Wally: a home sensing solution | Hacker News Reader

Wally: a home sensing solution

wally-home.com

8 pointsundo14 comments

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. You would need a heck of a lot of sensors to cover all of the places where there could be potential problems which would cost hundreds of dollars. Additionally, these sensors need to be replaced roughly every 7 years while during this time maybe 1 spot in a home will be problematic and be sensed with this system if it's even working at all. If this sensor senses a problem, significant damage is most likely already done. Any cost savings of decreased home damages are outweighed by the cost of these sensors. Instead of buying a bunch of sensors, it would much much more sense to have a thorough home inspection conducted. Also, if there is a moisture problem, do these sensitive electronics even remain intact?

Seems like a great idea, but I couldn't help but find this http://i.imgur.com/h7DjXen.png picture to be really awkward.

What's going on with her legs?

This is like the Nest and the Nest-Smoke Detector - a beautiful solution with some high tech wizardry, but I could solve the problem just as easily by spending 10% of their solution. You can buy a 6-pack of devices on Amazon that make a noise like a smoke alarm when it detects water for $30.

And they would like look a six-pack of fugly cheap plastic thingies. And you have to chain them up yourself. And they wouldn't talk to an integrated app.

300 buckadingdongs for 6 sensors, a hub and an app seems quite reasonable to me. This would be especially useful for a landlord to unobtrusively monitor properties.

This is an area of huge interest to some insurance companies, however one of their biggest problems are water leaks within walls that take weeks to build up and cost insurances millions. If anyone can find a cost effective way to solve that problem, the potential would be huge.

Couldn't you just use one of these things, but instead of batteries plug right into the wall?

Lots of nice pictures of why to get it (your kids, your beautiful home, etc) - pulling heart strings can be effective. However, the website didn't make the technology very clear which is immediately suspicious in my book - place a magic box somewhere in your home and get notifications if something goes wrong (water or temperature related). The dashboard and interface also looks nice, but the product seems to give the false implication that with a bunch of these you'll have something of a smart-home. I definitely believe that smart-home type products are usually a good investment, and with this you may be one (small) step closer. However, i'm of thinking that most homeowners are very familiar with the state of their home - not that there can't be surprises - but for 300$ the piece of mind may not be worth the carelessness that comes with it (thinking all is well so i don't need to check).

Clicking "how does it work" and scrolling down has a link to a paper published in ubicomp 2010 detailing the CMOS chip and modulation. They seem pretty open about the technology to me.

oh must have missed it then. My bad.

Can i stick the sensor to the wall or somewhere, i think the sensor better has some kind of suction

Unless they're using some kind of new technology to detect water it seems like the sensor needs to be where the unwanted water will be. And that's on the floor.

Our homes are different from what people build at the US, but at least here, leaking water is normally located at the walls. You'll have plenty of evidence of a leakage (like destroyed painting and bad smell) much before it reaches the floor.

Plus the huge dark stain on the ceiling/wall...

This sensor doesn't seem to do any extraordinary detection like that. It's an ordinary RH/Temp/H20 contact sensor.

Now if the sensor could watch the walls for far-infrared discoloration to show unseen leaks that would be useful in your part of the world, but that's going to be a ways off.

http://smokedamagemichigan.com/water_damage.htm

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