Guides for Home Assistant, HACS and self-hosting
KNX Heating in Home Assistant: 21 Automations Become 6
Moving the heating logic of a KNX house: 16 copied window automations become one with a mapping table, and the operating mode feedback is still missing.
Latest Posts - 113
Home Assistant Backups on S3-Compatible Storage, Not AWS
The built-in aws_s3 backup location only accepts amazonaws.com. A daily encrypted backup plus a script that copies it to Hetzner Object Storage and verifies it.
Home Assistant Packages Instead of Include Files
One YAML file per area instead of files split by type, the price of that layout, and a deploy script that validates the config and restores a backup on failure.
Home Assistant Migration: Old and New in Parallel
Moving from Home Assistant 2024.11.1 to 2026.8.2 with both instances running: the new one reads first, automations arrive switched off, and I compare states.
Move KNX Switches From the Home Assistant UI to knx.yaml
31 of 33 UI-created KNX switches moved into knx.yaml without a restart, with their old entity ids restored. The steps, the tool, and five broken actions.
One Day of Home Assistant Logs: 775 Errors, Seven Findings
775 errors and 5,077 warnings in one day of Home Assistant logs: five findings from that day, two from the restart after it. Three affected operation.
Mushroom Cards in Home Assistant: Template Card, button-card
Four custom cards, one theme and self-hosted fonts turned a stock dashboard into an instrument panel. The four things that broke on the way, with the fixes.
Home Assistant Dashboard Templates You Can Copy
Two complete YAML dashboards to paste: one on built-in cards only, one with four custom cards. Including how to wire them in and how to swap the entities.
21 Releases Behind: I Rebuilt Instead of Upgrading
An instance 21 monthly releases behind. Why I chose a clean rebuild over an upgrade, what a fresh install starts with, and the screen that made it a choice.
Create a Home Assistant Dashboard From Zero in Five Steps
Five steps from an empty view to a finished dashboard, one screenshot each. The step that changes the most adds no new cards at all, only structure.
Where Home Assistant Runs: One Small VM, Measured
A 7 euro cloud VM running Home Assistant in Docker: memory, boot and disk measured, why not Kubernetes, and what a data-centre machine cannot do.