Home Assistant

Letting Claude Rewrite My Home Assistant

After years of accreted config, dead sensors, and a failed ChatGPT attempt, I handed my Home Assistant to Claude to rewrite the YAML and clean house.

The Night My Safety Net Fought Itself

A week ago I said my battery had never breached its floor. Last night it did — not because the safety net failed to fire, but because a second safety system was running month-old code and kept turning the charger back off. Two backstops at war, and a human at 2am.

One Year of Buying Electricity Cleverly — First by Hand, Then by Script

A year ago I put in a home battery and started timing my electricity buying — by hand at first, then a Python script I built. What the year added up to.

Making the Numbers Honest: A Maintenance Day Under the Hood

A Cloudflare 502 sent me to fix one thing. By the end of the night I'd found three more — numbers that had been quietly wrong for weeks.

Two Databases, One Repo: How SQLite Glues This Site Together

The 0-byte ghost.db fossil at content/data is a Ghost migration leftover. The one that actually runs this site lives one directory over — 13 MB, 44 tables, and the entire reporting and automation layer for GPS, energy, SEO, alerts, and the planner.

What My Battery Compares Every 30 Minutes

Most home batteries charge whenever the rate is cheap. Mine compares this cycle's cheapest slot against the next cycle's, the projected drain, the SOC-aware ceiling, and a forecast of tomorrow's solar — every 30 minutes.

I Wired Up a UK Bin Calendar — and Improved Three Councils Upstream Along the Way

A small wrapper around an amazing open-source UK bin-collection scraper — plus three upstream council fixes I sent along the way.

Home Assistant as the Brain: How My Solar System Manages Itself

Discover how Home Assistant automates your solar energy system to maximize savings with Octopus Agile pricing and intelligent self-management.