So in the past year i have got into smart home devices / automation, specifically through smart assistants Siri and Alexa.

Stage 1 my initial foray was simply with a smartplug, which was purchased to make my life easier - to switch on / off a lamp in my living room where the normal switch was inaccessible. Initially as I have a lot of Apple products it made sense to use this with Siri, but the stumbling block was that the smartplug, in this case made by TP-Link was not compatible with Siri :( Never fear, as I have an always on Raspberry Pi I can run homebridge! Whats that I hear you ask, well it is a package of software that provides comparability for a range of smart products with Apples Homekit system. I got it working without much effort and I was happy... for a while...

Tags: boiler, smarthome

Last Saturday all of a sudden the wireless thermostat in my house (a Siemens RDJ10RF) reported a temperature of 40 degrees C and would not budge an inch. The fact that we were not sweating profusely in the house supported my theory that the thermostat was faulty or at the very least playing up.

Tags: boiler, problem