Month: January 2022

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

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