smart house hardware?
So, I'm watching my in law's house while they are out of town (they go to Hawaii for about 3 weeks each January) The house has radiant heating, but the house is about 100 years old, while the system is regularly maintained and pretty well up to date it still has problems. The punch line being that the big problems happen during that three week window while I am responsible for the house.
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Last year the system froze and I caught as the pipes froze.
This year I caught it after the system froze, at least in one zone and this evening when I came over I found that a pipe in the crawl space was leaking a lot of very hot water...
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So, now I am turning to AI asking for advice. Has anybody put together a Smart House system based on their Mac?
What I would like to suggest to my Father In Law would be a Thermostat that can be wired into his iMac, then relay real time data about the house to either his MobileMe account, or to another website. A nice feature would be to set parameters where it would email an alert when those parameters were tripped (IE, the ambient temp in the house is too low, or even monitor the radiator itself for when pipes are freezing!)
The house has two separate thermostats running three or four different zones of the house. My In-Laws have enough money that they can spend a fair bit of cash without too much moaning.
The system would have to tie into an White iMac, 2.16 Core 2 Duo, running 10.4.11 (I will probably convince the 10.6 upgrade when it comes available)
Are there any places online that give advice that is geared toward the Mac? Any pieces of hardware that are ideal for this? Experiences with this type of system?
Thanks in advance for any help in this area!
--
Last year the system froze and I caught as the pipes froze.
This year I caught it after the system froze, at least in one zone and this evening when I came over I found that a pipe in the crawl space was leaking a lot of very hot water...
--
So, now I am turning to AI asking for advice. Has anybody put together a Smart House system based on their Mac?
What I would like to suggest to my Father In Law would be a Thermostat that can be wired into his iMac, then relay real time data about the house to either his MobileMe account, or to another website. A nice feature would be to set parameters where it would email an alert when those parameters were tripped (IE, the ambient temp in the house is too low, or even monitor the radiator itself for when pipes are freezing!)
The house has two separate thermostats running three or four different zones of the house. My In-Laws have enough money that they can spend a fair bit of cash without too much moaning.
The system would have to tie into an White iMac, 2.16 Core 2 Duo, running 10.4.11 (I will probably convince the 10.6 upgrade when it comes available)
Are there any places online that give advice that is geared toward the Mac? Any pieces of hardware that are ideal for this? Experiences with this type of system?
Thanks in advance for any help in this area!