Bidet
Bidet by far. <$60 USD, easy to set up, and my goodness have I never looked back. I do a lot of home improvement (and garden work) and every time I use the bidet I think, “this may be the best purchase I ever made”.
Using an enterprise grade networking equipment in the house. My setup uses PFSense (free), which runs in a virtual machine on Proxmox (free) and Ubiquiti WAPs (2 X $100). I have not heard the “Dad the wifi is broken!” call from anyone for a while.
This is a great tip. The only thing you have to watch is enterprise grade networking is usually louder and uses more power. You can replace fans to make it quieter on some equipment, but sometimes it needs the airflow. I just got a brocade icx6450-48p network switch delivered for $85, 48 poe ports and 4 sfp+ ports. You can get some great used enterprise hardware for amazing prices.
undefined> Canopyflyer
Licensing fees can be a bear too. I would avoid true Enterprise gear, such as Cisco, Alpine, etc.
Ubiquiti makes very good enterprise grade gear that is more for the home. I’d call it “Prosumer” rather than enterprise, although I’d have no reservations running a small to medium office on it. My previous home router was a Unifi Security Gateway. Until I upgraded to 300/300Mbs fiber. The USG is only good to about 120Mbs. That’s when I put PFSense on a virtual machine on my Proxmox server. Picked up a 4 port server NIC and am running it all on a Dell Precision workstation that has a Xeon processor and ECC memory. I picked the workstation up off of Dell Refurbished, with a 40% off coupon for $300. Both the WAPs in the house are Unify AC Pro’s.
Since doing the above, our internet service has been rock solid. My wife was the president of a national non-profit for two years. One year, during the lockdown, she had to run the national yearly meeting for an entire week. Thousands of users all over Zoom. She had to stream video, audio, presentations for 6 hours a day for a week. The only things I did was take one of the WAPs, put it on its own isolated subnet, which only her computer connected to and gave the PFSense VM a bit more memory (which I was thinking of doing anyway). It ran rock solid that entire week. Even with me working from home and the kids having virtual school.
My attic used to have 2 light bulbs with pull chains on them. Going up there was always a battle to feel around and find the string to the light. And it was barely lit even then.
I bought these 2 led bar lights from Costco that are motion sensing. They are super bright. Now, as soon as I pull down the attic stairs, the attic lights up like the sun. I’ve had many compliments on them from workers coming over for pest control or ac maintenance.
I’ve done a few really great ones. I got the UBolt Pro for a fancy lock I can track who accesses, auto lock, unlock remotely if needed, etc. It’s very handy for visitors because I assign their access code as the last 4 digits of their phone number so they never forget. I got Zigbee smart bulbs everywhere, but if I were to do it again, I would do smart switches in any places I didn’t need dimming or individual bulb control. Here’s another great idea: FANS. Ceiling fans, desk fans, whatever. You can connect good Vornado desk fans to a smart switch so you can get cooling on demand without getting out of bed. Lastly, an Aquasana under sink water filter. Only filter I know of that removes PFAS and PFOAs and is third party certified to do so. Good delicious safe water.
Peg board in the garage. Organizing tools is easy now