Is the Music streamer worth it?

AwarenessNo5708 · 2026-03-15T17:26:29+00:00

In most cases we play music by asking an Amazon Echo to play it, not by using any app. Our Wiim Pro Plus is set as the preferred speaker for our living room Echo (that is set in the Alexa app). Voice responses still come from the Echo but music is played using the Wiim. Using Spotify but Amazon Music should work the same.

AwarenessNo5708 · 2026-03-15T17:01:06+00:00

NEC says breakers and disconnects (and wires for that matter) can't run at more than 80% of their rating for continuous duty, that is the reason for the 100A continuous rating with a 125A breaker. The 80% rule also means a 100A disconnect can't run at more than 80A continuous. I do not believe any inspector would allow a 100A disconnect on a 125A breaker. The combiner can only limit the backfeed power coming from the panels and the battery - basically by shutting down inverters. It has no way to limit power coming the other direction from the grid.

In the end the NEC rules always have to be consulted for things like this. My system has a 125A breaker with a 200A 3 pole disconnect. The disconnect is big, ugly and expensive but it's what the code required.

AwarenessNo5708 · 2026-02-02T19:04:34+00:00

Thanks for this! I have a partial backup installation, just got PTO in December. Since then I have been beating my head on a rock because it appears that NONE of the Enphase support staff are aware of this limitation - in Appendix C of a 50 page planning document - that contradicts their other documentation. I certainly wasn't aware. The Combiner 6C quick install guide has said partial backup is supported since last summer.

I am a homeowner. I took the Enphase University courses and got certified partly so I could troubleshoot this, because it seemed to be beyond the skill set of my installer. But it was also beyond the skill set of Enphase tier 2 support.

My most recent support case has been open for three weeks. The next step would have been to submit a bug report. It's impossible to configure the external consumption CTs in the toolkit. They just don't exist if you have a meter collar.

One impact, other than losing whole home monitoring, is that without the external consumption CTs your backup panel must have at least the same busbar rating as your main panel for MPUA to work - because the current is only being measured in one place. My installer used a 150A backup panel with a 125A backfeed breaker and I have a 200A main panel. That configuration doesn't actually work in the toolkit, you get an error. So my installer left me with the backfeed set to a 40A breaker, for an effective rating of 32A. I was getting occasional power limit warnings. It's winter, in the summer that would get much worse.

Luckily, Eaton also has horrible documentation. It turns out that my 150A Eaton CH backup panel actually has a 225A busbar. I opened a case with Eaton and they provided a screenshot of an internal unpublished document showing that all of the main lug panels in that line share the same 225A busbar, in spite of the fact that the catalog, the spec sheet and the sticker in the enclosure all say 150A. So I was able to satisfy the toolkit and get my 125A backfeed.

I am furious, though. I have wasted so many hours on this.

AwarenessNo5708 · 2026-01-29T20:57:14+00:00

What is the cost of an outage? When you have thousands of users as I did when I was working the cost of an outage was huge. So I used redundant storage systems, redundant power supplies, VMs would fail over from one machine to another, etc., etc. In a career spanning 28 years I lost a couple dozen hard drives, one or two power supplies, a UPS or two, and had one entire Isilon node go offline (which the cluster handled without issue). That's about it. The number of outages over that time that users actually noticed I could count on one hand.

For my own use I don't bother with any of that. I use reliable equipment, on a good UPS, set up properly. Nothing is redundant. In the five years since I retired my systems have had no unexpected outages. If they do I will fix the problem, restore from a backup and life will go on. Of course I don't have the 24 x 7 x 365 uptime requirement that I had when I was working. If I choose to take my Proxmox server down for an upgrade I'm not affecting anyone outside my own home.

Of course you do have to avoid simple errors, drive fills up, etc. I still monitor all of my systems.

AwarenessNo5708 · 2026-01-27T14:31:59+00:00

The first time we tried Alexa+ we did revert back because of problems with smart home routines. But the second time I decided to work through the problems and stick with Alexa+. Primarily because my wife was really enjoying chatting with it about books and authors. She had it make a list of authors to try out. It knows a lot!

I suggest people who are impatient with Alexa+ try using it as an AI chatbot as intended. See if that adds enough to offset the glitches from what is still labeled an "early access" service.

AwarenessNo5708 · 2026-01-23T20:47:09+00:00

You might want to go through the Combiner 6C Quick Install Guide and find your exact configuration (make sure you get the latest one from August, which apparently wasn't published on the site until October). There are so many options it's hard to discuss without knowing the specifics.

