puntloos

Tx. It's surprising how poorly imaged these pages are in most vendors. Wickes is worse of course: https://www.wickes.co.uk/search?q=kitchen+doors%3Arelevance&page=0&perPage=30

Perhaps a bit strange detail, but we're looking for a modern kitchen with hidden pulls. Problem is that especially in the floor cabinets, they are typically built in such a way that they easily collect dust. Has anyone seen pulls like the attached image..?

Interesting point. I'm tall and hate bending over..

Need picture..

Trawling the dankweb I did find this: Temp, Motion, Light, Humidity But it only works with Apple Homekit. I wonder if there are any good bridges for Homekit to Smartthings or somesuch. @joth you know if suchlike exists? Tend to agree, today it's definitely true. But what about the future.. Good call, will make a note.

To be fair, there's not THAT many rooms in a house. My main gripe with it is that it relies on wifi/zwave which means a jammer can turn it into a paperweight, although with internal sensors this might not be a major deal for security reasons.. Well your user picture is a good preview to prep..

Phew, pricey. Note that for 20 quid you get this: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000283075492.html?spm=a2g0o.cart.0.0.55343c00zTWCVB&gps-id=shopcart_buyagain&scm=1007.13440.139630.0&scm_id=1007.13440.139630.0&scm-url=1007.13440.139630.0&pvid=8a1434a0-8e28-4ec2-8728-c13208a010bd I'm tempted to just order one and see if I can get it to play. I might literally cover the actual camera with paper (to turn it into 'light sensor') and snip off the microphone (privacy)..

On another note, @pocster, what "sensor array" did you put together? I think I'd like some combination of smart: - motion - temp - humidity - light for each room. And *perhaps* have the motion ones wired, to avoid clever thieves with jammers getting away with my exotic gourd collection.

Hey, we are an open-minded forum, please do not judge people's proclivities for cablep*rn.

Sounds very sensible advice, thank you. Will heed. Only reason is that it's a small plot and to achieve the amount of internal space I'd like to see.. etc etc. Interesting point, why is this?

Sounds very sensible advice, thank you. Will heed. Only reason is that it's a small plot and to achieve the amount of internal space I'd like to see.. etc etc.

Ha, I hadn't actually thought of that option- no idea why! We're actually quite friendly with the neighbours, I suspect they wouldn't mind.... Would you try to get it in writing? Or is some verbal agreement sufficient?

[generic gripe] - the building trade really loves to say something is "very expensive" and only when pressed multiple times coming out with any meaningful number Anyway.. Can someone give me a more-detailed-than-'oh, very expensive' idea of how much it costs to build a house right on the border of the property? In particular it would mean we'd have to use internal scaffolding, but perhaps there are other considerations too? Which factors play into this? One thing to mention is that the neighbour's property does not touch the border, about 1m walkway on their side.

Curious that central london has no gas.

Very much in general I'm with @joth that DIY is not a road I want to go down unless it has super detailed , simple instructions, fire and forget. Not one for the 'it needs a bit of tweaking'-gambit.

Ha, I should've googled "one more step". But indeed, I suppose I might go for cat8 then.. Frankly I didn't really research it too closely just yet, but it looks like cat7 also has some compatibility issues, I assumed it was all backward compatible with older stuff?

Cat 7a exists - and isn't *dramatically* more expensive than 6. Would go for this one myself. PoE isn't bad but perhaps slightly limiting for what you can put in said wall boxes.. Indeed what if I wanted to put some google home mini next to it etc... Huh, interesting idea, those switches seem cool. Am I understanding correctly that you'd listen to these switches with the little PCB, and those will then trigger a relay as well as somehow communicating this status to the rest of the smarthome? It sounds great but I don't think I'd be up to manually wiring up those things... want a solution in a box! [edit - oh I didn't notice there were already comments to this ]

Honestly, I my point about 'switching off the kid's room at 8pm' was mostly joking, I doubt Id want to be that parent. I think indeed my main reason would be for safety (holiday) reasons, as well as indeed monitoring overall power usage. Perhaps it's less useful than I imagined.. and indeed it's a fair point that while not necessarily damaging, most equipment isn't really meant to be hard-power-cut.

