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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Make sure to do the math if solar is even worth it for you. Electricity is relatively cheap in my area. When I did the math, it would take me at least 20 years to break even (that’s if I paid cash, even longer if I finance). Considering 25 years is an average panels lifespan, it would not save me any money.

    Being independent of the grid is the only selling point, but I haven’t done enough research if that’s even true with solar. If it’s still connected to the grid, will I even be able to utilize my panels if there’s an outage in the grid?









  • So, I used Homebox for a few days now. I like the simplicity of it and I like the direction they’re going. However, there are quite a few bugs and data loss issues, it’s not ready for production yet. The thing is, these issues should be so easy to fix (it’s a simple CRUD app) that it makes me doubt the dev skills and possibility of other issues I haven’t discovered yet.

    • The purchase date just increments or decrements by one day after editing an item
    • When editing an item the notes/description fields show the data from the previously edited item, causing you to overwrite data

    These two issues alone made me go back to my spreadsheet for now (good thing I kept a backup). I simply don’t trust the app to keep my data intact.



  • HA is geared towards selfhosted, locally controlled stuff (zwave, ZigBee, mqqt, local WiFi, etc). Because the cloud and privacy invasion is the mainstream, HA may require a bit more tweaking and technical knowledge to get up and running.

    With that said, once you get it to how you want it, it’s been working rock solid for me for a few years now. I’ve built my house around HA automations and can’t imagine living without it.