Home Assistant Energy Dashboard with Shelly
Power monitoring with Shelly EM/Pro/3EM, Home Assistant energy dashboard, circuit-level metering, solar+grid tracking, and wiring sanity checks.
Tag: homelab
All the articles with the tag "homelab".
Z-Wave vs Zigbee in 2026
Z-Wave vs Zigbee: range, mesh, cost, and which radio protocol to choose for home automation in 2026.
Matter and Thread for the Suspicious
Matter and Thread protocol overview: what actually works in home labs, what's vaporware, and why you should be skeptical of the hype in 2026.
Home Assistant Backups That Actually Restore
Home Assistant disaster recovery: off-site backups, secrets handling, Z2M coordinator, restore drills that catch missing pieces.
Calibre-Web vs Calibre Server vs Kavita
Self-hosted ebook library showdown: Calibre-Web vs Kavita. Which stack handles your comics, manga, and ebooks?
Navidrome vs Funkwhale: Self-Hosted Music
Navidrome vs Funkwhale for self-hosted music streaming. Subsonic API support, mobile clients, federation, and which one fits a homelab in 2026.
Tautulli Beyond Plex Stats
Tautulli's notification webhooks, automation, transcode alerts, and custom triggers unlock Plex monitoring beyond leaderboards and statistics charts.
Overseerr vs Jellyseerr
Overseerr vs Jellyseerr media request UIs: Plex-only vs Jellyfin/Emby. Setup, auth, Sonarr/Radarr integration.
The *arr Stack Without 9000 Reddit Threads
Self-hosted *arr stack (Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, Bazarr) with durable Docker Compose. Hardlinks, folder layout, no breakage.
Synthetic Browser Monitoring with Playwright + Grafana
Set up Playwright synthetic monitoring: scheduled headless browser checks, login flow validation, and pass/fail metrics piped into Grafana dashboards.
Node Exporter Internals That Actually Matter
Which 30 Node Exporter metrics matter for Prometheus monitoring. Skip the 200 noisy ones. Textfile collector trick included.
Grafana OnCall + Webhooks: Paging Without PagerDuty
Self-host Grafana OnCall as a free PagerDuty alternative: escalation policies, Alertmanager webhooks, and phone alerts for your home lab (plus the 2026 catch).