Not really the subject of discussion I wanted to get into but just to comment that like I tried to say above I tend to figure out the business motives for companies, assuming a psychotic disdain for ethics when judging the situation. Meaning - I'm sure that some companies might be able to 'squeeze some money' out of permanently spying on you and overhearing you suggest an interest in xyz and then somethingsomething buynow! .. but the downside of people finding this out and shunning your brand forever would dramatically outweigh this little benefit. Even if they really care absolutely nothing about your privacy they have a financial interest in not screwing with you (let alone that indeed it might well be illegal) Sure, some data, erroneous or not, might be sent to the cloud but to assume that anyone is interested or going to "store this snippet for strategic later (ab)use" is just assuming you're way too special. Perhaps if you're a moviestar or whatever there's a slight increased chance that some shady person manages to bypass all the companies' internal safeties and then get to your data.. but my personal take is that I'm not going to worry about this one until I have solid info. Back to the subject at hand though - would it make sense to indeed design some standardized 'box', the same for each room, that indeed contains the network port, a router, few sensors, and optionally one the smarthome puck of your choice?

Ah I found those too, xiaomi aquara. I always wonder about Chinese stuff if it's "by default" poorly made. To be clear I have no reason to assume it is here... but all these smallish chinese vendors (xiaomi is quite big/popular btw, so this might be an exception..)

And you think there's a massive conspiracy where these companies risk losing your trust (and patronage) forever, just so they can overhear you discussing the neighbors cat?

Yeah, I don't know what physical limits I have to contend with - how many cables can you put in a wall? At *some* point there's no more space, surely? Yeah, exactly my idea.. - although it depends on how fancy ones you buy. In the main rooms 'height' speakers are actually a thing for convincing surround so I'm building those, but perhaps cables to prep for philistines in all others? Oh don't you worry, that part I have fully specced out for 7.3.4 Eh, funny, I actually forgot about those. Just to set the 'record' (ha) straight, they don't listen all the time, the whole reason for the 'Alexa' and 'google' words is that they have tailored hardware that exclusively listens for that word alone. If the word occurs, then and only then will the rest of the device power on, send it to the cloud for parsing etc.. Cool! Or hot.

On paper it sounds cool: Having a central power closet, with one power line going to each room so for each room you can both switch on/off the entire room and also know what the room in question is consuming. ("No dad, I'm not playing computer games anymore.." -uh huh. And why does it show 400W for one reading light?) But, there's a few downsides: 1/ Probably a few devices in the room need to stay powered. Networking router, smoke alarm maybe? but more importantly: 2/ Most switches I'm aware of only switch the usual 3000W - eg this one - https://www.itead.cc/sonoff-pow-r2.html - handles 240*15=3600W max. I don't like the idea that plugging in a vacuum and a hairdryer and a few bits and bobs might just overload it. (I guess I can build clever smarthome functionality to switch off the room if it hits 3500.. but..) How are classic houses built? Is each socket separately capable of sustaining 3500W? Or are most sockets in a room linked to one "3500W max" line anyway? Would you perhaps create one specific "power" socket and the rest standard? What about the lights? Separate circuit?

Just a bit of an errant thought, but which things feature in pretty much every room, and how do you make clever use of this 'repeating fact'? I realise this might be a bit of a 'smart home' question but there could be other things too. For example: - Networking cable, and perhaps a few "boxes in the wall" that can fit a router and allow me to open up an ethernet port here and there 'on demand'? - Ceiling speakers? (not a fan myself but you know.. resale..) - Water line? (with a small baby, can't express how useful a tap is in the baby room) - HDMI cable from one wall to another? (so one could hang a TV on one wall and 'drive it' from another device? - Switchable room power line (so you can turn an entire room off, and perhaps measure power usage - "no dad, I'm not watching TV.... - oh really?....") - Heating control? Is this even a thing with ASHP? - Window/shutter control? - Box of Sensors embedded at a strategic place? I'm thinking primarily temp and humidity, perhaps movement, not camera. I noticed that putting a temp sensor on the floor is next to useless, so this box probably needs to be at 1m50 somewhere?