The concept of the ‘Smart House’ is nothing new, and the reality for some years now has been that if you throw enough at an electrician, he will install some flavour of a domesticated commercial system.

For somewhere north of $5,000 you have been able to get a new house wired and installed with a Clipsal C-Bus system, but dont expect it to do very much except have very funky looking switched with LED’s on them and diide the house into a few zones that you can control the lights from other areas.

But is this enough for today?

Read the rest of this entry »

Green energy and the installing of solar panels on your house is all the rage at the moment, but what does anyone *really* know about the facts?

Yes you can get a govt rebate, but your COMBINED household income has to be under $100,000  year.

Yes Energy companies will give you further discounts, but only if you transfer to them the Renewable Energy Certificates at no cost.

Lets think about this for a second…..

Read the rest of this entry »

So, I am trying to diagnose a power issue that we have in the new house.

Maybe twice or three times a month the Earth Leakage Breaker will pop in the dead of the morning, cutting power to the house. Luckily I havent been caught out yet missing my train due to the alarm being off, but it is only a matter of time I guess.

We dont have much turned on at that time in the morning, only a handful of mobile phone and laptop charges and the occasional plug pack for various devices, a couple of computers and oh yeah, the fridge.

On discussing this matter with a few electricians on the OverClockers.com.au forums, it was decided to try and isolate the issue, despite the fact that it might take 12 months to do so.

Read the rest of this entry »

So you are already in the booming Sydney property market, but decide that the time is right to move on up in the world and invest in a bigger house.

All good.

You decide to buy a new house, not yet finished by a builder seen as a ‘premium’ provider.
Still all good, right?
Wrong.

Despite my family having owned 3 or 4 houses from this builder, and despite us paying a premium price for our new house, we have problems a plenty. No matter what you do, sometimes you cant find all the issues with a house till long after you have moved in, but in our case we identified MOST of the issues before the house was finished and before we had settled.

Asquith Homes was our choice of builder. Also has ties to Beechworth, or XXXXXX homes. We knew of the quality of their homes due to past experience and were impressed by their premium standing and good design, however what we didnt bank on was George’s absolute lack of customer service, lack of empathy and bluntly, total lack of anything vaguly resembling a brain.

Read the rest of this entry »

How do you monetise a website?

That is a good question, I am glad you asked.

No I dont have one that I prepared earlier, as I want to know the answer to this one too.

I have a menagerie of websites, none of them is properly monetised.

The issue isnt really that of getting enough traffic, really, it is all about finding the right advertisers. But to attract the right advertisers you have to have enough traffic.
Read the rest of this entry »