Pieter

Hot Water Recirculation Pump Controller

Our house uses a Noritz natural gas instant hot water heater, with a dedicated hot water recirculation line. Problem is the heater is installed in the garage, and in the summer the the garage gets so hot that the aquastat that controls the recirculation pump never turns on. This leaves us with cold water inContinue reading “Hot Water Recirculation Pump Controller”

Tuya to Tasmota to ESPHome

This is a summary of my experience, and the exact steps I followed, to convert cheap Tuya based WiFi smart plugs to ESPHome for Home Assistant integration. I am a novice when it comes to ESPHome, and I pieced information together from various great sources: Tuya Convert project. ESPHome Tuya Convert guide. ESPHome migrating fromContinue reading “Tuya to Tasmota to ESPHome”

Abandoning GreenEye for Sense

I planned whole a house energy monitoring setup when we built our house. But in all these years I never completed the Brultech GreenEye installation, I officially called that plan abandoned, and instead installed Sense energy monitors. First a bit of a history, skip to the end if you’re not interested in my procrastination journey.Continue reading “Abandoning GreenEye for Sense”

Phyn Plus Smart Water Assistant – Early Impressions

Phyn Plus is a “smart water assistant”, a device that monitors water usage, and can automatically shut off the water supply when a leak is detected. I am familiar with whole house water monitoring and leak detection devices, like the widely available and advertised Moen Flo Smart Water Shutoff, but until very recently I’ve neverContinue reading “Phyn Plus Smart Water Assistant – Early Impressions”

Moving from Unraid to Proxmox VE

I finally took the plunge and moved from from Unraid to Proxmox VE. I used to love Unraid, but at some point the easy to use web management UI and app store ecosystem simply lacked capabilities I needed for deployment automation and configuration tasks. Then there is the problem with the poor IO performance, thatContinue reading “Moving from Unraid to Proxmox VE”

Unraid User-Share vs. Disk-Share SMB Performance

This is yet another post on Unraid’s poor SMB performance, but I think I narrowed down the cause of the problem to the Unraid FUSE filesystem. I discovered this about 2 months ago, but with COVID-19 and no kids weekend sporting event duties, I have some time to post. In this round of testing IContinue reading “Unraid User-Share vs. Disk-Share SMB Performance”

Unraid vs. Ubuntu Bare Metal SMB Performance

In my last test I compared Unraid SMB performance with an Ubuntu VM running on Unraid, and Ubuntu outperformed Unraid. I was wondering if the VM disk image synthetically improved performance, maybe IO caching, so this time I tested Ubuntu on the same hardware that runs Unraid. I configured the system to boot from eitherContinue reading “Unraid vs. Ubuntu Bare Metal SMB Performance”

Recovering the Firmware on a Supermicro BPN-SAS3-846EL1 Backplane

In a previous adventure I replaced an Adaptec HBA with a LSI SAS3 HBA, and the chassis drive bay LED’s stopped working. I suspect the LSI card does not play nice with the SGPIO sideband controller, and I decided to replace the chassis with one similar to my SC846 chassis, where the LSI card andContinue reading “Recovering the Firmware on a Supermicro BPN-SAS3-846EL1 Backplane”

Unraid vs. Ubuntu SMB Performance

In my last round of testing I found that Unraid v6.8 SMB still underperforms compared to Windows Server 2019, but I was wondering if it is a Linux Samba problem, or an Unraid problem. I installed an Ubuntu Server 18.04.3 LTS VM on Unraid, bridged network, 16GB RAM, 128GB raw disk located on the BTRSContinue reading “Unraid vs. Ubuntu SMB Performance”

Unraid SMB Performance: v6.7.2 vs. v6.8.1

I previously wrote about the poor SMB performance I experienced in Unraid v6.7.2. Unraid v6.8 supposedly addressed SMB performance issues for concurrent read and write operations, and after waiting for the first bugfix release of v6.8, I re-tested using v6.8.1. In my last test I used a combination of batch files and copy and paste,Continue reading “Unraid SMB Performance: v6.7.2 vs. v6.8.1”