@tomasmcguinness

  • Smart Bulbs: my lightbulb moment?

    I’ve always disliked smart lightbulbs. Turn them off at the wall and you immediately question why you paid 1000% more. I’ve held this position for years and years, until one day I came across a tweet by Troy Hunt where he used the words detached and Shelly1. This immediately captured… Read ⇢

  • My Mixergy Smart Hot Water Tank

    I recently installed a Mixergy smart hot water tank into my new house, as part of a total renovation. I’ve been very impressed and wanted to share my thoughts on the product after using it for a few weeks. The problem with hot water tanks For me, the problem with… Read ⇢

  • Automating our dual fuel towel radiator

    As I explained in my earlier post, heating our bathroom, we installed a dual fuel tower radiator. A dual fuel radiator is one that can be heating by both our central heating and an electrical element inside the radiator. This allows us to dry our towels without having to turn… Read ⇢

  • Making a dumb light switch smart

    A few months back, when planning the rewiring of our house, we decided not to include any switched 5A sockets; you know the kind of arrangement where a switch on the wall can turn on some floor lights and lamps in a room? If you want light, but something subdued,… Read ⇢

  • Heating our bathroom

    The bathroom in our old house was cold. Really cold. It had two external, solid brick walls, and the room was tiled floor to ceiling. We had a rubber floor covering, so at least you didn’t suffer from very cold feet. We had a lot of condensation, which unfortunately led… Read ⇢

    Heating our bathroom

  • Moving a wall to create a bigger bathroom!

    When we purchased our house, one thing that we didn’t really like was the small bathroom. The layout is pretty standard for the type of house, with an airing cupboard and W.C. over the garage. We knew we wanted to retain the bath, for the kids mostly, and we knew… Read ⇢

    Moving a wall to create a bigger bathroom!

  • Insulating our 1950s suspended floors

    As we’re renovating our new house, one of the things I wanted to do was to insulate the floors of the downstairs rooms. When we renovated our old house, not doing something about the floors was something I regretted. At the time we were expecting our first child’s arrival, so… Read ⇢

    Insulating our 1950s suspended floors

  • New House – Technology Choices

    I’ve recently bought a new house. We completed renovated our first house and, in the process, we made an awful lot of mistakes. Don’t get me wrong, we got an awful lot of things right too, but we’ve always had some annoyances. These were born of inexperience and naeivaty. With… Read ⇢

  • Installing Konnected Alarm

    Back in February of this 2020 (This post has taken me a year to write!), I preordered an alarm panel from Konnected.io. The idea with the Konnected alarm panel is that you can take your existing wired alarm and connect it to your smart home setup. It’s a very clever… Read ⇢