In the beginning of 2023 I bought a house and was pretty happy about it. The house wasnt anything special but it has enough rooms to house me, my wife and my daughter. The biggest issue however was that the man that lived here before us was a heavy smoker. And I mean a real heavy smoker. So the walls and all the interior was basically soaked in nicotin. So the only reasonable thing to do was to rip out basically anything and replace it with something new and fresh. While I planned on how to achieve a home that I can live in for longer than just a few years a thought came to mind which was basically: Why not make it smart if I have to renovate everything anyway? And so it started. But first I had so clarify some things:
- How smart should it be in the end?
- Do I want to use cloud services to make it smarter?
- Do I need AI stuff?
After answering these questions and making decisions based on my answers I started planning every aspect of my smart home. First of: Power. How am I supposed to power all the smart devcices I plan to put into the house? And the answer was pretty easy. As I plan to reduce my fossil resource footprint anyway I did the only reasonable thing for me and bought a solar system with a battery which provides enough power to keep all my devices running for about 4-8 hours if its battery is fully charged and I cant get power from the grid. But before I could install such a huge solar system I had to replace my entire roof. Because the old one was basically build from plain trees and goodwill. The issue wasnt that the roof was prone to get destroyed any time soon but it wasnt capable of holding solar panels and more insulation, that I planned to add because until this point in time there were no insulation for the roof at all. This was the biggest step that I could make in the time and it was absolutely worth it. The Roof is properly insulated, the solar system is in place and runs smoothly and I dont have to worry about any power issues as long as I have some juice left in the battery. Step one was done. And the next one is building new rooms right under the roof. This is where I currently am. I have a full plan on how to build a new floor for rooms and how I get the powerlines in there and how the insulation for the floor is done and where and how I have to build new walls and so on… Lets just say I already started with it and am happy that, so far, everything turns out how I wanted it to. It takes time of course, because I do basically all by myself and I have so many questions on how to do things properly. Gladly I know how to use the internet and know people that know a lot of things that are completely new for me. So this adventure will take a few years and I plan to document it here. So if anythings arises I will add a new entry in here for you to read. If you want.