Managing Home Maintenance Costs

Intelligent WiFi thermostats are just one small part of the emerging smart home trends WiFi Thermostats is a subject that we want to discuss. Smart homes involve many different aspects. Security, environment control, comfort,  and control of everything in your home from your smart phone or desktop. We recently installed a new furnace and AC system with a WiFi enabled thermostat. This is an initial step towards a smart home. It is a huge improvement over the old manual system that was previously installed. It is modern and looks great. Above all it is connected to our local home WiFi system.

Smart home trends WiFi Thermostats

We can now control the homes environment from our smart phones from pretty much anywhere. As long as the in home WiFi is working and we have internet access to our smart phones we are good to go. If the WiFi goes down for some reason, access is lost from our smart phones or computer.

Using the app on our phones we are able to turn on or off the system. We can adjust the temperature in the home. We can also turn the fan on auto or always on. This capability gives us lots of flexibility to control our homes environment. It also tells us what the current humidity is in the home.

Sometime in the future we will integrate the thermostat with other smart home capabilities. We will do this when it makes sense from an economic perspective. The WiFi thermostat was added simply because we were upgrading our AC and furnace, so we decided to upgrade the thermostat at the same time. We also have a remote camera system that is also connected and allows us to visually check on our home when we are away.

A good deal for us and a practical smart home technology.

If you plan to stay in your home after retirement home remodeling for aging in place should be strongly considered. If you plan to move at some point then this issue may not be that important. Think through changes to your home carefully. The picture shows wheelchair access to the oven and the sink. This is just one tiny example. There are many aspects to consider and there are resources available to provide you with ideas.

Home Remodeling for Aging in Place

Important considerations anytime you plan on remodeling and plan to age in place include the following:

• No step entry into your home at the front entrance or garage entry
• If there are steps, add a ramp and/or a railing to hold onto
• Being able to live on one floor of your home
• Light switches and outlets should be reachable at any height
• Hallways and doors should be wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs.
• All faucet handles should be lever style rather than twist type.
• You may need to remove some furniture to make it easier to get around your home.

These are general items to consider.  Any time you remodel or renovate your home there may be many other considerations to think about. Imagine yourself in a wheelchair or getting around using crutches or a cane. Evaluate all of your day-to-day activities and assess whether you could complete them without remodeling your home.

Some people will even go to the extreme and pretend they need a wheelchair to get around to test how easy your home would be to get around. Do you need to install a chair lift to help get up the stairs? Some of these features can easily be reversed if you decide to sell the home.

For more information about remodeling your home, click here.

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