There are so many complex applications that I can’t believe are free: KDenLive, Gimp, Audacity, Firefox, Discord, Calibre, Jellyfin, Rainmeter, Godot, Retroarch

I use Emby and catalog my music using MusicBrainz Picard. Before Emby I used Ampache but I want to serve up as much of my media through the same interface as possible. Adding all the proper metadata and sorting the music can be time consuming, but it makes all the difference in serving up the music properly. Music is much more varied than Movies or even TV so it is a bit more difficult to get right and there are sooo many artists. MusicBrainz Picard makes it pretty easy though. I will be checking out Beets.io after reading this thread to see if it can help any more with organizing my library.

I have two IoTaWatts (https://iotawatt.com/) for all the circuits in my home. I also use Z-Wave and Zigbee devices to monitor individual plugs (I love these). I send data from all of this to an InfluxDB database and then into Grafana for displaying pretty graphs. Everything is running on my Windows desktop. The IoTaWatt doesn’t require internet access to work. I have been very happy with the setup and once setup it hasn’t required much maintenance.

The system is also good for recording temperatures, solar power information, and anything else that can make an API call. Not sure why your Z-Wave is falling off the network, for that I use a Hubitat and mostly Inovelli, Zooz, and THIRDREALITY ZigBee plugs.