Re: Intro/question

[Stuart Grimshaw <stuart@xxxxxxx>]

On Monday 05 November 2001 00:11 am, drownedrat@xxxxxxx wrote:
> Hiya,
> having posted my first question & read a couple of post about this
> being a community, not a Q&A sesh thought it's be polite to
introduce
> myself. Sorry if this is inappropriate.
>
> Basically I've recently bought a house & have a fairly technical
> background (computing, rather than engineering) & am interested in
> HA. Unfortunately I don't have a lot of spare cash, & doubt I will
> any time soon.
>
> Looking at a lot of the sites it seems to be a fairly pricy business.
> I know cable is cheap, but all the other toys seems to rapidy add to
> the cost of any project.

Join the club :-) you are in the same boat as 95% of the other members of
this list, myself included. The best advice is to monitor this list for
bargain alerts and get what you can, when you can.

> Is there a low end to HA? I've read Smart Home mag, which seems to
> deal with the very high end stuff (and also seems like more of a
> collection of ads than articles) and had a look at a lot of the links
> from automatedhome which seem to be a little more realistic, but
> still in the 'you could do this, or buy a new car' category. Please
> don't think I'm having a go, just wondering if I should shelve my
> interest until I have serious savings.

I've built up what little kit I have slowly, I started with an X10 starter
kit which included 1 each of the two modules & a CM12U, I'd recomend
you pick
up one of those from one of the usual suspects (Letsautomate, Laser etc). I
then baught a Pronto remote, and over the next 12 months baught a couple of
appliance units when PC World were selling them cheap & finally I
baught the
last of the cheap X10 kits from my local Homebase.

> My initial plans are a wired home LAN & some computer control of
> heating, with AV & lighting coming later (probably at another
house,
> some time from now)
>
> I know how to wire a LAN (pretty much), so any pointers on the
> heating would be great. I know this has been discussed a bit, but
> hard to find anything with yahoo's interface.

Heating is a subject that's been mentioned recently, but I don't think
anyone
really has a solution. If your retro-fitiing your LAN have a look at the
wiring guide on automatedhome.co.uk, and have a look at
http://www.smgsystems.co.uk/ha/
to see how I did mine not too long ago.

--

Stuart Grimshaw <stuart@xxxxxxx>
Chief Operations Officer
Football Networks Ltd
-
t:07976 625221
f:0870 7060260

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