So this blog has been about almost everything apart from technology. Due to the various Bad Things that needed putting right, the opportunities to gadget-up the bog house have been few and far between.
Clearly the best gadgets are the dehumidifiers: they allowed us to survive with only minor disease during our stay.
The next best are probably the security cameras, so at least we could see who was coming and going, doing weird stuff while we weren’t there. Quite a few unexpected visitors added interest, but a bunch of that is going to remain unwritten for now, for various reasons.
When we were over in January, I connected up a couple of temperature and humidity sensors that I could monitor remotely – one inside, one out. The numbers don’t make for pleasant reading at the moment, but at least it’s slightly warmer inside than out.
I also installed a remote mains switch that uses a mobile network for receiving and responding to commands. I added this because I noticed that the security cameras would go missing from the network for a few days at a time, and came to the conclusion that the mobile broadband router was probably down during those periods.
Since my temperature and humidity sensors are on that network too, I could test if the problem was with the camera system or the internet connectivity in general… if the broadband router goes down now, I simply send a text to my mains switch, which resets it. “Have you tried switching it off and on again?”
A bunch of these devices are on a UPS, which provides battery backup in the event of a general mains failure. Again, the temperature and humidity sensors aren’t, so if they’re dead but I’ve still got cameras and internet, it’s safe(ish) to say that the mains has been lost for a while at least.
Actually, last time we were over I put another security camera from a different vendor up to see how it behaved. Seems ok so far, although to the best of my knowledge nobody has actually passed by it yet (unless it’s proper rubbish).
I have done some other safeguarding, but I think that’s probably enough for now… wait for my “killer guard robot” post in the future…