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Comment by hawkesnest | Hacker News Reader

I heard/read a similar mental "hack" about folks who fear leaving things "on" when travelling. Take pictures with your phone of all the things just before you leave. They'd be easily available, verifiable evidence that the stove is off, all the doors are closed/locked, furnace set, water shut off, and so on.

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FWIW, this is also great advice from an insurance point of view. I went on a 3 month trip and took pictures of all the appliances before leaving--mostly for peace of mind, but also because the building was fairly old and had a history of leaking pipes, faulty outlets, etc.

Sure enough, a month into the trip and my downstairs neighbor has his bathroom ceiling fall in due to a leaky drain pipe in my shower. I had photo proof that the water wasn't on or leaking and the building's insurance policy ended up renovating both of our bathrooms. Came back to a brand new rainfall shower and granite countertops.

That's cheaper than my solution, which was to make the status of the door locks, garage doors, furnace, etc, all verifiable via home automation. And with backups for some of them, like auto-closing garage doors. I used to have a problem where I'd get a half mile from home and have to turn around and verify the garage doors were in fact closed. Never once did I return to find them open. But now I can just pull it up on the phone.

Pictures is a cheaper way of accomplishing that, not a bad idea.

The pictures don’t work with all ocd. Often times I would worry that I did the thing that couldn’t happen (open door, whatever) AFTER the picture. So I’d videotape the situation and myself walking away. It got silly. I really hate this condition.

Just recently went through my phone and spent an hour deleting all the photos I took of appliances, etc. I had taken during the height of my OCD. It must have been hundreds of pictures.

I had to upgrade to a bigger cloud tier. lol. So insane!

level 2 of that game, tho':

"Is the list I made to know what to take pictures of complete? Did I really take pictures of everything? What about that thing I'm not remembering right now and wasn't on the list but I'm pretty sure I didn't turn it off, either ..."

Sunflower Labs https://www.sunflower-labs.com/ and Ring will have products for you. The latter is only $250 and you can stick a drone at home you can look through.

I think you could also just stick one of the Amazon Echo Shows that has Drop-in or Auto-Answer or whatever (the Google Nests don't, disappointingly).

you can stick a drone at home you can look through.

Is the Amazon home drone a real product, or was that just a CGI demo?

So far, non existent.

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