The Rainbird controller would then skip the watering automatically whenever the sensor sensed water.

This is good and works but does not include the smartness of today’s world.

To get smarter and skip the watering if there is a weather forecast for rain on the day of the pre-set watering schedule, you need something that can connect to local weather stations.

We bought Rachio 3 for the same purpose and my experience is that it does work in real time.

City Rebates on Smart Sprinklers

Most cities in the USA promote installing smart sprinklers (which RainBird is not) and subsidize the purchase and installation cost.

In our case, the City was paying a maximum of $75 for purchase (including installation).

The Rachio controller normally sells for about $200 in the open market but Costco and Samsclub usually run deals in winter.

We timed our Rachio 3 with 12 Zones from Costco for $100 in January. Here is the current deal from Amazon for 16 Zone version:

With the City’s subsidy, the final cost to replace our Rainbird controller with Rachio was $25.

We have saved this much on our water bill due to automatic watering schedule changes and rain forecast watering skips that Rachio does on its own.

How to Find City Rebate

Rachio has a dedicated page for finding the rebate that your city is running for installing smart sprinkler controllers.

Enter your zip code and press ‘Update’ to see the rebates available in your area through the local city water management department.

Installation

Rachio installation is pretty easy and you can do it yourself.

If you have RainBird installed, you will just need to take a picture of the existing wire connections and just plug those wires into the Rachio controller.

Rachio does not need screws. Only plugging the wire works in this smart switch.

It won’t take more than 15 minutes. Rachio also gives you access to your controller via a free smartphone app.

The Rachio app features that I tried and liked:

1. Smart scheduling means that Rachio will adjust the watering days per month automatically based on the local weather.
   • Connects to the local city weather station and skips watering on days when it is expected to rain or has rained. This is pretty useful.
   • Even though we can adjust the watering schedule manually, the best part is that it adjusts the monthly watering schedule automatically based on the season.
2. Smart Start and End times
   • Intelligent enough to start and end watering at the time of night when the evaporation is lowest to save water.
3. Cycle & Soak
   • Intelligent watering technique in a round-robin fashion to increase water absorption by the soil.
   • Water for like 3 minutes and then let the soil soak for another 3 minutes and then water again for another 2 minutes.
   • All these times are managed automatically if you select the ‘Cycle and Soak’ feature in the Rachio app.

Rainbird WiFi & Smartphone App -$$

Rainbird, on the other hand, sells the wifi connector separately easily costing about $100 extra over and above their controller.

Once you install this Rainbird WiFi module (hardware) on the RainBird Controller, you will be able to access the app on your phone.

The app is still not smart enough to connect to weather stations and automatically make decisions on skipping watering. The only benefit I found with their app is to change watering or trigger quick runs through the phone.

FAQ

The post Does Smart Sprinklers Save Water Bill? Tried Rachio with $75 City Rebate & Saved 30% on Regular bill appeared first on AM22Tech.

Multiple web hosting providers provide custom domain email services for a small fee. Even Google has a workspace option but charges a hefty $8 per month per user. Google does provide 15GB of space for each as part of the workspace account and includes Gmail, Drive, and other Google account features out of the box.

If your business only needs the email feature and that too free of cost, the best reliable option that we have tried and found to be easy to set up is Yahoo Mail.

Set up Custom Business Email – Free with Yahoo Email

Yahoo mail gives you 1 TB of space and allows you to use it with your custom domain to receive and send email automatically.

Users will send and receive the email from a custom business email address.

We will use these addresses as email addresses as an example for the setup.

#1 Create a new email address at Yahoo mail

If you already have a Yahoo email that you want to use, you can skip to the next step.

Otherwise, create a new Yahoo mail account. We have already created a new Yahoo mail address as contact.truvisa@yahoo.com.

#2 Create Cloudflare account

You may have to create a custom website account if you do not have an existing account for your custom domain here.

Use this Cloudflare guide to add a website.

#3 Create Email routing at Cloudflare

Cloudflare provides a free custom email forwarding service.

In simple words, we will receive emails sent to custom email on Cloudflare and forward them to Yahoo mail.

This means any email received on contact@truvisa.com will be forwarded to contact.truvisa@yahoo.com automatically.

1. Go to Cloudflare account->Email Routing
2. Click the ‘Routing Rules’ tab.
3. Click ‘Create Address’ under ‘Custom Addresses’.
4. Save.
5. If you are prompted by Cloudflare to add email DNS records, click yes and add them. Cloudflare will automatically add these.
6. If you are not prompted by Cloudflare to add email DNS records, then go to the next step and we will guide you on what to add.

#3.A. Verify Yahoo email address

Cloudflare will send a verification email to your Yahoo account i.e. contact.truvisa@yahoo.com

You should wait for this email and verify before going to the next step.

