With our student getting ready to return home it was time to setup the den upstairs. The timing couldn’t have been better because BenQ got in touch and asked us if we’d like to add one of their portable projectors to the Automated Home.

What Is It?

Described as the ‘World’s First 2.1CH Audio Portable Projector’, the GV30 is an all-in-one projector with sound, approximately 12cm x 20cm x 2cm and weighing in at 1.6 kg. It uses a DLP chip to produce its native 720p image (1280 x 720) and can handle up to a 4K UHD input (3840 x 2160).

With brightness rated at 300 ANSI Lumens, you need a dark room to get the most from the GV30. BenQ quote the lifetime of the LED light source as 20,000 in normal mode. To put that in real world terms, if you used the projector for 5 hours

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Some people are surprised to hear that we illuminate our entire pool area using nothing but solar LED landscape lights. As in: the sun provides free evening ambiance with zero effort on our part. Nothing has to be plugged in. Our electric bill feels zero impact from softly illuminating this entire area of our house. So today I wanted to share the 3 solar products we use in case you want to give your own outdoor space a literal glow-up.

Technically we have a porch light and in-pool lights too, all of which use traditional electricity, but we almost never turn them on. Honestly, they’re a little blinding and we like a soft glow that doesn’t block out our view of the stars. Instead, day-to-day (or night-to-night?) we just rely on our solar-powered LED lighting for that oh so charming come-hither glow.

I used to think solar-powered landscape lighting was

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This post comes to you from deep in a pile of paint charts. Although we never really believed this sale would happen until the week it did, I had booked the decorator and joiner way back in March on the off-chance that we might need him towards the end of the year. He told us he would be ready in November (he has a wall planner and just writes people down in the order they approach him) then rang last week to say one client had dropped out and we were next. And so he arrives in a couple of weeks. And while I have all the joinery for the bedrooms planned and accurately plotted on graph paper I haven’t quite thought through the colour schemes.

kitchen design by Karen Knox of Making Spaces

kitchen design by Karen Knox of Making Spaces

It also turns out that the windows and radiators all need replacing. And the silver grey

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