So I order this inside-out-fridge contraption from a company called RHEEM, also known as RUUD, and yes I very much am naming and shaming this company, and after going back and forth to the hardware store eight times I was on first name terms with the lady in the plumbing aisle and the proud owner of a new 240v line and a machine that makes my water hot by making my basement cold.

And there was a QR code on the side and a thing saying Download The Econet App! and I said "Pfft no" and if all went sensibly that should have been the end of it

Things didn't go sensibly because an unrelated series of events did not go sensibly a few years before, and now I have a couch that reclines in such a way that my head enters an adjacent room.

Why do I recline into the next room over? For the same reason I had to build a four inch wide coffee table. Don't ask me questions about that today. The important part is that when I settle down at night with a glass of whiskey and some Star Trek, I press a button and lean my head back into a void in a rack that sits in my workshop, which is where this water heater lives, and the water heater, being a fridge, goes BRRRRRRRR

It occurred to me at some point that if I had the app, I could tell this water heater Dude, it's ten o'clock at night, there's no need to be actively making more hot water right now, be quiet.

So I scanned the barcode and downloaded the app, which didn't work.

In fairness to Rheem, the way the app didn't work WAS pretty funny. See, it made you register with them before you could schedule your water heater. So first it'd ask you what username you wanted.

I'm not gonna tell you my Rheem username, you'll have to wait for the inevitable data breach for that, so let's say it was ifixcoinops. So you tap the box (you have to do this on a phone, you can't register in a browser) and you tap the letter i on the keyboard and a little i pops up on the screen, quite clever really, then you press the f and the text hole has iif in it. Hmm. Alright well the next letter in "ifixcoinops" is another i, let's press the i on my keyboard, the text hole now says iififi.

Which is slightly unconventional, but okay, let's see where this is going, iifiifiiififiifix. So I introduce myself as mister iififiifixifixcifixcoifixcoiifixcoinifixcoinoifixcoinopifixcoinops, and it tells me there's not enough digits in my phone number

Now I'm vaguely aware on some level that an awful lot of android apps are just a web browser with no clothes on, and that's certainly what this feels like, and buddy lemme tell you, HTML wants to work. It takes concerted, dedicated effort to make something fail this hard. Like, you've gotta code up some truly trollish javascript to make that kinda thing happen. So I guess hats off to Rheem.

Did I mention there wasn't even a place to put my phone number

I'm scratching my head over this and wondering if maybe something in my autocomplete settings are screwing with the input, I eventually figure out that they've somehow managed to make a form field that only works with specific software keyboards.

This is the first time I've ever seen anything like this. There's something new in the world. It's oddly beautiful, but haunting, a little melancholy. Luckily I have a few different keyboards installed on this thing so I change around a bunch until one of them works and lets me input normal words instead of this whimsy.

But there's still nowhere to put this phone number it's been asking me for, and no way to proceed, so I cast the app out of my mind for several more months

Eventually one night listening to it go BRRRRRR I get big mad and want all the functions that I paid the better part of two grand (!) for, and I search around for other people having the same problem.

(note: I want to schedule the water heater's heaty times. There's a big dotmatrix screen and a bunch of buttons on the water heater itself. Someone at some point should have said "Wait.")

Turns out everyone's having this problem! Everyone's been having this problem for over four months! But in the meantime, instead of using the Rheem app, try the Rheem Econet app, or the Econet app.

