With the electricity prices we’ve seen in Europe lately — I wanted to see if we could reduce our energy consumption. I’m specifically looking at “wasted” energy, meaning usage we can reduce without even noticing it.

Having a central place to view or search through server logs is awesome. I’ve used Graylog in the past, but I’ve always felt it was a bit cumbersome to set up and use — and it felt overkill for my need.

Instead I gave Grafana Loki and Promtail a try 👇

Controlling my Komfovent balanced ventilation system through Home Assistant — opens up a world of possibilities.

Here are three automations I use to make the system a bit smarter 🙂

Mona needed more places to plant her flowers, so I built her some planter boxes — using impregnated wood and lining the inside with landscape fabric.

The Unifi UAP-AC-M access point in my garage stopped working a few weeks ago. Or, the device didn’t stop working, it still showed up in the Unifi controller and I could ping it. But it stopped providing Wi-Fi connectivity — my phone connected, but got no network access…

I remembered experiencing this before — the VLANs for user and guest Wi-Fi wasn’t allowed through the D-Link switch. I had simply not configured them, but why was it failing now?

Trying to log into the switch — I found that it no longer got an IP from the DHCP server. By all accounts; it looked like the switch had been reset.

Last year — I wrote about plans for my home network, or home network v2, as I called it. Let’s take a look at what I have done, what remains, and what has changed since then.

After my Wi-Fi mapping adventure — I found a few spots with low Wi-Fi signal. Both kids’ rooms on the 2nd floor only had mediocre signal, at -67 and -68 dBm 2.4 GHz, and the side garden had -71 dBm — which is terrible!

I also discovered that Mona’s side of the bed had much worse Wi-Fi signal than my side. This was because I had a clear line of sight to the UAP-AC-IW in the den, but the signal to Mona’s side had to go through a wall and her wardrobe…

Simply not acceptable, something had to be done!

Hello again reader; I’ve been AFK for a few months — got fed up with computers and did other things 🙂

I’ve had many routers over the years — Linksys WRT54GL, Linux and iptables, ASUS RT-N66U, Ubiquiti USG, OPNsense, Ubiquiti EdgeRouter, and MikroTik CCR1009. At least those are the ones I can remember.

But I’ve been fascinated by VyOS ever since I first heard about it, even more so after using the EdgeRouter CLI. As both VyOS and EdgeOS are forks of Vyatta.

Fascinated and intimidated is probably more accurate — the lack of a GUI doesn’t give you a lot of help… But at the same time, it’s a great learning experience — you have to know and understand what you are doing 🙂

So I set out to replace my internet facing router — with a virtualized VyOS instance 🙂

We got balanced ventilation installed last year, and have been very happy with the system 🙂 But we quickly found that we needed to expand it into two more rooms — the 1st floor bathroom, used as the laundry room, and the play room, which will be a bedroom at some point.

Time to fix that 🙂