By Dan Cash Do It Yourself • Energy Saving • General Information • Renovation • Tips and Tricks • • 0 Comments

Can You Make Your Kitchen ‘Smart’ Without Brand New Appliances?

Modern white kitchen with white marble counter top and pendant lighting.Smart devices around the home are a boon, of course, but they can be especially helpful in the kitchen. The oven that already knows how to cook the perfect chicken, the fridge which you can peer into to see if you need milk while you’re actually in the dairy section of the supermarket, and the bin which updates your shopping list when you throw packaging into the recycling certainly make keeping ahead of the housekeeping easy.

But can you do it without investing in brand new white goods?

If you’re refitting your kitchen with a raft of new appliances it is certainly tempting to buy those which have all the Smart Tech available already installed: Fridges with built in cameras, ovens which are programmed to know the cooking times of all your favourite meals, along with cameras and sensors which know when your roast has reached the perfect shade of brown, even bins with barcode readers which can order grocery deliveries for you because it knows you through your rubbish.

But what if your budget doesn’t stretch that far? Or you want to Smarten up your kitchen, only you don’t want to junk all your old appliances just yet? Can you get the same usability without buying the latest goods? Read more

By Dan Cash Broadband • Design • Do It Yourself • General Information • Renovation • WiFi • • • 0 Comments

Building, Renovating Or Refurbing? We Need To Talk About Data Cable!

fibre installation, fibre optic, ultrafast fibre dataWhether you’re renovating an old building, adding an extension, or building a new project from the ground up, it’s always a good idea to think about futureproofing. You wouldn’t leave electric wiring or plumbing out and add it as an afterthought, so why leave data cable to last?

Can installing digital infrastructure really be considered ‘futureproofing’ at all? We can all see how digital broadband data is here to stay, the only question is, how much of it we’re going to need as we become ever more data hungry? Ten years ago you would have been happy for one computer in your house to get fast access to Facebook to see who had most recently thrown a sheep at you or poked you (no, nobody knew then, nobody knows now. It was just one of those things), but today we need ‘instant on’ when we’re streaming movies, watching online TV, downloading and sharing music, and of course, checking our news feed on Facebook… And that’s not even considering the data that’s needed for Smart Home Automation devices and the demands that Covid has put on us in regards to working from home, always being in & needing to find ways of entertaining the kids and breaking up the Groundhog Day-like monotony of lockdown after lockdown. Putting all those aspects of modern home life and, together with Moore’s Law that technology becomes cheaper, faster and smaller with every passing year, it’s hard to imagine what the home without a broadband spine leading from the router to the street, or a strong, stable ultrafast wireless broadband connection would look like to Future Us. Read more

By Dan Cash CCTV • Do It Yourself • Energy Saving • General Information • Home Security • Tips and Tricks • Uncategorized • • 0 Comments

Preparing Your Home For Another Stormy Winter On The South Coast

poor aerial installationAs October draws on it’s a good time to think about preparing your home for the storms and snow that houses in the south east of England face this winter.

People who live on the south coast and along the South Downs will be more than familiar with the gales which can batter the region for days any time between October and April. We’re inured to it and laugh inwardly at those who are new to the area, who think that an umbrella will be of any consequence against weather which is coming in sideways.

But right now is the perfect time to prepare your house for winter, and all that it brings. Summer is a time when we’re all out enjoying the benefits of living in southern England, but now, as the nights draw in and the thermometer falls, it’s time to plan for the worst it has to offer.

Maintenance and Repairs

Autumn is the perfect time to carry out domestic repairs as the jobs which need doing reveal themselves. You won’t have noticed the rattling draughty windows during summer as they were all flung open to let the fresh air in, but now you’ve closed them you notice how much care they need. The same goes for many maintenance jobs.

Sash windows are prone to rattle and let in drafts. Wedges in the corners will hold them still and reduce a lot of the drafts, however, a draft excluder designed for small gaps inserted where the bottom and upper sash meet fill the equivalent of a two inch square home in every window in the house. Read more

By Dan Cash CCTV • Design • Do It Yourself • General Information • Home Security • Renovation • Tips and Tricks • WiFi • • • 0 Comments

Keeping Kerb Appeal Flowing When Selling Your Home

kerb appeal, garden, cctv, home security, bathroom, selling, housebuying

You’ll undoubtedly have heard the expression “Kerb appeal,” the makeover you give your house to make it attractive and give potential buyers a warm, positive feeling about your property before they’ve even stepped through the gate. It’s something agents and vendors bang on about all the time, but how can you get it, and how do you keep that positive feeling going up to and beyond exchanging contracts?

