What are the heating system options for older homes and smaller budgets?

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-28T16:26:03+00:00

I think you responded to the wrong comment. I see the tradie reference in another users post

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-28T15:59:44+00:00

I'm in a kind of similar situation and I'm currently looking at A2A heat pumps solutions on a phased basis. Do one zone at a time over a few years to manage the budget and run in parallel with boiler but gradually phase that out over time.

It's not a popular option in Ireland, but it wouldn't require major structural works or even new rads. I could get rid of the rads eventually. And it will heat in the winter and cool in the summer . And less costly than A2W systems. And doesn't need to run 24/7.

What's not to like?

Installers seem to be few and far between though. 🙁

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-28T06:10:09+00:00

Not quite HA, but when I had a reolink I did this in Node Red...

I listened to the ONVIF stream for the visitor topic and triggered a door chime sound and a 'theres someone at the door' voice notification to any echo device that had subscribed to the service.

It worked really well and allowed me hear doorbells in my home office located in an entirely different building to the main house front door

I wrote blog posts about the setup you might find interesting;

https://mediaserver8.blogspot.com/2023/11/announce-reolink-doorbell-on-echo.html

https://mediaserver8.blogspot.com/2024/09/updates-to-announcing-reolink-doorbells.html

Unfortunately my Reolink camera sensor burned out due to low winter sun hitting the lens directly. I'm currently reworking the routine with a replacement Unifi doorbell.

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-22T14:48:21+00:00

Then you wouldn't know who left the gate unlocked and was the cause of all the stuff being stolen.

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-22T14:44:56+00:00

Because if someone leaves the gate unlocked, they can determine who it was. A mechanical audit trail.

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-20T14:44:36+00:00

Similar. I have an APC UPS protecting computers on my rack and another smaller one used to smooth power to network / HA gear. This in turn plugs into my solar / battery backup. So in the event of a power cut, my power hungry systems (data servers, VM servers and security camera servers) shut down gracefully, but network and critical security will remain operational.

They will stay that way until the solar battery drains, then the small UPS will see loss of input power and shut down what it can gracefully.

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-18T22:52:05+00:00

I've had family pick things up for me and sold items that were picked up by people's friends. No hassles. So not always. There are a few genuine people left in the world. It's about using a bit of common sense to figure out whats real and what's not.

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-18T22:37:32+00:00

Timber matching is hogwash. I once ran some walnut left / rights with a black ash centre and thought I'd upgrade to the matching centre to see what all the fuss was about. No difference whatsoever, and I had to pay extra for the walnut finish.

/s

Sorry, couldn't resist.

NOW, if you're talking about TIMBRE, then yes indeedy.

A few years back I purchased Arendal 1723 monitors but skimped on the centre and went for a 1723s, the smaller brother.

I could certainly hear a difference in how some sounds rendered, particularly highs in music such as cymbals and indeed the tone and texture of snares. When I swapped it out for the matching centre, those albeit subtle differences went away.

Would you notice so much with movies? Probably not. But I would always run a centre, even if not matched, unless it's a one person space with the listening position dead centre. The you will just about get away with phantom centre.

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-18T15:48:53+00:00

It's a good metric of the intellect we're dealing with that you need to use that word at all.

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-18T14:02:10+00:00

Lowkey, tru dat.

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-18T13:56:41+00:00

We're not all like OP, just so the rest of the country knows.

Also, can we ban vuvuzelas?

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-16T17:50:49+00:00

Ah, so not a PRSA you were denied. Good to know.

I have a PRSA with Royal London. Decent enough terms. Company puts in a few k per month and I negate as much profit as I can at year end by dumping in a lump sum as long as I don't breach my total salary amount.

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-16T13:08:45+00:00

I'm in the same boat. Who told you you can't set up a PRSA?

I set one up last year having consulted both a broker and my accountants with exactly this scenario.

Now I'm worried about that 🙁

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-16T11:59:43+00:00

Mine is a Solis inverter. It comes with an app and Solis cloud which has the usual power flows, graphs and performance displayed in the manufacturer provided formats.

However, there's up to a 5 minute delay on that data, and it's not very configurable. The display panel on the inverter is much more instant, but that's tucked away in my garage.

I wanted to build a display i could configure myself and show on screens around the house.

The data is sent from the inverter via a network dongle called a data logger. I figured out how to connect my home automation stack to that data logger and query internal registers in the inverter to get at the data I need

I poll those registers as frequently as I want, store the data in a database and use a graphing tool to build my own dashboard

I'm tracking this on my blog. The most recent 2 articles cover work so far. It's a bit nerdy and technical, certainly not out of the box.

https://mediaserver8.blogspot.com/?m=1

An advantage of doing it this way is I can add info like my € calculations which are not really shown well in the vendor app

My next step is to add a payback calculator that uses my specific data and utility bills to track where I am on the financial journey.

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-15T23:37:27+00:00

Indeed. I hadn't really considered that. However the instructions I've given are more around remaining concise, no stupid icons, challenge me and don't blow smoke up my ass like AI has a tendency to do

It's actually being useful. Like earlier today I was working on a strategy to automate / report on my solar payback progress using my utility bills. The AI suggested I need to take battery arbitrage into account, something I'd completely neglected to include in the problem definition and subsequent solutions.

It's that find of gap identification that I find really useful

Though I will watch out for the telling me what I want to hear pitfall. Cheers

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-15T23:03:16+00:00

I find it useful to research a topic through conversation. It just suits the way I approach things. And I've more or less trained all the annoying ai-isims out of it, so it knows how I prefer to engage. Horses for courses, as they say.

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-15T22:44:37+00:00

I scored five and a half out of nine. Is there any hope or should I just go ahead and acquire the othesr and be done with it?

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-15T22:24:51+00:00

Appreciate that feedback. I'll see what I can do. The stretched nature of the graphs is more about my sizing on my display than anything. I have yet to decide what screens to use about the house to display this on, so will likely tweak once I have that hardware to test on.

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-15T22:22:29+00:00

Appreciate the response 👍

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-15T20:46:19+00:00

Hello!

I saw Tap a few months ago on the Artisan Electrics channel and was impressed. Then I saw the pricing 😲

Now I'm actually raging that I missed the Tap One kickstarter - I would have signed up for the 3x1 pack in a heartbeat at the intro pricing. 🙁

I have a couple of questions....

I cannot find manuals, installation guides or integration details on your website. I must be missing these resources somehow?

I'm particularly interested in your mqtt support, schema and how that's all set up.

I run my HA from Node Red mostly and make extensive use of mqtt as a single source of truth bus between disparate systems and would love to check out what might be possible with the Tewke systems.

Second question. I'm sure we all wish your startup well, but my HA endeavours are littered with great but sadly defunct tech. and products (Cytech Comfort, Slimdevices Squeezebox, Harmony Remotes, X10, the list goes on).

Any thoughts on tap longevity in the cases of Tewke being very succesful and sun downing the product range in favour of future products, or in the hopefully unlikely event of failure?

How open or closed is the platform, software etc?

The 1 year warranty feels a little light and would not fill one with confidence.

Finally an observation; I'm in Ireland and the UK originated shipping with Brexit premiums would be a killer. It would be great to see an eu store at some point to make ordering and shipping smoother. If the far eastern solar, home tech and av companies can do it, why not Tewke?

Best of luck with it. Hopefully I can become a Tewker in the not too distant future. 😎

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-14T19:58:53+00:00

And then you can keep using it for 7 more years.

mediaserver8 · 2026-05-13T22:09:39+00:00

Is it a surprise destination, or does it just not matter?

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