New East Texas Pool Build- Part 2

Jump to latest Follow Reply
Status
Not open for further replies.
It was -15 (Yes, MINUS 15!) here night before last here in central Pennsylvania! I have been looking at all the pool builds I missed the past few months, dreaming of warmer times! Today was much warmer, at 18 degrees, lol. Your build is very interesting, Ken. Thanks for sharing!
 
One word, wow!
It looks GREAT! I think it's because most of the other shots have been quite close up to specific areas and this allows you to see the whole pool house in all it's glory. Plus the lighting really sets it off.
 
Installed my first 3 Wemo WiFi Light Switches tonight. We are going to install three in the pool house. So I am putting some in the house too so that we can control the outside lights and put them on timers. Here is what 2 of them look like-

 
The app is pretty easy to use. I have already set the three lights outside the garage to come on at 5:30 pm and to turn off at 10 pm-

689fdf1d887125c8d2d17f751d918813.jpg
 
That looks pretty cool. We have a Control4 system in our house, which controls (almost) all the lights as well as audio and video (it can do locks, hvac and other stuff too, but we don't have that integrated right now -- we do have Nest thermostats which we love). We're pretty happy with it. The interface isn't Apple-quality, but it's usable.

We have lots of fun things programmed, like a "movie" mode: double-click down on the light switch in the media room, and all the lights dim. Hit "play" (on the blu-ray player, TiVo, appletv, etc.) and the lights turn the rest of the way off. Hit "pause" and the lights come up enough to find your way to the bathroom or kitchen (all the lights between the media room and those rooms come up). Hit "stop" or turn the tv off, and the lights slowly come all the way up. Or when we come home from being out at night, hitting the light switch just inside the door turns on several sets of lights so we never walk into a dark house. And we can adjust it all for our phones even when we're away from the house. It's not life changing, but it's kinda fun :)
 

Enjoying this content?

Support TFP with a donation.

Give Support
Wow it is really getting there, so now for the big question, after this saga are you going to invite us all over for the big pool inauguration party in a couple of more months when warm weather arrives?

Ike
 
Ken, they are showing some real progress. When is the weather going to let up so they can finish the pool and get the water flowing? I hope your planning on doing a video that you will post for all to see

:shark:
 
sharding,
Listening to your description of your Control4 System has my mouth watering. I am not even attempting to do anything like that. I would just like to turn on the outside lights on a schedule and be able to turn off the lights in the pool house without going out there every time one of the kids leaves them on.
 
During the middle of the night I had a light bulb come on (no it was not controlled by a Wemo Switch) and I went back and looked at the pictures again and it appeared that there was water going to a drain. So of course I had to go see and sure enough we have running water in the pool house. So it looks like they got the pool house connected to water and sewer yesterday. We still have plumbing to do, but we have water!
 
I played with the WeMo Light Switches in the house last night. They are really easy to install. I am a real tech geek, but I have always been a little afraid of electricity. I think something must have happened when I was a kid. I do not remember what exactly happened. But from a child's perspective I remember a "fist" coming out of an electrical socket and hitting me as hard as it could. It's weird but I can still see it in my head (even though it was 45 years ago or more). Anyway enough with the scary electrical fist stories. I was able to install the first switch, set it up, get it running, redo it to make it look better (I know OCD problem) and then somehow shut it down and lock it so that it would not work at all in about 45 minutes. It probably took me that long to figure out how to unlock the thing and get it back on. In case you were wondering, holding down the switch for 30 seconds does not reset it, but instead, turns the wifi off. You have to do the same thing to get it back on.

The first thing the switch will want to do is update firmware. I let the first one do it. The next two, I told them to wait thinking that they would all upgrade at the same time if I waited until the end. But no, it is an individual thing. So go ahead and do it after each switch.

Also, I think the firmware may have outpaced the documentation. The documentation makes it appear that you can send texts to the light to turn them on and off, but have no direct connection to the switch without a wifi connection. However, I found that if you linked the lights to the online IFTTT service, then you can control each light through the cell phone without any wifi while out of the house. I am sure that someone walking past our house last night probably thought we had a short or something because I kept just turning the outside lights on and off from the couch (some with wifi on and some with wifi on my phone turned off, then with the wifi on again but on a different network). Then I had to repeat the whole process with my iPad. You get the picture. This morning I was in the garage turning off the wifi on my cell phone and watching the lights outside the garage go on and off at my command. Fun toy.
 
I was out of town yesterday at a meeting. During the drive and before the meeting started, I figured out how to do the following: 1. set up an app so that when my cell phone gets within a certain distance from my house, the garage lights come on; 2. send a text to a certain number saying #on and the lights come on and sending another text saying #off and you know the rest. So I would switch between apps. I would send a text and then switch apps to watch the lights turn on and/or off. I can just imagine one or more of my neighbors talking about whether they should tell us about the short we have in our outside lights. When I got home last night I added the last switch I had (other than the three set aside for the pool house) to the lights outside the front door.
 

Enjoying this content?

Support TFP with a donation.

Give Support
Status
Not open for further replies.
Thread Status
Hello , This thread has been inactive for over 60 days. New postings here are unlikely to be seen or responded to by other members. For better visibility, consider Starting A New Thread.
Top Bottom
Back
Jump to latest Follow Reply