As an Airbnb host, I have done this sort of thing for my guests and my own usage, but with a "flat" structure: a simple, searchable inventory (https://maisonrougevernet.fr/inventaire) which doubles as technical documentation for some items (with optionally links to PDFs, videos, etc.).
Writing documentation for your house
101–110 of 326 posts
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a fair part of the population, especially those using at home a crappy PC crashing twice a week, 'smart home stuff' means that some bug or backdoor may lead them into a mess: lock them out, let an intruder in, over/under-heat for weeks while they are out of town... They don't want any part of this.
If I bought a house that had a bunch of IoT junk, my first step would be to rip it all out.
Agreed.
At the same time any home automation needs to be able to be cloud and vendor independent.
It begins with registering the property an independent email address for any accounts used during setups before taking them offline. Easy to manage for future tenant or sale.
Gear is more able to be cloud independent or be made cloud independent, leaving a greater chance to leave at most a local wifi network and local appliance with touch screen (pi) that can peacefully operate without the internet, plugged in and hung on a wall like any other appliance in a mechanical room of the home.
The more off the shelf parts can be, the greater the chance of it surviving.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just for history. Current values are available without internet on the esp32.
why not use a local server, even just an RPi?
Sometimes the library pushes easier to a cloud.
Managing storage and more can still be work and worth doing as a second step since most of the time it’s worth doing the setup over at least one more time.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#104For my last house, I had spent years on smart home automation, I had a binder that contained clear instructions I wrote for everything, and receipts for every upgrade I ever made on the home, warranty docs, QR codes to download smart home apps to control the devices, plot maps, floor plans, a 1-page list of repairmen for everything- you name it. I made short YouTube videos for everything like turning the water on/off…
To be fair, smart homes absolutely suck. Especially about four or five years removed, or, in this case, an owner change. This is like writing code vs figuring out someone else's code. Those are totally different things, and code is a bunch of readily accessible text files. Smart homes? Some device in the attic, some device in the basement, some wiring that goes who knows where, where does all this info go? What was t…
There really is starting to be a case for more remote control only smart home automation .. and then learning to handle those remote commands.
Leaves what people are familiar with and trust in place.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#105I own an RV. The RV came with two thick manuals, one for the RV chassis, and one for all of the appliances that were factory installed. I am not the first owner of the RV. My brother, a meticulous military man kept the documentation for every appliance and gadget he installed in that RV. And since I took ownership of it, and have I been ever grateful that he documented it, I have done the same too, for the WiFi, for…
Business idea - House Documentation as-a-service. You fill in the blanks online and it generates the PDF for you.
There's this https://github.com/hay-kot/home box "inventory and organization system built for the Home User"
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#106This amount of organization feels alien to me. The title of the article might as well have been “how to fly by moving your ears really fast”
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#107So good, I would love to do it, but I guess I wouldn't have the necessary discipline. I will add it to the todo list
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#108So, i sold a house i had in north Seattle after a divorce in 2018. We had bought it in 04, i was working at Microsoft at the time. We raised our son there. I even built a 8’x8’x8’ brick oven for baking pizza and bread (plans from Ovencrafters). I rented an excavator for a week and dug around the entire house and put in 12’ deep footing drains, with clean-out pipes every 20’ down the 100’ to the road. A new 2” pex wat…
>I will just be pickier about who i sell it to. Honestly this kind of mindset is a huge problem in the US. You built the oven, you enjoyed the oven, and you decided to sell the house. Why do you feel the need to dictate what the owner does with the house after? If you wanted to keep the pizza oven as some kind of monument to yourself you could have kept the home. This kind of mindset leads to stale neighborhoods, whe…
Whoah, that interpretation seems pretty wild to me. They put a lot of effort into building a pizza oven and someone else tore it down, and they should feel nothing about this?! If an artist sells their painting they shouldn't care if the new owner paints over a section?
Beyond the sentimental attachment to the pizza oven, I'd be bothered by the sheer inefficiency of it.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I will just be pickier about who i sell it to. Honestly this kind of mindset is a huge problem in the US. You built the oven, you enjoyed the oven, and you decided to sell the house. Why do you feel the need to dictate what the owner does with the house after? If you wanted to keep the pizza oven as some kind of monument to yourself you could have kept the home. This kind of mindset leads to stale neighborhoods, whe…
Whoah, that interpretation seems pretty wild to me. They put a lot of effort into building a pizza oven and someone else tore it down, and they should feel nothing about this?! If an artist sells their painting they shouldn't care if the new owner paints over a section? Beyond the sentimental attachment to the pizza oven, I'd be bothered by the sheer inefficiency of it.
> I'd be bothered by the sheer inefficiency of it.
This is the part that hurts me the most. I don't like when good things go to waste.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#110Did this last summer. Started as docs for friends taking care of the house for a couple of weeks. Used the multi-language feature of some Hugo theme to switch between ‘guest’ and ‘inhabitant’ docs.
Was great when my youngest wanted to make her first coffee herself. “Open your phone and go to home.family.tld and click on howtos!”