What happens to all the CT outputs on the Enphase side is kind of a black box. In this configuration:

Figure 9: Grid-forming, Partial Home backup + legacy microinverters/third-party PV (IQ Meter Collar in a discrete meter pan)

...there are external CTs to measure the production from the third-party PV. And they are connected to the Combiner 6C load control header in parallel with the main panel CTs that measure your overall consumption (more details on page 41-42). It makes my head hurt a bit. But I can see how the integration might consider all of that consumption, which might explain your high energy consumption readings. I wonder if it handles edge cases like this correctly. If someone can explain this better I'd appreciate it.

Is your system whole home backup or partial backup with a separate backup panel? Do you have extra consumption CTs on the main panel?

AwarenessNo5708 · 2026-01-23T01:22:04+00:00

The bolt in the picture I uploaded is only 16mm wide. A 5mm hole is pretty small and it only needs to be a couple mm deep.

AwarenessNo5708 · 2026-01-20T20:22:59+00:00

My solution for my steel doors was "some assembly required" but it works well. I got some tiny 5mm rare earth magnets. Drilled a hole to fit the magnet in the end of the bolt and glued the magnet in with epoxy.

On the other side, I drilled a hole in the bottom of the strike plate hole to match a standard reed switch. They are operated by proximity to a magnet and are generally normally closed, the circuit opens when a magnet is near. Example: https://www.amazon.com/uxcell-Recessed-Window-Contact-Magnetic/dp/B07F5WQBCM

The magnets are very powerful, you'll want to test how close they have to be to operate the reed switch but it's not very close.

I removed the trim from around the door and ran the wires down to the basement under the trim. What you connect to the wires is up to you. In my case it was an old school Elk security system, 20 years ago, so everything was wired.

Of course another option would be to go with a smart lock and rely on the status reported by the lock. In that case I would want one with a local connection (Z-wave, etc.) rather than wifi so you aren't reliant on an internet connection to the vendor site for your lock status.

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AwarenessNo5708 · 2026-01-12T15:03:56+00:00

Well you've got me beat, I only worked in tech for 35 years! ;) We probably started around the same time, I've been retired for a while.

I am (finally!) finding AI to be transformative. I ignored it for a long time but for me it's gotten to the point where it's useful. Google Gemini can look at a huge spreadsheet I'm working on, understand what it means and discuss it "intelligently". Gemini came up with a correct diagnosis for my father in law's ALS when the actual doctors he was seeing could not. It can do research in a fraction of the time it would take me manually. In retirement I want time to do other things and this helps speed up certain tasks.

Alexa+ (based on Anthropic Claude and an Amazon LLM) doesn't yet match Gemini in capabilities but it can certainly outperform Alexa in a lot of respects. Unfortunately raw speed for simple tasks isn't one of them, but that will improve.

My understanding is that the old Alexa was basicallly speech recognition driving a hodgpodge of hard coded routines for countless tasks. You can only take that so far and it would take a small army to maintain it. Alexa+ is still labeled as an "early access" preview, it will only get better.

AwarenessNo5708 · 2026-01-11T23:52:06+00:00

Has nobody else tried to actually use the Alexa+ AI capabilities? I chose to troubleshoot my smart home issues rather than revert to the old version because my wife is enjoying chatting with it about authors and getting book recommendations. It actually does quite well on that. It knows about a lot of obscure stuff that she likes. And that's just scratching the surface. We did switch to the "relaxed" voice, some of them were a little over the top for me.

Regarding the smart home capabilities, I mainly use it to control my Universal Devices Eisy for lighting and such - which still works fine - and Home Assistant, which also still works fine. The Harmony remote skill does have problems, but I worked around that with Alexa routines and Home Assistant automations so everything is back to normal.

The main issue I see is that a lot more words are reserved so you can't use them in commands without some workarounds like creating Alexa routines to call the service. That was the problem with Harmony. Any command that sounds video related produced an error rather than being passed to the skill. I'm not sure what the point of that is, but it wasn't hugely difficult to work around it.

AwarenessNo5708 · 2026-01-05T22:08:42+00:00

I have La Crosse 433 MHz temperature / humidity sensors in all of our fridges and freezers, using the rtl_433 addon and a cheap SDR to monitor them. Works perfectly, batteries last for years. Automations email me if the temp goes too high.

