Energy

• Charging the Car on Sunshine

  A Home Assistant automation throttles our EV charger to soak up the house's solar surplus. It charged past its target one day, whipsawed on cloud shadows the next — and then the whipsaw fix silenced the control loop entirely. The recorder data, all three root causes, the fixes — and the cloudy day that finally put the last one to the test.

• Did the Rebuild Actually Save Power?

  Cutting the power bill was one of the main reasons I retired the old servers — so did it work? I couldn't cleanly measure it at the panel, so this is the honest, bounded math: what the old hardware cost, what the mini PCs cost, and how that compares to the energy the AI itself used — then checked, at the last minute, against smart-plug readings on all four boxes that landed within a percent of the estimate.