Smart Home Perfected

If you want a smart home with no Alexa in it, you are not alone, and you are not stuck. Plenty of people want lights that come on at sunset and a lock they can check from work, without an Amazon microphone sitting in the living room waiting for its wake word. The good news is that voice control was always the optional layer. Almost everything people actually like about a smar...

Thermostat wire colors follow a convention that almost holds, which is exactly what makes them dangerous to trust. Pull an old thermostat off the wall and you will usually find red, white, yellow and green, and most of the time those do what you expect. But the colors were chosen by whoever installed the system, not by a standards body, and a green wire doing a yellow wire's ...

A furnace not turning on in the first cold week of the season is one of the most common heating problems there is, and the majority of cases never involve the furnace itself. The thermostat failed to send the call for heat, a safety switch is doing its job quietly, or a setting changed over the summer without anyone noticing. There is one sixty second test that tells you whic...

When your TV keeps restarting on its own, shutting down and booting back through the logo screen without anyone touching the remote, the cause is almost always one of three things. Something plugged into the TV is telling it to restart, the TV is protecting itself from bad power or heat, or its software is stuck in a loop. Those three need completely different fixes, and ther...

TV screen flickering comes down to three suspects, and one ten second test tells you which one you are dealing with. The picture is being fed something unstable by the source, the panel is not getting clean steady power, or the display hardware itself is starting to fail. Those three causes need completely different fixes, and people waste whole evenings swapping cables on a ...