firewall rules, the mDNS reflector quirks that ate a weekend, which devices get internet and which don't, and the honest ongoing cost of running a segmented smart home network.
Read moreThe edit-live-and-pray era is over. My real HA config workflow: everything in git, deploys over Samba, check_config before anything reloads, and the silent Samba auth failure that taught me to verify writes.
Read moreAn automation that silently died is worse than no automation. How I use Uptime Kuma to watch Home Assistant, hubs, and scheduled jobs — including the push-heartbeat pattern that caught the failure everything else missed.
Read moreLong-term notes on running Schlage BE469ZP Z-Wave deadbolts with Home Assistant: why alkaline-only is a real rule and not lawyer talk, how a 'dead' lock turned out to be a stuck calibration, and the PIN-length setting that makes the lock silently ignore user codes.
Read moreI converted my main Home Assistant dashboard from UI-managed storage mode to git-tracked YAML. The conversion itself is easy — the resource registry gotcha, the Bubble Card pop-up format change, and the fact that check_config validates none of it are what will actually bite you.
Read moreHow I built a wall-mounted tablet dashboard for Home Assistant that my family actually uses — how to choose a tablet, size touch targets, organize views, and the audit pass that fixed 22 broken cards.
Read moreDaily snapshots, weekly off-host pulls, monthly cold copies. The exact retention policy I run, what I learned from one near-miss restore, and what's still on the to-do list.
Read moreI ran most of my Home Assistant logic in Node-RED for two years. In early 2026 I migrated everything to native YAML automations. Here's what triggered the move, what was harder than expected, and what I'd do differently.
Read moreRATGDO garage controller, gate alarm, electric-fence monitor, vacuum-water-relay, and a battery-management board for a 12V dashcam install. What worked, what I'd change, and the ESPHome configs that drive them.
Read moreHow I combine a RATGDO garage controller, ESP32 gate alarm, two Z-Wave deadbolts, contact sensors, leak shutoff, and Alarmo into a coherent security setup that sends one notification per event instead of six.
Read moreKeymaster is the long-standing HACS integration for Z-Wave lock PIN codes in Home Assistant. Here's how it's set up, the 2025.8 breakage that pushed me toward Lock Code Manager, and the YAML I run.
Read moreHow I get BlackVue DR970X and DR900X dashcam footage off the cameras and onto my NAS automatically every time the cars come home — using BlackVueSync, ping sensors, and a small HA package.
Read moreWhy my first two attempts at home-versus-away detection in Home Assistant kept misfiring, what the working version actually does, and the failure modes that took the longest to track down.
Read morePulling instantaneous production, daily / monthly / yearly totals, and useful alerts out of two Tesla PVI-45 inverters into Home Assistant — what works locally, what doesn't, and the YAML I actually run.
Read moreHow I reverse-engineered the undocumented gRPC API on Span's Gen3 MAIN 40 panel and built a standalone local Home Assistant integration — and what happened when a Span firmware update disabled that API.
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