These are real apps made by Rheem. They all do the same job but fail in different ways at different points

Eventually - and I mean the sort of eventually that's measured in seasons - one of these apps lets me register for a Rheem account (why they couldn't just give me a link to those webpages I could access in a browser, I do not know) and then crashes, but another one lets me get the water heater connected to the wifi (there's no ethernet hole on this 300kg tank of water plumbed and wired into the house, it uses wifi only like your phone or handheld game console) and holy shit it works

It actually works

About 50% of the time

Tip: if Rheem doesn't work try EcoNet, if EcoNet doesn't work try Rheem EcoNet, if Rheem EcoNet doesn't work you can also try Ruud

If one of them works, DO NOT ALLOW IT TO UPDATE

Anyway at some point one of Rheem's other customers got pissed off enough with this tragicomedy to just completely write their own software from scratch, and of COURSE it works way better than the dogshit that Rheem put out

So yeah, the solution is to install Home Assistant on and old Raspberry Pi, get an ESP32 module and some phone wire, plug into the diagnostic port on the front and bypass everything to do with the official app and wifi interface entirely in favour of one that works.

Unfortunately this means you now have Home Assistant in your home, which means you now have a new hobby whether you want it or not

You don't expect to have emotions about a water heater

It's supposed to be the most boring machine in the house

I actually rang Rheem today, dude picked straight up on the first ring, his proposed solution was to try another phone

Mate every other app works on my phone

I was like, alright where does this thing spit out its logs, I'll email them to you, he's like I Don't Know

Didn't occur to him to go and find someone who does know

Should never have to get on the phone to talk about a water heater

Yes hello I would like to have a lengthy conversation about a tube that makes water hot, this is a good use of two peoples' time

Let's make the grey cylinder exciting, let's make it part of a hobby

The world isn't complex enough yet

The times are not interesting enough yet

Let's confuse a fridge into heating water and put it on the internet and give it anxiety

🦝 BUT I FUCKING KNEW THAT HOME ASSISTANT WAS GOING TO BE REALLY NEAT AND INTERESTING

I KNEW IT WAS GOING TO SUCK ME IN WITH HOW AWESOME IT IS

THAT'S WHY I'VE SPENT YEARS IGNORING THE HELL OUT OF IT AND TRYING MY BLOODY HARDEST NEVER TO LEARN ANYTHING ABOUT IT

I'VE GOT
OTHER
SHIT
TO DO 🦝

Actual quote from the Home Assistant Community Store:

"To download HACS

"How you download HACS depends on your Home Assistant installation type. In the instructions below, select the tab that matches your installation type (OS/Supervised, Container, or Core).

Warning

If you don't know what type of Home Assistant installation you are running, you should not use HACS (or any other custom integration)."

Is there a link to find that out? Is there any further explanation of what these terms mean? Is there so much as a crumb of information available to help answer this question?

Did the operator of this website install a sense of smug FOSSbro elitism where they should have wired in, say, competence?

This is the most useless documentation I've seen in years. And that includes the monitor schematic that had the middle third replaced with a lewd limerick.

"If you installed Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi using the Raspberry Pi imaging tool, choose OS/Supervised" there, fixed, wasn't hard. Jesus.

Nothing winds me up harder than people who chat like they're clever while being aggressively, stubbornly incompetent.

You know how when you go to the house of an absolute colossal nerd and you ask them

🐇 Hey, how do I watch Netflix?

🦝 Yeah no problem, well first you've gotta turn on the amp. That's the power button on this remote here. The right-hand power button that is, the left-hand one isn't programmed to anything yet

🐇 OK

🦝 Sometimes that makes the TV come on automatically, but if it doesn't then you've gotta turn on the TV. That's this button here on this other remote.

🐇 So we're on two remotes now

🦝 Nearly finished. Oh by the way, if you want to adjust the volume, use the first remote, the volume on the second remote doesn't do anything. Well it does, but it sounds terrible because that's the TV speakers, so leave that at zero

🐇 But I'm *watching* tv

🦝 Yes but you're *listening* to the amp. Oh, sorry, forgot, set the amp input to 2.

🐇 on the amp remote?

🦝 Yeah, the video goes through the amp too.

🐇 In my house we set the TV to a different input, should -

🦝 Don't do that here. Don't. The TV stays on input 1 with its sound muted. Next you've just gotta use this third remote, for the -

🐇 for Netflix?

🦝 Well, technically for Kodi, but that's nothing to worry about yet

🐇 yet?

