My exterior painting, wood repair and small roof repairs was the fat end of £4.3K and the fucking house alarm at £1.86K, bloody houses. £6K buys a nice bit of kit.
We had a decent house alarm fitted in Feb this year, not cheap but i don’t begrudge that, the path work however…
Are any of you familiar with Netamo year? We’re lookong at changing to their some radiator thermostats with a unit on the boiler
Dunno if they’re available in the UK, and if so what their reputation is
Quite pleased with myself today, as I found an actual legit use for a wifi smart-plug.
Our fitted kitchen is such that the only socket for a 300kg fridge/freezer is directly behind it. Around it, it’s totally built up with a larder cupboard so access requires pulling out the whole fridge. Crap design but there you go.
We just had a requirement to power down the fridge and the only options are either switch off the entire downstairs socket ring main or move the fridge.
So I’ve installed one of these smart plugs in the socket and now I can turn it off via an app or by voice. Skynet would be proud.
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LESS faff is suddenly cool ?
Except when it defaults to off on a minor power trip and all the food spoils. 
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I use these for the hard to reach outlets behind my hifi rack - less than a tenner.
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meross and talk to Alexa
Skynet would have engineered a one in a billion fridge “accident”.
So for various reasons we’ve been looking to move to a bigger house. During our search I’ve seen some pretty cool things that people have done with their house an gardens. Things such as…
- Electric binds / shutters for windows
- Video doorbells / intercoms
- Hot Tubs
- Lights nicely integrated into decking.
- full house sonos systems
- smart heating
- ‘smart’ cctv / alarms
that kind of thing.
Just wondering if anyone here has spent any time / effort on this kind of thing or other smart home stuff.
yes
- Electric binds / shutters for windows
- Video doorbells / intercoms
- ‘smart’ cctv / alarms
- smarting lighting in places
- centralised storage for all data (music, photos, filing) with physical and cloud backup
We have been renovating our house for what seems like years. The most hi-tech thing we did was to replace our antique central heating and hot water service with a new zoned system run with Hive. The more modern high efficiency boilers combined with a serious program of insulation has cut our running costs by about 20% at a conservative estimate. Getting a house with proper modern insulation would be a top priority for me.
USB sockets on powerpoints in most rooms has been useful too as the amount of whining about uncharged iToys has fallen dramatically.
EDIT: The thread merge bunny has dropped this post into a thread where I have already waffled on about the new heating and insulation. I had forgotten all about those posts because middle-aged brain reasons.
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Silence Wilson user.
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Wasn’t there a little problem recently? 
This x 100
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Not an iToy issue. Casual but inept in-family burglar causing havoc.
If you are rewiring the house I would advise running cables for everything CCTV etc, if you decide not to bother with it at a later date you will have only wasted a few quid.
yep just run network cables, and if you think you need two per room run four. We have 8 cables into every room (16 in the living room), two in the upstairs hallway.
Our CCTV is IP CAMs, hardwired into the network and powered by PoE
it’s a new build that’s nearly finished so we aren’t in a position to negotiate full ethernet wiring - it does however have partial Ethernet wiring to the lounge and 1st floor bedrooms.
I was going to look at mesh network systems as a backbone or would people recommend powerline adaptors. In the past I’ve just used a TP link wireless access point connected to an 8 way switch or the router has managed to cover the house however the new place will be 3 stories so expecting a router to cover that on it’s own is rather hopeful.
We are looking at a ring doorbell and floodlight camera as we will be at the end of a cul-de-sac with minimal street lighting
Personally I’d like all the toys so I can just gibber at some aamazon or google thing and everything moves around by itself but money isn’t unlimited and there are other things that we need to sort out so I think the buzzword will be ‘upgradability’ i.e. blinds or shutters that can have automation added at a later date, etc.
Another thing I’d love to have is an electric garage door opener as basically I’m a lazy cunt. Has anyone had one retrofitted to an existing garage door? What’;s the hassle factor / cost - is it a whole new door or can they just strap a motor to it and call it job done?