automation

When we were constructing our second house, I went to a nearby hardware shop to buy some items. There, a new lady homeowner came to purchase some items. During billing time, that lady asked the shop owner for an alternative solution for the float valve. As it stops water before filling the sump. She was explaining the same issue that I was facing. Her sump tap is installed somewhat down inside the sump, and the standard float valve does not allow the tap to fill the water....

Staying in rental property is one type of problem… Having our own house and managing it properly is another type of problem… This is what I noticed after we entered our first house. Out of all the homeowner’s problems, one problem that fell under my responsibility was operating the sump valve weekly. The float valve is a perfect solution to automate… In our case, our tap is located a little deep inside the sump....

Once we entered our first building after house construction was over, the issue I noticed was operating the Sump Valve every week. I was the only guy who needed to monitor and operate the sump valve On/Off every time… because I’m the guy who works from my home office and stays at home. So, every week, I need to turn off my sump valve when water starts overflowing from our sump....

Yesterday was Saturday, so my brother was staying at our house. So, I planned to implement my Sump automation to stop water automatically once the sump is full. This is the same as what float valves do, but no height limit exists. That means… no matter where your Tap located inside the sump, it can perform On/Off of tap based on the water level you set. The same concept has been implemented in my first building but not in the second building… now recently our water man leaving too much water so we need to On and Off tap many times a week....

When I went on the Rameswaram trip, I noticed somewhere in some public lights that they adopted the same concept that I shared inside my outdoor lights automation. But… That’s on street lights. I’m not guiding you street light setup. That setup is different from our outdoor light automation setup. Only the product is same. We don’t want to do what they did in public lights. We need to keep design and affordability in mind....

One of my friend’s houses is near our house. I used to see this friend’s house from our house until now. Another construction work is going on between our buildings, so I cannot see their house these days. After dinner, when I come from the first house to the second house through the back door, I notice one thing in my friend’s house on most days. His father slowly comes down from the first floor just to turn off the light daily....

When it comes to doing any kind of automation in the home, you might think it’s a costly thing and need separate service providers to do that. On one level, that’s true. If you are going to use sensors and want to automate inside the house, then you need a different team, and it costs more to implement. For my Outdoor Light Automation setup, you don’t need such automation experts to implement....

While I started implementing the automation switch to my parking light, one device I tried was – the Sonoff switch. It requires the internet to work. That’s not an issue in my house, as I properly planned everything and can get a Wi-Fi signal anywhere I want in my building. It was working fine. However, the problem with the device is that it did not last longer because of voltage issues....

I realised this problem after having our own house. Until we had our own house, we used to stay in the rental property and never have to worry about outdoor lights. In most cases, the owner takes care of that. In some cases, no one ON the outdoor lights. Life goes without worrying about homeowners’ problems :) Then we had our first house; that time, our house was on the first floor....

When we built our first building, I noticed one task which is a boring, painful and time-consuming task we were doing is… Switching On/Off of our outdoor lights. After noticing this pain, I thought of doing something about this. That time, I got a few ideas I could try, and I experimented with those. Some of those different ideas felt worth implementing in our second building. Initially, I used my own self-made IoT devices to do automation in my first and second buildings....