One farmhouse. One very stubborn tinkerer.

I'm Andrew. I help run a small family farm in southern Oregon and turned our house into a Home Assistant test lab, mostly by breaking it first.

I'm not a professional installer or an electrical engineer. I'm a self-taught tinkerer who reads the error logs so you don't have to. That's the point of this site: what this gear is like for a normal person in a normal house with kids, pets, and a router in the wrong closet.

How we test

Everything reviewed here is installed in our house and runs for weeks before we score it. We check whether it works with the internet unplugged, whether it strengthens or weakens the Zigbee mesh, and what broke. We pull the logs before we form opinions.

"Hovel" because it's a lived-in house, not a showroom. "Hack" because nothing here works perfectly out of the box.