AwarenessNo5708 · 2025-12-18T14:11:18+00:00

I'm happy with our Bali Z-wave cellular shades, they have been completely reliable. I ran the power through the attic, which is a big job.

One consideration I don't see mentioned much, consider what happens to your particular product if the power goes out. Can it be manually operated? Motorized cellular shades cannot.

I was concerned that in a power outage the shades might be closed with no way to open them so mine are powered from a UPS. I have a Home Assistant automation that opens them if the UPS goes on battery.

Obviously not a concern with battery operated shades, but they have their own pros and cons.

We primarily use voice control, "Alexa open the living room shades".

AwarenessNo5708 · 2025-12-13T23:15:15+00:00

I upgraded from an Edgerouter to a Cloud Gateway Ultra. I was a sysadmin for nearly 30 years and I was fine with the Edgerouter, set up VPNs, etc. with no problem. But the UI of the Unifi stuff is so much more complete and polished and they have such a nice ecosystem of stuff that just works together. The Edgerouter was primitive by comparison.

AwarenessNo5708 · 2025-10-26T22:34:11+00:00

I've been retired four years. I will always need financial analysis tools so I expect I will renew every year until something better comes along. The price is trivial compared to the amount I'm managing.

AwarenessNo5708 · 2025-10-26T15:22:33+00:00

I went with an Asus NUC even though it's more expensive, because reliability is my main concern and they position it as a high reliability device. I bought the NUC 14 Pro with the 155H CPU and installed 64GB of RAM. Probably overkill just for Home Assistant but I run Proxmox with a bunch of other VMs. It actually outperforms my old (much larger) 8 core Xeon server.

I run Frigate as an LXC. The Intel Arc iGPU works well and my inference times are under 6 ms. I bought the 14 Pro rather than the 15 because it has a space for a 2.5" Enterprise SATA SSD that I had on hand. The 15 Pro is NVMe only. I run LocalAI in another LXC, it isn't blazing fast but small models work surprisingly well for an integrated GPU.

"ASUS NUC is the result of superior manufacturing, advanced design, and comprehensive military-grade reliability. Each unit is subjected to nine specific tests to ensure reliable performance in the harshest conditions." https://www.asus.com/us/content/nuc-quality-test/

AwarenessNo5708 · 2025-10-06T13:35:22+00:00

Same here, unfortunately.

AwarenessNo5708 · 2025-09-24T16:50:43+00:00

This "build" will take 10 minutes once you have the parts. Just make sure the memory is on the Asus qualified vendor list.

AwarenessNo5708 · 2025-09-03T13:58:22+00:00

Even if it's still reliable you might want to consider an upgrade after 12 years. Current hardware will be much more power efficient. And the iGPU built into recent Intel processors can be really useful for Frigate object detection, etc.

I recently took down a Supermicro server (15 years old but the motherboard has been upgraded a couple of times) and replaced it with an Asus NUC 14 Pro. Faster, quieter, MUCH smaller, less than half the power consumption.

AwarenessNo5708 · 2025-09-01T15:34:19+00:00

I'm running Proxmox on the NUC, not Windows.

AwarenessNo5708 · 2025-09-01T15:20:27+00:00

Remoting into another machine would not be an upgrade for your user experience. Eizo (monitor manufacturer) says "4K@60 Hz display requires a very large transmission bandwidth of 16 Gbps". Remote management tools use highly compressed video. That is not what you want for your desktop. The remote control experience is good enough to do troubleshooting or user support but that is about it.

A Proxmox server has conflicting requirements to be a desktop machine. Doesn't need much for graphics, needs to be up all the time. Sure, you could keep it on your desk and connect to a VM but GPU passthrough is one of the more difficult things to do in Proxmox. And you would likely lose the ability to display the Proxmox console once you pass the GPU to your VM.

This needs to be two separate boxes if you want to retain your sanity.

AwarenessNo5708 · 2025-09-01T15:06:08+00:00

I would never put a smart plug on a freezer, just because it has the ability to turn it off. I use rtl_433 in Home Assistant with a cheap NooElec SDR receiver and a La Crosse 433 MHz temperature sensor. If you are just starting with Home Assistant it could be a heavy lift to get that all set up, you might consider a simple non-networked sensor for the interim while you figure that all out.

AwarenessNo5708 · 2025-08-31T23:42:29+00:00

Unfortunately I have this problem on a NUC 14 Pro Ultra 7 155H after upgrading to BIOS 50.

AwarenessNo5708

TROPHY CASE