So, home control with your own setup is great, but you have to think about what happens in the event you sell your house, get hit by a bus or someone needs to work on it in the future. Home Automation should add value to a house, not turn people off a sale. This is… Read More »
This is part one of some of my notes regarding Home Automation concepts. Part 2 is about planning for the future and house resale value. Electrical Isolation/Safety Electrical safety is very important obviously for home automation, and as well as my tendency to over-engineer, I’m often thinking about ‘what could possibly go wrong‘. One of… Read More »
You can pay thousands for Bose multiroom audio systems, or buy a huge stereo and crank it up so you can hear it throughout the place. You can also get multiple digital distribution amplifiers that run over Wifi (eg Sonos), but again they come at a huge cost. What you really want though is cheap… Read More »
Selfie Booth Photos from the Shelly Park School Colour Fun Run, April 2019
Beach Hop in Whangamata had around 100 classic, vintage and retro styled caravans this year. Here are a bunch of photos I took. Not my best work.. but I didn’t spend a lot of time taking them, and of course it was pretty overcast. Congratulations to the winner at the Top 10 shootout, Retro Custom… Read More »
You can spend thousands on home automation equipment. You could get yourself an ecosystem like Apple Homekit, Samsung Smart-Things, Control4 or many others, however with just some moderate techo skills you can set up or convert your home to pretty awesome home control with DIY. My take on home automation is that it should be… Read More »
Someone recently sent an email to our local neighbourhood and it went something like this: We live at no 123, and I thought it was worth sending an email as my car was broken into last night on our driveway. My husband’s car was also broken into on our driveway the other night. Both times,… Read More »
Subtitle: How not to be a d@%k, when owning and driving an Electric Vehicle. Warning, these are my opinions, and in some cases may be mine alone. Feel free to weigh in to discussions below, or on the various Facebook EV owners and Nissan Leaf groups. This is a New Zealand site, so some links/comments may… Read More »
Caravan thefts in New Zealand have become a lot more common in the past few years, and every day or so you hear about another one going missing. Caravans are pretty easy to steal by themselves, as they are light weight, usually easily accessible on a driveway… and they sit home alone when people go… Read More »
Do you have an existing house or structure and trying to get a cable into a tricky place? Here are a few tips from methods I have used over the years. Conduit Sucker There is nothing more annoying than finding a broken cable in a conduit or pipe and having nothing to pull the replacement… Read More »