#4 Create Email DNS records at Cloudflare

These are important. The email forwarding will not work without these records.

Create these DNS records in your Account->DNS

#5 Set Custom Email Address at Yahoo

Visit your Yahoo mailbox -> Settings -> Mail Boxes -> Add a new email

Here, use your custom email address that you want users to see when you reply or send emails through your Yahoo mailbox.

Yahoo will send a verification email to the contact@truvisa.com email address.

This email should end up in your contact.truvisa@yahoo.com email mailbox as Cloudflare DNS will forward it to your Yahoo account.

Once you verify, you can use this Yahoo email mailbox to send and receive custom emails free of cost!

#6 Test email

Write an email from your Yahoo Email Box to anyone like your own Gmail address and select the sender as your custom business domain email.

Check your Gmail and verify the sender’s address. Here is what it should look like in Gmail:

That’s it. Enjoy the 1 TB email space for your custom domain email address.

The same setup can be done for Gmail as well but it does not allow you to use the custom sender address as easily as Yahoo does.

I will do a separate article on how to set up the custom sender with the same setup through Gmail.

Buy Custom Business Email Set Up Service

If you can’t do it yourself or want it to be done professionally, we can help you set up your custom business email quickly to work with Yahoo Mail.

We have expert developers and our turnaround time is fast once you have ordered our software services.

The post Create Free Custom Email for Your Business with Yahoo (or Gmail) appeared first on AM22Tech.

We have 5 cameras around our house too to keep the women of the house always in control of the surroundings.

4 are battery-based ring outside cameras and 1 is a wired Ring doorbell.

The pain point with battery-based cameras is the battery charging every month.

Since, we had 4, and one of them will run out of juice someday, I found myself stepping on the ladder and taking out batteries for charging almost every week. This was painful and since this task requires no skill, I wanted to automate it.

The ring is smart and hence sells solar chargers for cameras separately at a good price for a single charger.

I was very interested in installing solar chargers but the cost of each panel demotivated me.

This prompted me to try non-ring brand solar chargers which are easily half the cost of ring charges.

Wasserstein – Solar Panel (Half price of Ring – Works)

I then bought a Wasserstein – Solar Panel for Ring (2-Pack) for the same cost as a 1 Ring solar panel to just try and see if it works without hassle.

After trying these for 2 months, I went a step ahead to try the generic solar panels from Temu, which are supposedly shipped directly from China to your home in the USA.

Temu Ring Solar Charger (Cheap – AND Works)

I bought two $11 Temu solar chargers costing me a total of $22 thinking that it might be worth a try. They did work without any hassle and connected to the Ring camera.

The problem with Temu is that most products are taken off the shelf after some time. Not sure if it is only me that I am unable to find the same item again if I have to reorder after a couple of months.

I am unable to find the link for the same solar chargers that I have tried now but these look and feel pretty the same as the ones I have:

Reliability and Charging

They have all been through the harsh Texas sun, 70 miles an hour winds, hail storms, snow storms, and heavy rain.

These solar panels have now in action for more than 12 months and they have been doing their job of charging the Ring stick-up camera battery normally.

I am pretty happy with them and my whole purpose was to extract at least 12 months of usable life from unbranded solar panels to keep the smart home costs low. I think I have achieved this and you can save money too.

Let me know if you have questions about this setup.

FAQ

The post Auto Charge Ring Cameras with Temu’s Cheap Solar Panels [Smart Home] appeared first on AM22Tech.

His answers shocked me and told the true story behind the hype created by online Instagram reels.

In a nutshell, it is extremely difficult to make any meaningful revenue from YouTube Ads, Instagram sponsorships, or Twitter revenue unless you have followers in millions.

As per my understanding after talking to multiple people working hard to create online content, most of the time, they only get paid in a barter system.

A barter system means that a company will send their product as a gift, which they would expect you to promote on their channel.

In the case of the restaurant business, they will probably invite you for a free lunch and expect you to post their reels or YouTube shorts.

Social Media Career

Effort Required: HIGH

It requires a lot of effort and continuous work to find that one reel or video that goes viral.

Ravi believes that your chances of making a decent living are much better in a regular profession like a Doctor, IAS, Engineer, or a job in a Western country than in a content creation field.

There’s competition, and staying relevant means constant adaptation to trends and algorithms. The social media companies are always trying to maximize their profits by selling ads. Hence, they also look for trends or to so, create trends every day to increase engagement.

They play with user’s sentiments and that’s why you may see an extremely silly thing that is irrelevant but would be topping the trend charts.

Most content creators follow these trends and create a reel or a short by copying the trending reel. You will also notice that most trending tweets will also be copied and pasted.

Education and Skills:

If you are trying to create content within your education or a professional niche, then you have an edge.

It will be easier for you to attract followers with your knowledge in your specific field compared to non-experts.

