A lot of energy hardware already has a local data interface that often goes unused: DIN-rail energy meters, solar inverters, heat pumps and ventilation units often speak Modbus. The protocol comes from industrial controllers and needs no cloud or account. Once it works, you can poll voltage, power and energy counters as often as the device allows.
A smart radiator thermostat replaces the head on a radiator valve with a small battery-powered motor that opens and closes the valve on a schedule or on command. It is a simple way to give each room its own schedule, and some models are now very cheap: IKEA's Thread-based LILJEBAGGE already sells in Sweden for 199 kronor, and heise reports a German
Most home cameras are sold as a pair: the camera and the manufacturer's app, with clips stored in the vendor's cloud. That works until the subscription price goes up, the service shuts down or someone finds a hole in it. In October 2026 CERT-UA warned that attackers were reaching Dahua cameras through the Easy4IP cloud feature by guessing serial nu
With a dynamic price contract, the energy part of your bill follows the wholesale market instead of a fixed rate. Cheap hours get cheaper, sometimes close to zero or below, and the evening peak gets more expensive. Whether that saves money depends almost entirely on one thing: how much of your consumption you can move, and whether you move it autom
A lot of "flaky" ESP32 projects aren't flaky because of the code. The board resets when Wi-Fi connects, a relay clicks and the log stops, or a battery sensor dies after two weeks instead of two months. Each of these usually comes down to power: a supply that can't deliver the current peaks, a regulator that doesn't fit the input voltage, or a pin t
Plenty of cheap Wi-Fi plugs, relays and switches are built around an Espressif chip and ship with firmware that talks only to the manufacturer's cloud. Tasmota replaces that firmware with an open one that runs entirely on your network: a web page on the device, a console, timers and rules on the device itself, and MQTT for anything bigger. This gui
The boxes in the smart home aisle carry three logos that look like rivals: Zigbee, Thread and Matter. Only two of them compete. Zigbee and Thread are radio networks that move small messages between low-power devices. Matter is a language devices use to describe themselves and accept commands, and it runs on top of Thread, Wi-Fi or Ethernet. Once yo
A smart plug is the cheapest way to automate something and the easiest way to find out what a device really uses. It is also the product category where it is easiest to buy the wrong thing: a plug that only works through an app and a remote server, a relay too weak for a heater, or a metering chip that reports once a minute when you wanted live dat
Wi-Fi does not reach the bottom of the garden. Zigbee needs a chain of mains-powered routers to get to the shed, and there is no socket at the gate or the rain barrel. This is where LoRaWAN earns its place: a battery sensor that sends a few bytes from hundreds of metres or even kilometres away and runs for years on a pair of cells. It is not a repl
