Techie House
/Warning: this is the nerdiest post I have ever written. If there are two things that are true about LB and I, they are these: we love technology and we love music. Second to those fundamental truths, we also like saving money and making things easier on ourselves. One of the very first things we did when we bought this bad boy was to get a nest thermostat. We replaced the old school thermostat cover with this bad boy and it took all of 15 minutes. Our lives, and our heating and cooling situation have not been the same since. (Holy moly, I want to get crown molding and board and batten in that hallway.)
The Nest is definitely the thing that we use the most often. It's too warm in bed? Turn down the AC from your phone/iPad/computer. Too cold downstairs? Turn up the heat from your comfy spot on the couch. Forgot to turn the heat down when you left the house this morning? No worries. Just do it from your phone while you are on the train. The Nest also keeps track of your energy usage.
The Nest also learns your patterns and creates a schedule based off of those. You can then go into the Nest app and tweak the schedule from there.
Are we glad that we spent the money to get the nest? Yes. Abso-freaking-lutely. I think it has saved us a bunch in heating and cooling even though I drive LB crazy with my AC drill sergeant behavior.
The other piece of techie nerdy lovin' we invested in was the Kevo lock.
This thing is great. While the blue tooth can be sort of finicky (I have found that we have to have our phones unlocked for it to work), it is awesome. You literally just walk up to the door and tap it. Boom. Deadbolt opened. The greatest feature, hands down, is the fact that we can send e-Keys to friends and family. No more making spare keys. You can still totally do that, and re-keying the door is incredibly easy. This is a screen shot of the app showing the eKeys we've sent. Ashley uses hers all the time to steal/borrow our tools.
What was NOT so easy was the installation. LB lost pretty much an entire day, getting this thing installed. I would ask him to give a run-down of how he got it up and working, but I think it might send him into some sort of catatonic state. (2 weeks before the wedding is not the best time to do this).
So those are two ways that we pimped our house out a little bit. How about y'all? Ever thought about getting a nest? Got questions? We've got answers!
