Finding stories in everyday adventures
After moving to our new house recently, I decided to go all Apple Homekit for my smart devices. Our previous homes were all Z-wave and Zigbee. In the first house we turned into a smart home, it was Wink, then came SmartThings. There was a bit of Google Nest. In our next house, we used SmartThings, and later Home Assistant, with Ring for cameras and security. Needless to say I’ve had my experiences with smart …
I took my smart home journey one step further today. I installed a smart auto water shutoff valve. Wow, what’s that? Well, this device mounts to your main water shutoff valve and automatically open or close it based on your command. Sounds magic! Yes it’s magic. Seriously, we now have Z-Wave devices that do this magic. I bought one such device called “Dome Water Main Shut-Off”. Dome’s device mounts to your main water pipe and …
I don’t use Cortana very much. I don’t have Cortana powered speakers. I don’t have Cortana app installed on my cellphone and I don’t use any Windows Phones anymore… but one thing that I have and majority of people do is a Windows 10 computer. If you do own that, then Cortana comes installed by default on it and you can actually use it to do some really cool stuff if you happen to have …
Picked up Wink Hub 2 last week. Pretty good as compared to Samsung Smartthings which is going back to Amazon.
Replaced the old thermostat with the smart Nest thermostat. Had always been wanting a smart thermostat and after we bought the house, it was the perfect opportunity to get it. The previous thermostat used to be an Aprilaire thermostat. I believe it also controlled a humidifier. However, there is no central humidifier I could find, therefore, it was only to control temperature.