Owning your own home

Out of curiosity how do people use the Google / Alexa integration? Struggling to understand the use case.

"Alexa turn off the kitchen cameras so we can bone / turn on the bedroom camera so we can bone"

?

Do people have these cameras for a deterrent, or do you live in places that have a good police response time? I think they'd just make me super paranoid.

The neighbour's drunk handyman who fucked our drive came over (drunk) yesterday to try and explain solutions.

I think he's probably just over enthusiastic. But one certainty with alcoholics is that there is zero certainty as to how they will react or behave. Our neighbour was amazing though and went and spoke to him. But just in case he comes back I want a recording so I can escalate it before anything more serious happens.

Tl;Dr I'm already prang.

I use with an Alexa with a screen (Alexa, show me the garden camera) but the integration is pretty shit so it rarely works.

I do have a couple of cameras inside but they're turned off at the mains when I'm home.

@n3il mostly deterrent although the one time someone climbed over the garden wall I was at home so I could tell them to fuck off.

One last thing I thought of w.r.t. offset mortgages is FSCS protection - if the lender goes bust and you have more than the FSCS deposit limit in your offset savings account what happens? The answer is that you get the protected funds back and any remainder goes towards paying off the mortgage balance.

Something I didn't know existed was (and this is from YBS)

Offset Plus is an option that lets family and friends link their savings to your Offset Mortgage. The more savings your family and friend link to your mortgage, the more that you can reduce the interest payable on your loan

Might be useful for some?

I have maybe £20k worth of tools, a £5k cargo bike and a £25k motorbike in the garage. Golf club thread etc.

For me, they’re piece of mind for any insurance claims.

I have the one covering the drive, one inside the garage and one looking at the door into the garden.

They’re not to keep people from nicking anything and I also think the chance of anyone stealing something is super low, but it cost ~£200 to make it super easy to prove everything was locked and secured if something gets stolen.

Have you got the Homebase? I got a Homebase 3 for cheap(ish) recently and seems to make things a bit quicker and reliable (particularly for the battery powered camera and being able to access videos from devices that were powered off).

Yes. Homebase 3 too.

I live remotely and the nearest police are an hour away. I use it when we are away for periods so I know if someone brakes in so I can call the police to attend. It's hard to remove squatters here.
It's a cheap alarm.

£20k worth of tools

Fucking hell.

I didn't expect a Festool subscription to be cheap, but that is quite pricey.

Ha. A lot is festool but there’s a table saw, a load of garden tools, hand tools etc. they all add up.

Seems like the right amount of tooling to make a garage door

😂

#rep

It’s small, the microsd card covers weeks of always on recording before writing over the earliest one and quality is great.

Have you found any of your cards throwing up errors after long periods, or require regular formatting? I didn't realise until recently that SD cards wear out. Had to replace my decent microSD from my dashcam recently because of this.

Possible as well they've used a cement based render instead of lime, so 'more waterproof' until it eventually gets a tiny crack somewhere then it channels it down against the stonework or brick work until it gets in, because with cement it then can't evaporate back to the outside world like its supposed to. See it on chimney's and patchs all over Scotland, fixes the problem for a few months or years and then turns REAL nasty.

PSA: If you ever need home CCTV as evidence for identifying someone, having only wide angle they will mostly through it out as evidence or the 'its not me mate' line will often work in their favour. A second angle with something quite tight focal length shot at face height across what the wide angle see's is infinity more useful, less distortion, more detail even if you only catch their face for a second.
Source: Bitter experience for me and others when attempting to take evidence to court and being inadmissible, followed by non guilty plee and 'it wasn't me mate' = scot free*

*I would love to try this after robbing a bank or something as it seems to work well for others

£20k of festool is maybe you have like 6 things.

Most multi-trades will rock about £20k of stuff most of the time, with more at home for more defined tasks.
1 hour response time is the same even if you live next to a police station, decade + of massively under-funding them means there are basically none left to have, and when a unit does turn up, they aren't really interested as they are overstretched and everyone is grumpy towards them.

I’ve had no issues so far. A couple of those cameras are coming up on three years installed.

All non-volatile memories have a limit to the number of write-erase cycles before the circuit will begin to deteriorate. The cheaper the card, the fewer write-erase cycles you'll get.

But in a dashcam camera, assuming it's only being used a few times a day, you should get years and years of usage before that deterioration sets in.

I assume if you're using the Homebase then it writes to a HDD there rather than the SD card.

@BrickMan I've been tempted by these dual lens tracking cameras. https://www.eufy.com/uk/dual-camera

Wondering if anyone can please help me out work out if the quote my dad's been given is reasonable or not?

Scaffolding to reach roof quoted at £800 & has to go round the corner a little. Replace & repair natural slate verge/edge of roof current estimate £2,500 to 3000.

He thinks it's a bit rich but hasn't had anything like this done for probably 15yrs+. SW4 postcode.

Any recommendations for local roofer or similar very welcome!

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£20k of festool is maybe you have like 6 things.

Burn

But in a dashcam camera, assuming it's only being used a few times a day, you should get years and years of usage before that deterioration sets in.

Weird, I use my car at most 3 times per week, with the cam running a decent Sandisk ultra class 10 MicroSD card. New card time.

Whats the cost these days for a Solicitor when buying a new home To do all the

Depends on the price of the house sadly.