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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • It’s a balance, they might not know exactly what the job would entail until they send someone to look, and labour could double the price if it’s something ridiculous.

    However, they absolutely should be able to give a ballpark, and it drives me up the wall, especially when I’ve given enough details for them to do so.
    I hate it.
    If you won’t even tell me how many zeroes your service is going to cost, there is an absurdly high change you’re going to be wasting your engineer’s time doing a visit.

    “How much for a 12000 BTU on the ground floor with electrical already run?”
    “Well sir, we can’t give an accurate number yet, as we need to send someone out”
    “Not even a ballpark?” “I’m afraid not sir”

    Which led me to investigating what I could do myself…Turns out, they now make self-install units for about £600.
    Or Costco sell a better brand one including fitting for £1500.



  • GreatAlbatross@feddit.uktoADHD memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comNothing but truth
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    5 months ago

    Same with certain home improvement companies that hope once you’re on the line, they can close the sale there and then.
    I swear they must make all their money off people who don’t want to think about what the job involves, and just hand over a chequebook.

    The water softener from Costco is £500, the one from ScrewFix is £400, but I’m curious how much the one from NameBrand is.
    NameBrand website “Well, it can vary a lot depending on how complicated…”
    Forum posts: “£2k including fitting and a year’s salt, £1500 for the unit”
    (Which isn’t an insane price to just have it sorted, I just hate the bollocks excuses when everyone magically still comes out around £2k)

    The physical staircase will cost me about £1000, then a few days of skilled labour for someone to fit.
    I wonder how much one of those “we’ll just handle it” companies in the back of the sunday supplement could do it for…Oh, that’s 15 times the price, wonderful.









  • You'll need to have a zigbee radio on a HomeAssistant instance (maybe possible with other software).
    And on HomeAssistant, run ZHA (or similar) with the zigbee radio.
    Sorry if that's teaching to suck eggs, just wanted to clarify.

    If you're already set up with that, it's just a case of deleting a bulb from the Hue bridge, and searching for it using the zigbee integration. Once it's deleted from Hue, it will go into pairing mode. You may need to power cycle the bulb if it does not appear in the search within 10s.

    HASS was able to support my white/ambiance bulbs and colour bulbs without any issues. In fact, it responds faster. The only downside is that they don't so much fade, as jump to a new value. The update frequency is about 2 times per second.