My Automated House

This weekend, I skipped continuing on the scrap room to install the last heater for the house. Now, finally, every room has its own heater, and now every heater in the kids rooms is also controllable via remote control!

See, without central heating, the idea of a thermostat becomes unrealistic, and so the only thing to do is either to trust the thermostat on the wall heaters (which only reading the air around it, does little to say if the room is warm or not), or to find another solution. I decided, when finding a phenomenal deal at Radio Shack on Z-wave receptacles ($15 vs list of $60 and normal pricing ~$45), to go the automation route and control our house temperature MY way.

So I installed wireless outlets at each heater, and spent part of the weekend coding the ability to control the heaters from my computer. So a few hours of coding later (sorry Diane, for holing up with some code), and I've got the three heaters turning on and off from a command line app! Now, I can set them to come on and off at any time during the day.

Next step: iPhone control.

After I make it so that I can turn them on or off from my phone, the final step will be the bigger investment: temperature sensors for each room. Then I can look to see what temp the room is at, and turn on and off the heaters like a thermostat would, just with some geekish intervention.