Since Home Assistant announced energy monitoring was being added, I've been super interested in what sort of data I could get out of my energy system. We have nothing fancy here. Just fairly standard dual-fuel (electricity and gas) system provided by the grid with a smart meter. No solar panels or batteries or returning power to the grid. My provider (E.ON Next) don't make that data easily accessible (or at least, they didn't when I looked).

So, I searched around and found Hildebrand and their Glow meter. Which was out of stock. Boo.

I signed up for stock alerts for the product and started wondering if I could write a bot to log in to my account on the E.ON website, then scrape the data and push it back into Home Assistant in the meantime.

But then I got an email...

I've recently started using some Tasmota plugs for power monitoring using Home Assistant, in setting them up I found (and was shown) some useful commands!

I've recently dived into MQTT. I got it working without really understanding some core concepts (yay easy-to-use UIs) but felt myself wanting to know more about what it was. I did some reading up on the various parts and decided to document them here for my own reference later on. Maybe it'll be useful to others too, who knows!

Time moves on. Posts do not. Sometimes (read: most of the time) an old post doesn't get updated. The information in that post might be outdated and incorrect. But people don't always consider the age of the post, just jump to the content.

Taking inspiration from Twitter, I've added a message to be displayed on blog posts older than 365 days on here.

Previously my phone-photo-backup process involved connecting it to a computer, then manually copying photos to a folder on my NAS. This was inefficient, and I'd often forget to do it for months at a time. I wanted something that'd backup my photos automatically, and do so to my own hardware. I found PhotoSync to be an awesome app and setup PhotoPrism as a backup target for it to use.