🦝 We'll come to that,

🐇 I'm being *so* patient right now, I'm really proud of myself

Anyway, imagine that, but your your lightbulbs. This is what Home Assistant promises

🦝 Anyway I got some Tradfri lightbulbs and a ZigBee dongle plugged into a spare Pi on a long USB extension to avoid radio interference, and I went on aliexpress and ordered some cheap ZigBee knobs and buttons so I can set up cosier circadian-rhythm-respecting lights as a sidequest to schedule my water heater and monitor my eventual photovoltaic setup.

^ see that sentence? That's both a legit telling of what I've been up to lately, AND a self-parody shitpost. The only people who recognise it as a legit post are other doomed individuals.

I'm glad I'm in a long term committed relationship because yikes can you imagine trying to use this software while dating

🦌 *tugging at shirt* Hey, do you mind if we turn the light off?

🦝 Sure!

🦌 OK~ wait why is there tape on your lightswitch

🦝 Oh wait yeah. Sorry. *grabs phone* Hold on. *fiddles* Just a sec.

🦌 um... ok?

🦝 Sorry. Just gotta do an update. Sorry. Just a sec. It's not normally like this

🦌 Did you just pull out your phone and start doomscrolling? While I'm right here?

🦝 sorry sorry no it's a different kind of doom, just a second, nearly there, sorry this never happens

🦌 wait my purse is vibrating, someone must be calling me

🤖 HOME ASSISTANT HAS DETECTED. LOVENSE. LUSH. SET UP DEVICE NOW?

🦌 goodnight

Better minds than mine have been warning about this shit since The Twilight Zone was new. What happens in every show that ever had an episode about The House Of The Future? Everyone's impressed for about five minutes and then it all goes wrong and there's usually at least one death.

But on the other hand, cosy lighting and RGB LED coolness so, y'know,

You know the best thing about Home Assistant?

There are some things, if you shit all over them on the internet and say all the ways they messed up, their fanboys will come out and tell you hey no, you just don't understand it yet, it's not shit you are

Home Assistant, the fanboys come out and say haha yeah join the club, wait hold on I've got some even wilder stories, just you wait lol

🦌 *hands curling around coffee cup, worried expression, leaning across table and talking softly* Does your husband know about Home Assistant?

🐩 I dunno, HEY HONEY

🦌 shh! Don't ask him!

🐧 YEAH HON

🐩 NOTHING NEVERMIND

🐩 Why's that?

🦌 It's a cognitohazard. If you ask him about it he'll want to know what it is, and then he'll be doomed.

🐩 Doomed, you say?

🦌 Doomed. It puts your house on the computer. He'll spend three hours a night programming the lights and you'll never see him again.

🐩 Oh my, that sounds awful. *pulling out phone* But you don't seem to be affected by it.

🦌 It seems to mostly affect dads.

🐩 Mostly... *smiles, turns phone around, it displays a big red button* but not exclusively. *press*

🦌 My god

🐩 *presses again*

🐩 Sorry, this is supposed to play the Dramatic Chipmunk sound on the kitchen radio

🐩 sorry

🐩 one sec

🐴 "I use Home Assistant so I ripped all the lightswitches out, wired all my light sockets to be live all the time, and replaced the switches with Smart Switches that radio the computer and tell it to radio the bulb to turn off" ~ actual things that people do with Home Assistant

As someone who works with electricity, my absolute favourite thing in the world is components that are energized while giving the appearance that they are not

An actual forum thread I witnessed:

🐴 Hey my bulbs turn on after a power outage, even though I've got them set to turn on at zero brightness, what gives?

🐑 Yeah turns out there's a safety override so you don't think the socket's safe when it's actually live

🐴 Ugh, that's such bullshit, what are the manufacturers thinking? Has anyone figured out custom firmware for these things?

I finally configured a smart knob so my daughter could adjust the light colour in her room.

