Graves On SOHO Technology

Stormy Weather: An observation of POE Budget

Late the other afternoon we had a thunderstorm come through. Tis the season hereabouts. The wind picked up, pushing in dark clouds. The sky darkened quickly. Then the Unifi app on my Pixel 8 pinged to alert me to a network error. The network switch in our attic had exceeded its power-over-Ethernet (P.O.E.) budget.

What a novel set of events I thought. It was the first time I’d ever seen such a notification. I wonder why it occurred? It didn’t take long to work it out.

The device reporting the power problem is a Unifi USW Flex 5-port switch that lives in the attic. It receives power from the USW-24-POE main switch in the house. The POE+ (aka 802.11at) ports on the main switch can deliver up to 30 Watts over a single Ethernet cable. That is, up to its overall power budget of 95 Watts.

USW Flex can deliver up to 46 Watts when powered from a POE++ (aka 802.11bt) capable switch. When powered from mere POE+ the USW Flex is able to provide 20 Watts onward to network loads.

Breaking up with Evernote

I recently received an email notification of pending changes to my Evernote account. They tell me that my existing “Pro” account (most recently billed at $138.57/yr) will soon transition to their new “Advanced” account type with an annual cost of $249 a year. That simply won’t do. Evernote does not deliver me that much value, so I am considering my options.

Looking into the account history, I see that I have been using Evernote since 2010! Back then, I wanted a place to store notes, mostly text, that would be available no matter where I was, or what device I was using. I’d use it to store configuration data for customer equipment when I was working on site. I had Dropbox for storing and sharing files. Evernote was for writing, configurations and that sort of thing.

Over the years I’ve accumulated a lot of notes. Over 1,000 in about 36 notebooks. Sometimes I use the web clipping function to capture a web page, or a JPEG image. But mostly it’s just text notes and lists.

Deal Alert: Wen Parallel Kit Delivers 240v 50A (12 kW) for Household Backup Power

It was two years ago, after the crazy derecho and Hurricane Beryl that I did a deep dive into an affordable approach to whole home backup power. That effort documented our own strategy, which involves a Predator 9500, which is large portable inverter. This is in contrast to expensive, installed backup generators from Generac or similar.

Since then, I remain active in various online forums on related subjects. A question that often comes up involves connecting a pair of inverters in parallel to deliver more power. This comes up enough that I wrote an overview of parallel kits for the Predator 9500 and similar inverters.

In doing that I discovered that these parallel kits were in short supply. Some companies like Harbor Freight, simply don’t offer them. Duromax does, but was sold out for the longest time. So, I was happy to find that Wen has an attractive offer that’s currently on sale for just $62.

New Gear: Ubiquiti Unifi 5G Backup

Apologies for the lengthy preamble. Back in 2001 when we moved into this house we started with Comcast cable modem internet access that delivered 5/1 mbps. We were committed to Comcast for cable TV since we were a Tivo household. Tivo DVRs leveraged cable and the Cable Card decryption scheme.

It also happens that Comcast’s internet access was not very reliable. That caused me to get a DSL service installed as a backup. The DSL service provided by Sprint was modest. We are some 11,400 feet from the nearest central office, which meant that 1.5 Mbps / 768 kbps was the best we could achieve.

Over a number of years, Comcast’s cable modem service got both faster and (somewhat) more reliable. Still, I retained the relatively pokey DSL service as a backup. After Hurricane Ike in 2008 I felt vindicated in that choice. Throughout and after that terrible storm we had sustained phone and internet access via that DSL service. In contrast, Comcast was out for a month.

There came a time when I realized that I had not used the DSL in over a year. And 4G wireless broadband had become available, so I could tether to a phone in a pinch. That combination supported ending the DSL service, which suffered declining cost/performance.

All that is back-story. In all that time, we never had a “dual-WAN” arrangement. Failover between the ISPs was manual. Typically, repatch the WAN port of the router to the desired modem, then load a different WAN configuration. Not difficult. But manual.

Well, no longer! Last week I took delivery of the new Ubiquiti Unifi 5G Backup device. Newly introduced for just $99 this wee magic wand promises an affordable, automatic backup to a 5G wireless service. It’s not locked to any carrier. At the outset it works with AT&T, T-Mobile, and presumably their MVNOs.

Combination Wi-Fi Routers Are Dumb

The FCC made big news last month when it move to ban consumer routers made overseas. This got me thinking about consumer routers in general, and recalling back to when reliable Wi-Fi was something I was struggling to achieve. That was in the early days of this blog. I think that, in solving our Wi-Fi problem I failed to clearly state something that bears repeating now…combination Wi-Fi routers are dumb and should be avoided.

If you want to have consistent, reliable, Wi-Fi coverage, in a larger home or across an entire property, a combination Wi-Fi router at an arbitrary location is not going to be a good solution. You should be using dedicated Wi-Fi access points. And the location of each access point should be carefully considered.

MacGyvering Avian Surveillance

April 26, 2026
Michael Graves
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There’s a well-worn bird feeder that hangs just outside of our kitchen window. It was made by Stella’s late brother Robert. It hangs on a rope, well above head height. There was a time when we put seed in it. More recently, we feed the birds at a stand in the back yard that’s easier to reach. So this particular feeder has been empty a long while.

In March a Wren appeared to be renovating the kitchen bird feeder. For a week or more he appeared to be diligently filling it with nesting material. We could see the stuffing being amassed between the plastic sides of the feeder. Now and then the female would show up to inspect his handiwork.

I was impressed. So much so that I thought I should capture this activity on the part of our latest tenants. I happened to have a few Wyze Pan Cams 3’s in my collection of techno-junk. They had been purchased for a transient project, but were now idle.