Home Gadget

Installation day, finally. We can at last wave goodbye to the much loathed 24 hour programmer that has been driving the heating system and at the same time everyone nuts, whilst making far more profit for our gas supplier than is reasonable from a single household. As we move out of the dark ages we've decided to welcome the modern age in the safe hands of a Honeywell approved installer.  This seemed like the most sensible option as we're the second owners of this house and the previous owners left something of a puzzle regarding how the underfloor heating links into the rest of the system.  I'm no heating expert and having someone with the right tools, experience and knowledge setting things up just makes sense.  He also gets a good deal on the hardware so the whole install was less than we had imagined. Just a note about approved installers here based on the experience I had. Having got the list of Honeywell installers from their website, the first approved instal...

Since moving into the new Home Gadget HQ we've been planning all of the automation we want to add, in fact let's be honest we were planning this for months before the move (and if I'm really honest for years before). Our old HQ was something of a test bed for lots of different tech with the aim of finding the "perfect" solution should we move somewhere a little bigger.  As that somewhere bigger happens the first thing you realise is that each place is different and has it's own unique requirements in terms of automation, you can use lots of what you planned but will also need to find new solutions.  If you've already decided on the platforms you're using that process is much easier than if starting from scratch. That said all of the learning's, developments, trial, error, tears and shouting at little black and white boxes over the years has been worth it so we are up and running with our core and integrated systems very quickly, now it's just...