Category Archives: Consumer Electronics

Eaton 5E 850i UPS: belated sign of life; avoid

Accounts, Australia, Bad experiences, Consumer Electronics, Satisfactory outcomes, Tedious processes

tl;dr: If you’re looking for a functional UPS, avoid the Eaton 5E series. And if you want customer service, avoid Eaton.

In an attempt to make my network infrastructure more resilient, I decided to get an uninterruptible power supply, to keep the Wi-Fi on during power cuts. After some comparisons, I settled for the Eaton 5E 850i. It was a mistake.

UPDATE (2022-12-08): After a phone call, and another follow-up message, I finally got the support escalated to a product manager, who was quick to confirm that, indeed, the UPS was defective. It took another follow-up email to get a replacement actually sent to me. Fortunately, this time, it was detected.

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Product Reviews: Smart Home

Australia, Consumer Electronics, Good experiences, Product reviews, , , , , , , ,

A bit more than a year ago, I finally fell onto the Smart Home and automation bandwagon. I wanted to monitor temperature and humidity in a few spots of the house. I ended up using Aqara Temperature & Humidity Zigbee sensors. I set up Home Assistant to keep everything local, and used a Nortek HUSBZB-1 Zigbee/Z-Wave adapter (affiliate link).

It didn’t take long until I frantically was adding more stuff: Mirabella Genio and Kogan Smart Bulb light globes, a Genio Power Plug with 2 USB ports and a Davis AirLink air quality sensor.

The rest of this post reviews all those products, with pros and cons. All in all, they are generally positive.

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Netatmo Smart Home Weather Station: not as local as they say

Accounts, Bad experiences, Consumer Electronics, Product reviews

Due to heavy fire smoke in the area, we recently needed a way to monitor the outside air quality. Amongst the few devices that caught our eye, the Netatmo Smart Home Weather Station stood out as a decent compromise between features and price.

Until it turns out half the features (including outside air quality) aren’t measured locally, and instead obtained from other data sources.

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HP: Vendor lock-in as a standard, and deprivation of consumer choices

Bad experiences, Consumer Electronics

So I was in the market for printers. Having had good experiences with HP for printing in the past, I looked at their offering.

But then, something struck me.

Cartridges using a non-HP chip may not work, and those that work today may not work in the future.

I feel like, to future-proof my printer purchases, I now need to strike HP from the list of decent manufacturers.

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