Home Assistant
Growing a Home Assistant OS VM Disk from 32 to 64 GB
How I safely resized my Home Assistant OS virtual disk from 32 to 64 GiB on Unraid when the recorder database outgrew the partition.
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Showing all 18 articles
Automation
AEOCKY RHEA-001 Review: An 80-Pint Dehumidifier That Excels in Florida Humidity
A hands-on review of the AEOCKY RHEA-001 80-pint dehumidifier in a Florida home: how it handles real year-round humidity, why you should hook up the continuous drain on day one, and how to make a non-connected dehumidifier work in a Home Assistant house with an ESP32.
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Fixing an Unreliable Zigbee Mesh: The Systematic Version, After Too Much Guessing
Devices dropping, slow lights, battery sensors vanishing overnight — the actual failure causes in order of likelihood, from USB3 interference to router starvation, plus the triage checklist I wish I'd had.
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Putting 80+ IoT Devices on Their Own VLAN With UniFi: What Broke and What It Bought Me
The actual UniFi firewall rules, the mDNS reflector quirks that ate a weekend, which devices get internet and which don't, and the honest ongoing cost of running a segmented smart home network.
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How I Actually Deploy Home Assistant Config Changes: Samba, Git, and a Loop I Trust
The edit-live-and-pray era is over. My real HA config workflow: everything in git, deploys over Samba, check_config before anything reloads, and the silent Samba auth failure that taught me to verify writes.
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Monitoring the Smart Home Itself: Uptime Kuma, Dead-Man's Switches, and the 14-Hour Silence
An automation that silently died is worse than no automation. How I use Uptime Kuma to watch Home Assistant, hubs, and scheduled jobs — including the push-heartbeat pattern that caught the failure everything else missed.
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Three Schlage BE469ZP Locks, Years Later: The Battery Rule, the Fake Death, and the Silent Code Gotcha
Long-term notes on running Schlage BE469ZP Z-Wave deadbolts with Home Assistant: why alkaline-only is a real rule and not lawyer talk, how a 'dead' lock turned out to be a stuck calibration, and the PIN-length setting that makes the lock silently ignore user codes.
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Migrating Home Assistant Dashboards From Storage Mode to YAML: A 7,400-Line Postmortem
I converted my main Home Assistant dashboard from UI-managed storage mode to git-tracked YAML. The conversion itself is easy — the resource registry gotcha, the Bubble Card pop-up format change, and the fact that check_config validates none of it are what will actually bite you.
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Home Assistant Tablet Dashboard: Wall-Mount Layouts & Touch Targets
How I built a wall-mounted tablet dashboard for Home Assistant that my family actually uses — how to choose a tablet, size touch targets, organize views, and the audit pass that fixed 22 broken cards.
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A Home Assistant Backup Strategy That Actually Works
Daily snapshots, weekly off-host pulls, monthly cold copies — a three-tier retention policy for Home Assistant, plus the restore drill that catches problems before you need them.
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From Node-RED to Native HA YAML: A Real Migration Postmortem
I ran most of my Home Assistant logic in Node-RED for two years. In early 2026 I migrated everything to native YAML automations. Here's what triggered the move, what was harder than expected, and what I'd do differently.
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Five ESP32 Devices I Built for My Smart Home (And Which I'd Build Differently)
RATGDO garage controller, gate alarm, electric-fence monitor, vacuum-water-relay, and a battery-management board for a 12V dashcam install. What worked, what I'd change, and the ESPHome configs that drive them.
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Layered Home Security in Home Assistant: One Alert Per Event
How I combine a RATGDO garage controller, ESP32 gate alarm, two Z-Wave deadbolts, contact sensors, leak shutoff, and Alarmo into a coherent security setup that sends one notification per event instead of six.
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Keymaster for Home Assistant Z-Wave Locks: Setup & Alternatives
Keymaster is the long-standing HACS integration for Z-Wave lock PIN codes in Home Assistant. Here's how it's set up, the 2025.8 breakage that pushed me toward Lock Code Manager, and the YAML I run.
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BlackVueSync + Home Assistant: Auto-Pull BlackVue Dashcam Footage
How I get BlackVue DR970X and DR900X dashcam footage off the cameras and onto my NAS automatically every time the cars come home — using BlackVueSync, ping sensors, and a small HA package.
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Presence Detection at 326 Lines: What Finally Worked After Three Rewrites
Why my first two attempts at home-versus-away detection in Home Assistant kept misfiring, what the working version actually does, and the failure modes that took the longest to track down.
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Tesla Solar in Home Assistant Without the Cloud (Mostly)
Pulling instantaneous production, daily / monthly / yearly totals, and useful alerts out of two Tesla PVI-45 inverters into Home Assistant — what works locally, what doesn't, and the YAML I actually run.
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Getting a Span Gen3 Panel Working in Home Assistant (Before Span Closed the Local API)
How I reverse-engineered the undocumented gRPC API on Span's Gen3 MAIN 40 panel and built a standalone local Home Assistant integration — and what happened when a Span firmware update disabled that API.
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