There is an HACS addon for Meross to make the calls all local. I haven’t messed with it too much but it does work. The issue with my garage door opener is purely an issue with my Ubiquity setup and the fact it’s connecting through an exterior wall.

I have Meross smart plugs and they don’t cycle unexpectedly. They do use older wifi chips though and my Meross garage door opener has issues staying connected for some reason . I’ve not had an issue with their power plugs though, been using them for 3-4 years as well.

Not sure if you’ve de-googled yourself or not but there is a Google Drive Addon that has a whole slew of options for backing up your HA config. I’m sure there are alternate HA add-ons. This may require HACS but not certain.

Kei was recently found to botch all of their safety test scores for many years. As another commenter said, any crash in that design is guaranteed life threatening without some type of buffer.

At 10 they should know better. Now, I don’t know the dynamic of this “neighborship”, and pettiness is not the way to go about anything. At the same time though, it’s only water.

Wireguard IS a VPN. He has somehow through his challenges of exposing services to the internet, exposed wireguard from his home to the internet for him to connect to. Then he can connect to his internal services from there.

It’s honestly the best option and how I operate as well. I only have a handful of items exposed and even those flow through a DMZ proxy before hitting their destination servers.