More intelligence

Although I have done a ton of things since moving into the house there are certain things that have just been lingering on, for no real good reason. Last night I dug into two of them. The house has a sprinkler system that I have done very little with except turning it off at the start of rainy season to knock down the big water bill. I had some time last night so I decided to familiarize myself with the system more since regular rain is going to be ending soon.

I manually activated each zone to see where in the yard it corresponded to. I was surprised to see I have sprinklers all the way up to the corner of the development along the sidewalk. I assumed that was a community maintained section but evidently I water it as well. What my test revealed was half of the 8 zones don’t appear to be working. I’m not sure if the valves are just bad or if something else is going on. I’m going to have my lawn guy take a look at it and depending on what he finds either I will have him fix it or do it myself if the cost is high.

I also reset the controller so I could get it connected to my phone and wifi which allows me to control and monitor the system remotely. I’m always a fan of being able to pull the strings on my home smart devices from the cloud.

I then turned my attention to my smart thermostat. Like the sprinkler controller, I knew it had the ability to be controlled via Alexa but again just had not taken the time to make it happen. I actually had to get support involved to get the thermostat online because it was still registered to the prior owners. They were able to clear that out so I could activate the thermostat in the app under my name. Once this was done I got it connected to my app and wifi. This then allowed me to link it to Alexa which in turn now allows me to change the thermostat with a simple voice command. I remember at the old house I always wanted to be able to do that but the proprietary Trane set up would not allow for it. Even though I rarely change the thermostat, being able to do it with my voice is appealing.

Speaking of the old house, I was told by a co-worker and ex-neighbor that the new owners have been doing stuff, the most notable being fencing in the front of the property as well. It’s been a couple months since I last saw the place so I think I may swing by there to take a look this weekend. I have had a handful of people recently ask me if I miss my old place. It’s strange but the honest answer I give them with little to no hesitation is “not really”…..