sup peeps, Over reviewing the water cooler and the diverse wealth of knowledge that is in here it got me thinking about what the most cost saving Device anyone may have in their home might be. I had a friend reach out to me today asking for my contact for a professional I have that does my insulation which has brought my house down to about a third of what the average family spends on their heating and cooling costs throughout the year. And for some reason it got me thinking about the lovely path of adventure that got me here. one of the initial things that I had spoke to someone at wYze About if I were to have my wish of any device I could was to have individual room sensors for temperature, This was many many moon ago and I can’t say that I was the impetus behind this because even being a maven sadly we don’t always get what we want, but enough of our fellow community requested it and lo and behold we were blessed with that particular item being available. in seeing the different spectrum of temperatures that I had across different rooms in my home It was oddly apparent that I had some heating and cooling issues going on, and this was only a couple of years after buying this house. So being the nerd that I am and having the ability to now monitor rooms I bought a laser thermometer. And it quickly hit me that this only monitors that single tiny point and gives me an idea of what the temperature is but doesn’t show me exactly where the issue is where I’m losing or gaining heat from depending on the season. I worked some overtime and invested in a thermal Imaging Camera. I will say that that although expensive at the time was definitely one of the best investments I have made. It has led to me discovering that a lot of the walls in my very old home had no insulation at all, a lot of my windows had drafts leaks and other issues and have since been replaced, I’ve also even taken the step to turn a mulching leaf blower into a insulation injector via a little bit of extra money tubing and motivation. And here I thought buying a Nest thermostat ( years before Wyze released one although I now use a Wyze thermo in my garage) Would save me an insane amount of money just by only heating or cooling the house when I’m home. How little I knew. And thus leads me to the question proposed here in What has saved you the most money in your tech adventure? I undoubtedly would say that it has been my Thermographic imaging camera giving me the ability to find issues and fix them quickly, but as I recently invested in a device to plug electronics into just out of sheer curiosity as to how much exactly they cost over a set time it got me thinking about how diverse our community is and how wide the knowledge base is. I simply had to pose this question to everyone. And if anyone’s wondering about the thermal imaging gun, it was recently brought to my attention that it was just made public in the last two months or so that although I spent a lot of money on this particular type of gun, Harbor Freight now offers the same type of thermal imaging device for only $200.. Just in case anyone else wants to step down that path and give it a shot although I can’t speak to this particular device’s quality as I have not used this one but in the amount of years I’ve had my imager it is understandable that costs would have had come down quite a bit. harbor freight thermal imager
What are you guys saving money on that I might be able to look into I recently uploaded all of my utility bills my natural gas bills as well as the previous temperature ranges for my area into notebook LM just to find things such as anomalies and found different rate changes and found exactly when I had my insulation redone. Always looking to save more money so I can buy more tech toys.
If you haven’t looked into them yet, you might look into some of the various Home Energy Monitors that use Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring with CT clamps that clip around the main power wires (mains) inside your breaker box. It then uses electrical fingerprinting with Machine Learning (NILM): Basically, the AI analyzes the “noise” on your electrical lines. When it sees a specific spike or wave pattern, it cross-references it with a massive database of known appliance signatures to identify what just turned on. Then it knows what devices are used in the house and for how long they were on and during what times and it can even warn you like if someone accidentally left a curling iron plugged in and turned on for too long… Both to prevent your house burning down and to save electricity. You can even train lots of them how to recognize your devices. Then it can give you charts about what you’re wasting all your electricity on and how you can save on your power bill.
There is a similar option for water called Droplet that you clamp over the top of your main water line and it sends ultra sonic waves through the pipe to monitor the water flow in your whole house. Then you train it to detect what water looks like from each source (faucets, toilet flush, shower, etc) and it tracks those things and even warms you if there is a leak (small leak or burst pipe) based on the water flow patterns.
It will track how much water you’re using each day, week, month, year compared to the previous periods and what sources are using how much water.
I think those are pretty ingenious things that can help you save money on electricity and water if you actually use them to analyze where all your waste is coming from… Figure out it’s your kids, and issue eviction notices to save money. Just kidding.
I have a Ecowitt Weather Station. I bought 2 extra indoor sensors to monitor different areas of my house. Adjustting my manual HoneyWell thermostat based on what I am seeing on my indoor sensors I believe helps my to save energy and money.
you are kidding me!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? we are on the same team and I had no ideas about those things!!! im glad I got my insulation done because it apparently has been quite cold under this rock!!! you may or may not be getting a message from me thank you thank you thank you for the tip. this is just the type of information I was looking for but far beyond what I thought I might learn! man I need to stop picking up on call!