🦝 Alright, here we go, it's simple. Well, it's not simple, and I'm sorry, but here we go anyway.
🐇 o...kay?
🦝 So right now it's in colour temperature mode. Turn the knob for brightness. If you PRESS and turn it, it'll change the colour temperature.
🐇 What's colour temperature
🦝 Turn it this way for more like daylight, turn it this way for more like cosy. Press and turn it I mean.
🐇 Alright. But how do we make it colourful.
🦝 Well. You'd press and hold in, without turning, for four seconds. Like this.
*awkward four-second pause*
🐇 It's green!
🦝 Yeah! Now to change hue, you press in and turn clockwise, and it goes all the way through the rainbow and cycles back round. If you miss the colour just keep turning until it comes back round again. And to change saturation,
🐇 What's saturation
🦝 Controls whether it's colourful, or light. To change the saturation, press and hold and turn anticlockwise. It gets lighter and lighter and then cycles back round to bold colour.
🐇 Coooooool
🐇 Dad... can we make this go on a timer

I put a remote pack in her ceiling fan / light 'cause she couldn't reach the pull cord for the fan, so between the SMART KNOB and the remote control and the lightswitch itself she's got as many competing lightswitches as my dad's Frankenstein Land Rover has gear levers

The ONLY sensible thing involved in this is that if the bulb loses and then regains power, it defaults to being an unremarkable warm white bulb turned on at full brightness.

So we've had the conversation about how the knob works and how the remote pack works and how the light switch works and how if any of these things fails and she needs the light on she's gotta just flip the switch off and on again

This kid's doomed

So you decide to mess with Home Assistant and find out that this means you've gotta program your own dimmer switches.

(at this point, you've already had your Naked Lunch moment and you know the sensible thing is to run screaming but you're ploughing on regardless knowing whatever happens next, it's on you, bought and paid for)

So you write your dimmerSwitch.yaml in yaml which simultaneously stands for "Yet Another Markup Language" and "YAML Ain't a Markup Language" and is a cursed way to try and program, and you've filled your little yammal up with comments so when it breaks you can remind yourself what any of this crap means:

# dan it's 2am and this is the bit that registers the knob turning anticlockwise

# dear future dan, hi from tired past dan, this next part is a sin and I'm sorry

And you can do all this in an editor in the browser that's surprisingly capable, and hit Save.

You'll find out the next time you open the file that your comments were automatically and silently deleted, and you'll go "Huh, yeah, that tracks"

Note for normal people who actually work for a living: code is the part of the program that makes it work and paradoxically isn't all that important, comments are the part that make it keep working a couple of months later and Very Much Are Important.

Like, there's practically infinite ways to write a bit of code that does a thing, but the important part is the comment above your mess saying that the following bit of code does this thing, and the comment underneath apologising

Part of the problem here is the whole YAML thing is an abstraction on top of whatever programming language home assistant is actually written in

And all of computer programming is like this. When I was a very tiny boy you just had to know "A chip is a thing that sends a little bit of electricity out of some combination of its legs in reaction to electricity going into some other combination" and then make a cup of tea and read a thick book and bollock around a while and end up with Manic Miner, but that was too hard for most folk so we invented programming languages that took a best guess at what electricity to send where, and then it turned out those languages were also too hard for almost everyone so we gave those languages little hats, interpreters that went "If this crying man types GOTO 240 then we tell the body wearing us to tell the electricity to go the way," and we made more and different hats and some were good and some were bad and then we started stacking the hats on top of each other and forty years go by and suddenly we find ourselves fiddling with the top of a stack of fifteen hats that are making suggestions to the hats beneath while arguing and trying to topple off each other and shouting DON'T LOOK AT THE HAT UNDERNEATH ME while the aforementioned crying man shouts back GET OUT OF THE WAY AND LET ME SEE WHAT YOU'RE HIDING

It's not even that hats are bad, everybody likes a good hat, but wearing so many stacked on top of each other is asking for a mess every time you walk through a door