We live in a moderate climate, and when we built our house my plans were for my home server rack to be installed in the garage and vented through the outside wall to the alley. Unfortunately plans changed, and the instant hot gas water heater had to be moved blocking rack access to outside ventilation. Without cool outside air the servers complain about overheating in the peak of summer, and I either need to power down or keep the garage door open during the day. ...

The recent release of Home Assistant’s energy dashboard inspired me to restore my gas and water utility meter monitors. I lost the measurements when I removed my Brultech GreenEye energy meters in favor of Sense energy monitors. To recap, my local city and utilities do not allow any connections in any form to their utility meters, but I am allowed to install my own meters downstream, as long as the meter models are approved for local use, i.e. the exact same model as used by the local utilities. I installed the same model water and gas meters as used by the utilities but with dry-contact metering. ...

The SSD in my Windows 10 system started reporting failures, and as luck would have it, died while I was cloning it to a new drive. I suspect death was caused by overheating, and I addressed that with my new setup. This Windows 10 system is in an NCase M1 v5 SFF case with an ASUS ROG STRIX Z390-I GAMING mini-ITX motherboard and a Samsung 970 EVO NVMe M.2 SSD drive. The motherboard has two M.2 slots, one on the front of the motherboard and one on the back. The slot on the front has a heatsink, but I noticed the drive runs hot even under no load. Some googling showed this to be a common problem with the heatsink and M.2 slot being heated by the motherboard chipset, so I moved the SSD to the slot on the back of the motherboard. The SSD still reported +60°C temperatures under load, and I added a passive heatsink, and that kept temperatures in the low 50°C’s even under load. ...

This post is about troubleshooting the sporadic ESP8266 hardware watchdog resets in my water recirculation pump controller project. The ESP8266 would randomly restart, which I can observe by monitoring the uptime reported by ESPHome to Home Assistant. It is difficult to debug because the Sonoff TH10 is in a waterproof case in my garage, making it difficult to get a USB/UART connection for debug logging. The alternative is to monitor logs over the network, and to include the debug component that will log the restart reason. But, network logging does not capture crash information, that is only logged by UART. ...

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 garage gets so hot that the aquastat that controls the recirculation pump never turns on. This leaves us with cold water in the recirculation line, and we have to wait several minutes for hot water, defeating the entire purpose of the instant hot recirculation line. ...

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 from Tasmota guide. ESPHome Config device templates. Blakadder device templates. DigiblurDIY Tuya Convert guide. Frenck power plug calibration guide. My goal was to use Tuya Convert, for it allows over the air firmware conversion, and no physical disassembly and firmware programmer wiring is required. Unfortunately I found that many currently shipping versions of plugs that apparently used to work no longer work, possibly contributed to by Tuya switching from ESP82xx to Realtek chips. The model numbers and physical appearance of the plugs did not change, making it difficult to predict what you will get if you buy now. ...

I planned a whole 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 history, skip to the end if you’re not interested in my procrastination journey. I installed my first energy monitor, circa 2009, The Energy Detective TED-5000 connected to Google PowerMeter. Although our power utility (SCE) had installed smart meters, it took them several years, circa 2012, to enable Home Area Networks (HAN). I installed an EnergyHub Home Base, that turned out to be too unreliable due to the too long distance for ZigBee from the meter to our condo. I ordered the starter kit, that also included an energy monitoring power strip, but the power strip was unusable due to the excessively loud high frequency noise it generated. ...

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’d never even heard of Phyn. I was introduced to Phyn by a tech savvy friend that bought one at Costco, installed it at his house, and he had only good things to say about it. ...

I finally took the plunge and moved 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, that I’ve written several posts on, and excessive SSD writes wearing out drives, that have remained unresolved, and no solution seems to be forthcoming. ...

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 I compared the performance of “User” shares vs. “Disk” shares. An Unraid “User” share is a volume backed by Unraid’s FUSE filesystem, while a “Disk” share is a volume directly backed by the disk’s native filesystem. ...