Home Assistant Had 1,751 Devices, Sensors, and Controls. I Thought It Had 800.
I thought my smart home had 800 devices. An audit found 1,751 — and 29 of my 42 scripts had never run once. The fix wasn't more automation. It was less.
Writing
What broke, what I built, and what I’m still learning.
Newest first. The useful failures tend to age well.
I Killed My Home Control App and Fixed the Dashboard I Already Had
I built a house-control PWA with optimistic UI, reconnect resilience, auto-rollback deploys, 148 tests and a 52KB bundle. Then an audit asked whether it should replace Home Assistant outright, and the honest answer killed the project.
Alexa Couldn't See Twenty Lights
Every light at the lake place was invisible to voice control, and the setting that should have exposed them had been dead the whole time. Fixed that — then rebuilt the entire voice surface so two grandparents can run the house without ever opening an app.
My Somfy Blinds Needed a Seven-Tap Secret Handshake
Somfy's official cloud integration refused to see 18 motorized shades because of an account merger on their end. The way in was an undocumented local API, unlocked by tapping the hub's PIN screen seven times. The workaround ended up better than the front door.
Four Canadian Air Conditioners Wouldn't Connect Until I Set Their Region to America
Four Canadian LG air conditioners, installed in Canada, serving Canadians, refused to connect until I told the setup flow they were American. The hardware doesn't matter. The account region does.
A Power Outage Took 840 Smart-Home Entities Offline With No Alarm
A power outage took 840 smart-home entities offline with no error anyone saw. The cause was two services wanting one port and an appliance OS that re-enables its own daemon on every boot — so the fix isn't a config change, it's a boot-time reconciler.
I Used My WiFi Network to Tell When My Family Is Home
Home-and-away automations were firing for people who weren't there. What worked was a second, independent presence signal built from something I already owned — the WiFi controller — plus an aggregation rule with one sharp edge worth understanding before you use it.