I just use Chemtronics, I tried some other stuff once and decided there’s no need to waste anymore time on other brands. For difficult jobs, add more flux.
It’s for heat dissipation.
Oh my goodness, I see now I typed Hot air “gun”. I meant the kind you use for soldering, ie the soldering station. Of course I already have a hot air gun, sommer a cheapie from Ryobi 
I would never dream of trying to use that for desoldering.
I have used those for desoldering a couple of times. Great if you are only interested in saving the component and don’t care about the PCB.
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Seems like a lot of hard work when one can simply use Local Tuya
I’ve tried the Tuya stuff for a bit, and I simply didn’t like having to use their dev platform, giving them an email address, registering my devices in order to get the values I needed to address things. That is of course less work than soldering stuff, I’ll give you that, but for the most part I avoid this at the buying stage: I buy stuff that I know will run Tasmota.
I did accidentally buy one switch that is Tuya only. It cost R200 or so. I will probably throw it away rather than waste time soldering chips or setting up LocalTuya for just one switch.
What alternatives are there to the Astute, a good quality smart breaker which most important is HA compatible out of the box?
I know there’s the Shelly Pro, but expensive.
What switch is this. Maybe I’ll take it from you
Don’t know if any of you noticed this post on another thread on MyBroadband: SA smart plugs that can be flashed with Tasmota
But that online shop, sells the CBI devices with Tasmota on already:
Smartpad Store - Tasmota Devices
Could save you a lot of time, they make some money, and you get it as local as you can to your home assistant without having to deal with Tuya at all.
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Afternoon @Smartpad, I see on your site you sell the standard Cbi and one that is already flashed with Tasmota.
To your knowledge, is there a workaround in Home assistant to use the CBI/Tuya device in local mode without using their cloud, or is it best to just buy the Tasmota version for use with HA?
I see its a little bit more expensive, I guess you guys change the chip and flash it inhouse?
There is an integration in the HACS store for Tuya local control GitHub - make-all/tuya-local: Local support for Tuya devices in Home Assistant.
If you don’t want to log onto the integration with your Tuya/Smartlife credentials you will need to figure out the local keys and api keys for your devices manually through the Tuya iot platform.
While we haven’t used it in a while our experience was that It’s generally stable but we had occasional instances with devices that needed rebooting an power monitoring data could be a little bit spotty… but take all that with a pinch of salt we haven’t used it in a year or more and much may have improved since then.
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I have used it in the past, seems like you have to re-authenticate ever few months. Don’t look at my home assistant a lot so wife will just complain that the geysers are cold. When I look i will see that I need to re-authenticate, took them off the HA and set timers on them through smart home app. No more cold water, but they are flying blind now and not even showing up on HA anymore. The way i feel currently is to rip them out and replace them with ones you sell that has Tasmota on them.
That sounds like a very good feeling you have.
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Same experience. I went through that process once. I decided I don’t like 1) the time it takes, and 2) being beholden to the Tuya dev environment forever to make these work. I’ll gladly spend more money to make it run Tasmota.
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TuyaCutter also works nicely to wirelessly convert Tuya devices to ESPHome
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