I’m curious, what’s an item, tool, or purchase you own that you feel has completely justified its cost over time? Could be anything from a gadget to a piece of furniture or even software. What made it worth it for you?
50ft electric plumbing snake. Cost $60 and saved me $200+ bill first time I used it. I’ve used it for friends and family as well, making its value well over 10x in savings, not just my own.
Hair clipper. Paid for itself in two uses. It’s been years.
House insulation.
I live in Australia where the minimum insulation required by law is a long way below inadequate, and many cheap contractors go below the minimum because it’s so hard to prosecute them.
I already had solar and a house battery, so the next obvious step was replacing the insulation. With my already very low electricity bills I cant say that it literally paid for itself (although it would have without the solar and battery), but it has made the house so much more comfortable. On some summer days, the AC would be using 7kW and barely keeping the inside temperature down to 30°C/85°F. Now it uses 3-5kW and the whole house stays comfortable.
Also, finding and patching the massive gaps from the previous “landlord special” house extension made a huge difference to the temperature of that room, and explained how lizards had managed to get inside.
Put 11.6 KW of solar on the roof. I’ll hit break even next year. Should have 15-20 years left of use.
About 3 years I bought a mechanic set of ratchets and wrenches and some other tools for changing my own oil and some other auto repairs. All in I spent about $500. In July, I changed my own brakes and rotors and 2 vehicles I own. On that job alone I saved over $1000 dollars. Not to mention all the times I changed my oil. I also changed my spark plugs on one of my cars and found a gasket leak that I also fixed which was probably another $500.
Best investment of my life.
I guess my bike? Have saved loads of money on bus tickets and it’s much more reliable too.
Sewing machine pays for itself quite quickly as paying a tailor to repair your clothes is like 1/3 the cost of a brand new sewing machine, so just repair like 3 items of clothing to get your money back.
I got a hot air rework station with a soldering iron many years ago.
The things I’ve repaired with it are so numerous, I cannot even recount them all, but here are a few:
- an assortment of gaming controllers
- a ghetto blaster from the 1970’s
- a few gaming consoles (Xbox 360, PS3 “Fat Lady”)
- retro technology (at least two 3Dfx Voodoo’s and a rare Abit motherboard)
- a full-metal eBook Reader (Sony PRS-505) that will probably survive an atomic fallout
- a Panasonic broadcasting camera from the 1990’s (because it looked cool and I wanted it to work)
- a few LCD monitors
Even though some of that work was just replacing old capacitors, I have saved so much money by buying “broken” stuff and fixing it up. No regrets. Over the years, I paired the station with a hotplate and a solder sucker and now I could probably open up an electronics repair shop. But I mostly do these repairs for fun. Fixing things calms my mind and soothes my soul.
I love both my eBook reader (that 505 won’t die) and my PS3 (which could really use a reflow).
How difficult would you say reflowing one of the OG 60GB models is?
You need to get in touch with your local Repair Café! It’s sounds like you would make a perfect addition. :)
Can you post a gear list? I got an iron a while ago and some crappy Amazon sucker tubes but I really think I’m missing some stuff because I’m either missing stuff or using crappy solder. I like to try and just take components off boards for practice but even that is a huge struggle. I’ve fixed a couple things but it’s rough work for sure.
I know it’s probably a skill issue, but I think some other tools might make certain things a bit easier as well, but without someone I know to ask questions I don’t want to just buy some random stuff.
Heat the metal, heat the PCB a little bit, then solder. I’m terrible at soldering and my friend just taught me that trick.
- Smart Lighting - My mum replaced most the lightblub in our house with Philips Hue. Nearly decade on and still using them which as an Autistic, I love that I can tweak the lighting to however I want from an app and compare to regular lightbulbs, it doesn’t give me as much sensory nightmare as I find some of the lighting to be really harsh and distracting.
- Noise-cancelling Headphones - Often use it if I’m in sensory overload, walking as I tend to listen to music as well as being on the bus to distract myself which otherwise, I start panicking how full the bus is.
- Desktop DAC & Bookshelf Speakers - Always find changing volume on OS itself to not be perfect as it too low or high for my liking. I can simply tweak the volume knob of my Desktop DAC to get the volume just right. Also great way to listen to music
A lot of my work gear is sort of pricey but it keeps me safe and working. Usually pays itself off within a month or two and will last at least a few years.
My motorcycle has paid for itself many times over in terms of the enjoyment I get out of riding it. It’s something I can recommend to anyone, and lets you see the world in a way most people never will.
What are your monthly costs? Does seem fun
Something like 1500/yr for insurance, probably 30/month for gas, assuming I don’t take a long trip.
A local NAS for storing all my files, especially if you consider all the value I deprived from Google and Microsoft by not engaging with their cloud bullshit. Even if you don’t, I paid like $500 CAD one single time for a 16 TB server hard drive and $300 for a consumer hard drive I’m using as an offline emergency backup. Meanwhile just 2 TB of Google Drive costs $139.99 CAD per year. I wasn’t able to find pricing for 16 TB but assuming it scales linearly (like if I had 8 2TB accounts since Google seemingly doesn’t offer any higher capacity for individuals), that would be $1,119.92 per year. Even factoring in the hard drive enclosure and the server itself, they’ve paid for themselves in literally half a year. That’s saying nothing of the kind of internet connection I would need to match the read speed of a mechanical hard drive on the local network. I could literally upgrade my entire house to 10 gigabit with the money I saved.
