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  • Oct 27, 2025 Gear

    Vaillant aroTHERM plus 7kW Air Source Heat Pump

    Like many houses in the UK, we rely on a gas combi boiler for heating and hot water. I know that continuing to burn gas is not sustainable in the long term. However, I couldn’t see the point in switching while the grid is still burning gas to generate electricity.

  • Oct 20, 2025 Home Assistant

    Home Assistant: Concurrency Model

    I like to think of myself as a computer scientist. I want to know how things work. Then I want to understand why they work that way.

  • Oct 13, 2025 Home Assistant

    Home Assistant: Hypervolt Resilience, Configuration and Backups

    The Hypervolt EV charger integration is an important dependency for the automations and dashboards that I’m running on Home Assistant. Now that I’m a few weeks in, I’ve noticed some edge cases where things are just not right.

  • Oct 6, 2025 Home Assistant

    Home Assistant: Octopus, Repairs and Blueprints

    Last time, we touched briefly on how to extract electricity meter readings from the Home Assistant Octopus Energy integration. I think it’s worth doing a deeper dive.

  • Sep 29, 2025 Home Assistant

    Home Assistant: Dashboards, Statistics and Custom Cards

    I now have useful data being collected and displayed on the Home Assistant built-in energy dashboard. Of course, it’s not being presented exactly as I would like and doesn’t include all the data sources I’d like. Time to dive into the wonderful world of custom dashboards.

  • Sep 22, 2025 Home Assistant

    Home Assistant: Integrals and Utility Meters

    I’m finding the Home Assistant Energy Dashboard to be pretty but not very useful. The main problem is that the data is very coarse grained. The dashboard is driven by Home Assistant’s statistics system and requires metered entities. That is, sensors that track total amounts of energy (kWh), that increase over time.

  • Sep 15, 2025 Home Assistant

    Home Assistant: Helpers, Templates and Solar Forecasts

    Last time, I took you through setting up a Home Assistant Green, installing HACS, adding custom integrations and then creating an automation to disable discharge of my home battery while my EV is charging.

  • Sep 8, 2025 Front End

    Vitest 3 Monorepo Setup

    I was about to get started turning my stub react-spreadsheet package into a real one, when I noticed a new Vitest related warning from VS Code.

  • Sep 8, 2025 Blog

    Rewriting History

    This is a blog, not a set of living documents. Each post is a moment in time. However, time passes, and sometimes you find things that are wrong in an old post.

  • Sep 1, 2025 Gear Home Assistant

    Home Assistant

    Home Assistant has been on my radar for a while. I’ve always liked the idea of having a small local server running 24x7 that I could use to “automate stuff”. Two things put me off doing anything about it. There was low level anxiety over picking the right hardware and OS to run it on, but more importantly there was the lack of anything that really needed automating.

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