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I gave up and went with a honeywell stat with ZWave ($140 ish on Amazon). I only have a basic heat/AC system and it controls it just fine. I use OpenZwave + custom SW to control it. No cloud services!   Seems like most wifi devices (not just the thermostats) come with cloud services....ugh.

I believe they use plumbers putty to seal the openings for where the A/C piping/wiring penetrate the foundation. It seems to hold up pretty well. This is in Canada. They might do it different elsewhere.

  FYI: As far as I know using the Aux switch doesn't fire any events indicating the state of the lights. i.e. you get a status message when toggling the main switch but if the aux switch is toggled, you have to poll to get the state. Dumb.

  Yah I had seen this one. It looks to be the best bet. I was trying to find in Digikey (way too many connectors to sift through) so I could get dimensions/specs to be sure it is the same. Also, I was looking for a panel mount one, but at $2 i guess I could buy a few pigtail ones with some...

Anyone know the name of the following connector (with Digikey or Mouser part #)? It has 2 pins, threaded locking, circular connector. I am trying to attach my own wiring to the transormers while keeping it fairly water tight.   I belive this is where the transformer came from...

Yah I searched a bit but couldn't find anything. Closest thing was "vinyl j-trim" on homedepot.com. The piece I have is not j-trim though as both sides are the same (not one longer).   I found a piece that still had the tag. I might have got it from another home reno store here in Canada (Rona)...

Not sure about 3/4" but home depot have the 1/2" version in the drywall trim section. At least that was where I found it a few years ago.

  I don't quite understand this... isn't the temperature in the tank in flux quite a bit?  Here in Canada in the winter there is some very cold water (5-10 degC). If I draw out 20 gal of hot water, it is being replaced with this very cold water. The tank temperature will have dropped...

Honeywell has one as well. Available at home depot. Looks pretty slick but the deal killer for me is that I believe you must use their portal. i.e. no local wifi access without internet. Or am i wrong? Anyone have one? http://wifithermostat.com/

It still does depend on the devices. I had some onewire stuff fail due to grounding issues caused by a shared power supply. Onewire does carry the ground with it. I never looked into the root cause, but isolating the power supply solved the issue. If you are powering phone chargers, ipod...

If they are all independent devices it will probably work. Just so long as none of them interconnected with something else. I think doing this also voids any of the UL listings, etc... on the device as it likely specifies it must be used with the attached wall wart.

Are the DC outputs isolated from each other? Or do they share a common ground? MD

I have a very manual system. Three 40 gallon olive barrels collecting water from about 1200 sqft roof. They fill very quickly (<10 minutes) with a rain shower. Then I just fill watering cans or attach a hose to the bottom and have it water the grass via gravity (the barrels are about 2-3 feet...

I saw this one while looking through the links (from the first post) http://www.dockalot.com/ Don't see any pricing.... currently vaporware.

Yup felt it in Ottawa. I was only 4 stories up and it felt like a subway train was running right under my floor. Low rumble, BIG rumble, lots of low rumbles. Can't say I would like to live in California where this happens much more often and when they get 6.0-6.5 which is 10x worse than this...

Hmm... it looks like Prowl has the same idea as the AppNotify. From what I can read on their web page (quickly for now -- i will read more tonite) there is an API that will allow a perl script to send a notification to the iphone. This would work for me as well. Pricing seems similar $2-3. I...

I have been looking for a way to get my home automation system to notify me when something happens. I don't have a cell phone or alarm system so I think the best way would be to have the ipod Touch running all the time (locked) and then have it notify me when something happens. I believe as long...

Yah the mountpoints are one of things done better with *nix. Case in point. OWFS (one-wire file system). Dallas one wire devices show up as files in a filesystem. You can treat them just like files in any script/program. Sweet! The other thing I like is scripting. Scripting works well under...

I had lots of problems getting mine to scan properly as well. I had my XP work laptop (no go), my Vista machine (no go) and finally my XP home laptop (worked!). I don't know what the issue was but make sure both the laptop and the device server are on the same physical network segment (i.e. both...

Up here in Ottawa (Canada) my attic temps (at the peak of the roof) is about 55-60 C (130-140F) on sunny days. Outside temperature is not the real factor. Sun is the real killer. If you can shade the roof from the sun, the temperatures will drop. Trees don't grow fast enough! That said, I am...