This reminds me of my mom’s first day of retirement. Her dog had left fæces throughout several rooms in the house that morning, so she spent the first part of the day cleaning that up. Afterward, if anyone asked how she was enjoying retirement, she could say that the first day was y.
I don’t have any particular gadget to recommend, but the things @carverofchoice mentioned about monitoring water and electricity make me think of the Ting device. That’s not really an ongoing money saving thing but more of a potential early warning system for possible electrical problems.
I don’t know what you’re referencing and I’m lucky I don’t know what you’re referencing because there’s no way to edit a post and there’s no way I would have gone back and fixed what voice to text would have potentially messed up and for anyone else reading this, this is light razzing between the mavens lol
ting is one I was also unfamiliar with and something I’m definitely going to look into although its usage kind of confuses me. And I say this as someone who had a son who decided that he wanted to run out of Electro outlets and plug a space heater into a power bar And when I got off duty that night I decided to check in with my son and pop my head into his room and when I realized that the light was off on that particular outlet because I had installed one of those type of outlets it set a red flag, lo and behold I got insanely lucky that my son did not burn the house down plugging a space heater into a power strip and he melted the wires all the way up into the ceiling light. But on an upside, I guarantee that that is something that he will never forget as I and many of my friends ingrained him for years down the road. He also got to assist with the repairers. I’ve never had a house fire and I’ve never been a firefighter but as a welder I catch on fire quite a bit probably more than I should And let’s just say that one caught me off guard and scared me quite a bit period from what I see on that ping device If he was still young I would definitely buy into that! I may even look into their stock in the next week or so if they are publicly traded!
While both obvious and unpopular, I would be remiss if I didn’t say that one thing that saves me an insane amount of money is using AI.
I can do so many things now that I was previously too ignorant or insecure to do on my own. Including technical stuff like complicated automations in YAML, or learning to do self hosting of docker containers or virtual machines. As well as projects around the house that I never knew how to do before and previously would have paid somebody to do for me. Now I can do them myself. Saves me an insane amount of money and makes me insanely more productive at the same time because I don’t push things off simply because I don’t want to spend money paying someone else to do something.
I know it’s a big fad to hate on AI, but my goodness is it the best cost saving and productivity boosting thing if you know how to use it right. You can figure out how to do almost anything now. It easily saves me thousands of dollars a year, let alone time and getting more done and having the confidence to be able to figure out anything. Even just to bounce ideas off it or have it play devil’s advocate with me. Knowing how to use AI effectively has been a Freaking invaluable skill that makes me feel almost superhuman sometimes in a way that I have increased freedom and independence, critical thinking tools & problem solving. There are a lot of things I normally would have just thrown away, but with AI I’m able to dissect and fix a lot of things instead of have to buy new ones or pay someone to help. It’s empowering and probably saves me more money than any other “tool” or device I own.
Sometimes this gets over-looked, but make sure you have LED bulbs in all your fixtures. This will reduce your energy use if you still have some incandescent bulbs. I moved to LED several years ago when LEDs were not this inexpensive.
I’m with you there for sure I remember being one of the first people that I had in my circle to have Leds in the home, back when they were exposed and you could actually see the diode itself. I remember I bought them from my momma’s house and she said yeah they’re ugly And I argued about their cost because I was importing them from China at that point, but nonetheless, she still has those Leds working some of them are the ugly ones that have exposed diodes but they are working wonderfully. And it’s been roughly 15 years
That’s kinda scary about wires melting up as far as they did. What’d you have installed that stopped it from getting worse? GFCI, maybe? In any case, that’s cool that your son assisted with the repairs. I think that’s a good lesson.
So far all I’ve seen from the Ting is reports of when it’s offline and that the electrical flow it’s monitoring is apparently normal. The app also shows reports of power outages that the company monitors, and apparently you can get that free in the app even if you don’t have the device. If it does what they say it does, then I’m not surprised that some insurance companies offer these to customers.
Solar panels, batteries and inverter. I have a roof top system and a ground mount system. Summer time and I get free power. I switched to Time of Use billing and am reducing my monthly power bill by moving consumption out of the peak rate period (5pm to 9pm).
I recently uploaded all of my utility bills my natural gas bills as well as the previous temperature ranges for my area into notebook LM just to find things such as anomalies and found different rate changes and found exactly when I had my insulation redone. Always looking to save more money so I can buy more tech toys.
Just kidding.
thank you thank you thank you for the tip. this is just the type of information I was looking for but far beyond what I thought I might learn! man I need to stop picking up on call!
y. 
Got to scrape that state right off your shoes. 
