Automate Everything, Notice Nothing

The best home automation is the automation nobody notices.

For six years I've been building a system to run itself on our property in rural Victoria — water tanks, gates, solar, sensors, backups, all of it quietly doing its job so I can stop thinking about it. Then on the 9th of January 2026, a bushfire went through and took four buildings, six cars, and a lifetime of collected things. This book is what I learned putting it all back together, plus the five years before that taught me how.

It's not a manual — there are excellent Home Assistant manuals already, and this isn't trying to be one. It's a journal: fourteen chapters, in order, from 2020 to now, built around the fire that reorganised everything I thought was worth keeping. Every chapter has the technical detail boxed off separately, so you can skip it if you're here for the stories, or dive in if you're here to build.

Includes: what actually broke, what it cost me, what changed each chapter, and ten tips, five years on.

Automate Everything, Notice Nothing is a 94-page book, available however you like to read it. Grab the PDF or EPUB for an instant digital download — DRM-free, yours to keep on whatever you like — or order the paperback, printed and shipped to you on demand.

ISBN 978-1-7648708-2-5 (PDF) · ISBN 978-1-7648708-1-8 (EPUB) · ISBN 978-1-7648708-0-1 (Paperback) · Published by Woolshed Press, 2026