The fundamental thing about kerb appeal is making the house and garden look like the sort of place the buyer can see themselves living in without having to lift a finger. Even if they think they’re looking for a ‘fixer-upper’ most buyers will be daunted, to say the least if the property looks like a building site which has been abandoned or worse yet, a derelict which is rotting before their eyes.

So What Do You Do To Make That Unforgettable First Impression?

It’s a truism that you have to speculate to accumulate, so you’re naturally going to have to put money and effort into the appearance of your house if you want to get the best price for it, but naturally you don’t want to waste money on baubles which won’t make a difference to the impression you make or price you finally achieve. Read more

By Dan Cash Design • Do It Yourself • Energy Saving • General Information • Home Entertainment • Home Security • Renovation • Tips and Tricks • • • 0 Comments

Running Out Of Space At Home? Don’t Move, Improve!

We’d all love to live in a luxury home with all the mod cons and labour saving devices that come with a life of leisure, but few of us can afford it. If you don’t have the money to move house, but you still want the trappings of a luxury lifestyle there are always ways and means. Create a budget, shop around for bargains and muck in, doing as much of the work yourself as you can and you could improve your home so much you won’t even want to move home!

If you’ve ever been channel surfing at about 7pm on a weeknight you’ve probably seen an episode of Buying and Selling with Drew and Jonathan Scott, a show where two unrealistically handsome twins, one the rugged construction guy type, the other the smart lawyer looking one, renovate a family’s old home and bring the value up so much they can afford to leap several rungs up the property ladder. The thing that often grabs me is, after the work they put into making the old place look fantastic, why bother moving at all?

Transforming the home is something which is essentially within anybody’s reach, unless you live somewhere that is so tumbledown that it needs serious restoration, and if that’s the case, this isn’t the blog for you!

On the other hand, if your home is just looking tired, dated, shabby and doesn’t conform to your needs any more, why not look at other ways you can get the most out of it without selling up and moving on? (And if you still want to move on, do those improvements anyway, the work you carry out is proven to add to the overall value of the house, meaning you get what everybody wants when moving house: options.) Read more

By Dan Cash CCTV • General Information • Home Entertainment • Home Security • Tips and Tricks • 0 Comments

Smart Lighting? That’s A Brilliant Idea!

https://www2.meethue.com/en-gb
Philips’ Hue Lighting Enhances TV Viewing

They’re the first thing you switch on when you get home, and the last thing you turn off as you get into bed, but you only really notice them when they stop working. Without them the electrification of the western world would still have happened, but at a much slower rate. Outwardly their design has changed very little, but the technology that goes into a lightbulb has changed radically, so why do you need to invest in Smart lights?

Edison and Swan invented the incandescent light bulb at almost exactly the same time, but Edison saw that to get electricity into every home he’d have to make it all the more practical, which is why he still holds the record for the most patents registered: all these labour saving devices meant mains electricity wasn’t a fad or a luxury, it was a necessity. Read more

By Dan Cash Design • Do It Yourself • General Information • Home Entertainment • Older People • Tips and Tricks • WiFi • • • 0 Comments

Smart Cooking Appliances Are Hotting Up! What’s In The Connected Kitchen For You?

smart kitchen wifi connectedWe know that Smart tech is going to find a really practical home in the kitchen. Find all your recipes, preheat the oven, re-order and do the shopping, turn the lights on so you can see what you’re doing. You can even recalculate measurements automatically if you’re low on one thing or want to make enough to feed an army when the recipe gives you the method for a tiny batch.

The only problem is mess.

With cake mix flying all over the place when you turn the mixer on, gravy dripping from your fingers and water getting everywhere when you try to clean up your tablet or Smart interface could easily get damaged, gummed up or dropped in the sink just when you’re trying to knock up a souffle.

No matter how hard you try not to touch, and you swear you’ll be careful, Murphy’s Law dictates that you’ll drop it, splash it, try to use the touchscreen controls with a spoon or otherwise do something that will in no way help to prolong the life of your devices. Read more