A person, a house, and a system that got slightly out of hand.
Who's writing here
I'm a master mechanic by trade, with a background in IT, now working in vehicle development. I like to know why something works, not just that it does. At some point I started asking the same about my house.
You won't see my face here. I'd like to share the logic, not my home. The house in the pictures is an AI-generated illustration.
How it started
Not over many years. Just under one, with a few detours.
November 2025
Node-RED
The first attempt: automations in Node-RED (a visual tool where you wire up automations as flows), inside Home Assistant (open-source home automation software), written with the help of an AI. It worked, until the flows got too tangled to follow.
Turn of 2025/26
AppDaemon
Second attempt, as small Python programs (Python is a programming language) running in AppDaemon (an add-on that runs Python apps inside Home Assistant). Tidier, but it soon got too complex to manage.
Mid-January 2026
EnergyPilot 1
EnergyPilot is the name of my own energy management system, the software that decides when the battery charges, how the house heats and more. Generation 1 (EP1) was a standalone system on its own computer. From then on, the logic had room to grow.
2026
EnergyPilot 2 and 3
Two more rebuilds (EP2 and EP3), each with the lessons of the last one. EP3 is the version that runs the house today, and the one the videos are about.
What the system does
The house has solar panels, a battery, a heat pump with a gas boiler as backup, air conditioners, a wallbox and some flexible loads. When the sun isn't enough, the battery can be topped up from the grid.
EnergyPilot measures everything important, checks whether the values can be trusted, forecasts sun, consumption and heat demand, and learns from the difference between forecast and reality. From that it builds a plan for the next hours and days, and carries it out. Above all of this sit safety nets, and a flight recorder that writes down every decision.
Its most important rule is almost old-fashioned: once a day, the battery gets to be 100 % full for an hour. Everything else has to fit around that.
Why this channel
I built this system with an AI as my development partner, and I made plenty of mistakes along the way. A few were expensive; most were instructive.
I'm sharing what I learned so that you can take a shortcut, and so that you know in advance where the limits are. Or at least where mine were.
What you can expect
Always the why
Every rule, every number and every decision comes with a reason.
Honest about failures
What didn't work gets shown too, with the reason and the way to a solution that works.
No sales pitch
The lab isn't built to sell, but servers, tools and time do cost money. So later on there will be a few in-depth deep dives with code packages for a small, fair price. The first episodes and their basics stay free, and there are no savings promises or percentages pulled out of thin air.
Private stays private
Structure and logic, yes. Names, places, addresses and network details in videos and articles, no. Values are rounded or scaled where needed.
Privacy in one sentence
No cookies, and a page loads no third-party content unless you choose to; the only exception is a small Cloudflare statistics script, also without cookies, for visits from outside the EU and a few neighbouring countries.
Languages
English first, German follows. Français, Español and 中文 will come later.
Contact
The best place for questions and ideas is the comment section under the videos. For everything else, the contact details are in the imprint. Imprint
Your experience counts
Which system runs in your house, and where does it get stuck? I'd like to hear about your experiences, your doubts and your ideas, in the comments under the videos. Good ideas get picked up and built in public: as a video of their own or as an addition to an existing one.