Do you have any guide suggestions I can use to get it setup. Seems like a great thing overall
I mostly just cobbled my setup together, but the main parts are a mini PC to act as a server and a USB 3 multi-bay hard drive enclosure. I bought one brand new NAS grade hard drive to store the things I can’t afford to lose, and repurposed any decently sized old hard drives I had lying around for storing stuff that already exist on the internet and that I don’t really mind losing if the hard drive dies. I also have an M.2 SSD for fast storage of files I’m actively using.
The specs of the server doesn’t matter that much for a NAS, but my server is pretty beefy by mini PC standards because it handles all my home server related needs, not just as a NAS. If you’re only using it as a NAS with maybe a PiHole (ad blocking DNS server) instance or similar in the future, you can can either get a lower end (or refurbished) mini PC or a higher end single board computer like a Raspberry Pi 5, depending on what’s cheaper at the moment.
I’m running Fedora Server on it with LUKS encrypted Btrfs volumes on each drive. After each bootup I have to SSH into the server and run a bash script I wrote, where I’ll enter my password and let it unlock and mount each drive. It’s clunky but I trust it more than the TPM which is proprietary. If you don’t care about encryption, you can just put a regular filesystem on your choice on the drives, and configure Linux to mount each drive on bootup by adding them to /etc/fstab.
For accessing the NAS, I can currently only do so from the local network which suits my needs, but in the future I could also set up a VPN server that I can tunnel into from the internet to access. I use Linux for all my personal computers so this probably won’t be applicable to most people, but I mount the NAS as an SSHFS volume and simlink folders I want to offload to the server. I chose SSHFS mainly because it’s an easy way to have an encrypted link to a network share that’s already supported by default. I wanted an encrypted protocol since it would defeat the purpose of encrypting the drives if the data just goes over the network with no encryption, but again, if you don’t care about encryption you can just use NFS or SMB (more likely SMB if you use Windows, since that’s what it supports natively). This also means that my work computer, which runs Windows, can’t even see the network share because it has no SSH access to my server and even if it did, Windows doesn’t support SSHFS anyway.
Last but definitely not least, I have one consumer grade hard drive with enough space to backup my main server hard drive and some extra, in a basic USB C enclosure. Every month I plug it in and sync the server drives over to it. This means if the server’s main hard drive dies, I accidentally rm -rf the server, I get one of the super rare Linux ransomwares, or my dog knocks the drive enclosure down, I don’t lose all my data.
This is probably way overkill in some ways and desperately deficient in others. For anyone else I’d definitely recommend picking a ready made open source NAS OS, which will usually have excellent and beginner friendly community made documentation, and support for Windows clients through SMB. I can’t recommend one myself because I don’t use them, but I’m sure others can.
I’m using an old thinkpad with Ubuntu Server as the OS. Almost any OS will do, but Ubuntu server has a single button to install docker during the OS install, so it’s easy.
I’m using docker compose instead of docker so that I can look at and update any scripts, and don’t have to remember anything. For the file sharing, I’m currently upgrading from Samba to Copyparty - the best software I have seen in a long time.
I’m also using WireGuard and Syncthing to duplicate the storage to an identical laptop in a family member’s house, rsync for weekly backups, and calendar reminders to do a monthly offline backup (automated with a script except for remembering to connect and disconnect the external drive).
I doubt you need all of this, but an old laptop with docker has so many options that you might start adding more stuff just because you can. I’ve also added HomeAssistant, Immich, and even a Factorio server to the same laptop using docker.
My solar panels have. Literally.
Setting up a fully automated system to download, track and organise … eh … Linux distributions …onto a NAS under the stairs. I used to subscribe to a bunch of services that would … eh … provide access to all sorts of … eh … Linux distributions … for a flat monthly fee, but I realised that I often was only really interested in one or two specific Linux distribution so I really didn’t need to pay for these services.
Now I just download the … eh … Linux distributions that I actually want to install. It also prevents my kids from … eh … endlessly installing different Linux distributions. Not really a productive use of time.
Nice set up! You could easily use it to pirate and watch movies too.
Bought a sunrise alarn clock then felt some benefits of waking up easier
Then used it with combination of opening curtains and that energized me a lot
Now thinking the final evolution will be to have a curtain setup that auto-opens at the set time, and changeable when needed. Not sure yet if anything already exists product-wise for that but that’s something that will very likely help you a lot too (Hopefully you have a window next to your bed)
It is super underrated waking up millions times easier via the sun (Pair with consistent sleep schedule of when you sleep and wake)
They absolutely make “smart” curtains rods.
My sleep schedule doesn’t always have me needing to wake up after sunrise, so I instead have two of those umbrella-looking photography lamps at each side of the foot of the bed. Works great, but hard to convince dates I’m not filming them, so sometimes I have to remove them.
Which sunrise alarm clock have you been using? Been looking for one but can’t find/choose a good one.
a pair of PSB 50 mkII loudspeakers. I paid ~$650 Cdn for them back in 1992, and still have them cranking from my office/gaming PC.