Social media works best and pays better if you have built your brand as people are more interested in “How you did it” rather than just saying “How to do it”.

If people relate to your experience and your style of conveying things, they will follow you.

With easy access to video content creation and easy copy and paste of other content, it has become a forest out there on each media platform. That is why you see accounts looking for fresh content ideas every day to compete with others.

How Social Media Influencers Make Money?

#1 ADS

The easiest and quickest way is the ads that run on your website, YouTube video page, Twitter feed, or Instagram reels.

Please note that ads make you the least amount of money.

YouTube is known to share about 55% of ad revenue with its content creators.

#2 Sponsorships

The most money is made by influencers when they sign a one-to-one deal with brands for promotion.

That’s what you get to hear from major players who have followers of millions and are paid directly by big advertisers to promote their products.

They can then sell their services to a wider audience and may gain sponsorship deals from companies that are targeting the audience in this area.

In many cases, the direct sponsorship deals offer a cut on the revenue gained through their followers too. But, these may be reserved for very strong and big influencers like the best of the best.

#3 Selling Education Courses or Products

Many big influencers create their product lines to diversify their earnings once they have reached the top of earnings from ads and sponsorships.

The small ones may not be able to reach this level easily.

The post How Much Money Can You Earn with Content Creation Online Compared to Doctor, Engineer or Job in USA? appeared first on AM22Tech.

My Dell XPS laptop has an Intel i7 with 32GB RAM and 4GB NVidia GPU and still lagged when heavy game graphics were needed.

He is convinced that he needs a computer with a better GPU (Graphic Processing Unit).

A laptop that has a strong GPU would have cost upwards of $3000 and hence I asked him to come up with the components that we can buy and build a desktop Gaming computer ourselves.

I am sharing the best parts that he came up with to build a gaming system with 3 different configurations based on budget.

Parts needed to build a Computer

These are the individual parts that you will need to build your PC (Personal computer).

There are lots of websites that sell pre-made or pre-configured gaming computers and you can buy from them too. The benefit is that they build everything for you but then, there are limitations for not being able to upgrade them easily.

Most branded gaming system brands like Alienware or others make the motherboard not generic enough to be extendable. This means that if you need to add more RAM or change the GPU later, you may not be able to do so without changing the motherboard itself.

That’s the reason most gamers will choose to build the whole system themselves. This list is for people who are enthusiastic about DIY game systems.

Here is what you will need to build:

1. CPU – Central processing unit (like Intel i7, intel i9, or AMD Ryzen)
2. GPU – Graphics processing unit like NVidia
3. CPU Cooler – Needed to keep the computer cool. You can buy any but water/liquid CPU coolers are better but expensive.
4. Motherboard – Needed to plug/communicate all components into each other.
5. Storage Hard drive – Buying a fast SSD is better for gaming performance. If not, then you can also buy a normal 1 TB hard disk and it should be enough.
6. Computer case – A metal structure that can house all the components of a small home.
7. RAM – This memory is different than Hard disk memory. The more the better.
8. PSU – Power Supply Unit.
9. Power Cable
10. Monitor
11. Keyboard
12. Mice
13. Operating system – A software that runs the computer. Windows is most common and it is not free. Linux is free but its graphical interface is not as good as Windows.

The CPU and GPU combo is one of the most important parts of your entire PC.

It is recommended to allocate 40% to 60% of your budget towards the CPU and GPU combo, as these components are crucial for ensuring your build is reliable.

Best CPU + GPU Combo for 2024

We have nailed down our research on these components based on price and performance.

We are buying the mid-range CPU and GPU as these things get outdated in a couple of years and you will feel the need to upgrade sooner or later.

Out of these options, the Budget option usually results in a build being around $500-$1,000.

The Mid-range option will usually be from $1,000-$1,800.

And finally, the high-end build will be around $1,800+.

Common Parts

These are our picks for common Items for all configurations. You can upgrade them if you have slightly more budget but they should be enough to have a good gaming system.

#3 CPU cooler

Cooler is required as it will help reduce the heat and keep the computer system running for a longer time. It will help save energy costs too.

#4 Motherboard

#5 Storage Hard drive SSD ($55)
We are buying a 500GB SSD for the main system.

and then, we will add the 14TB external hard disk if we need extra space. This is optional and only needed if you need to record your gaming videos and then store them.

We did not want to spend much on computer housing or the case. Many gamers go for fancy-looking cases that have multiple LED lights flashing here and there. We chose to go simple and save money here.

#7 RAM

RAM is extremely important and we are adding 64 GB here.

#8 PSU – Power Supply Unit

#9 Computer Monitor

There is no limit on how much you can spend on a computer monitor. As per our choice, we will go for this Dell reliable 27-inch monitor.

Many professional gamers also buy this 49-inch Samsung Odyssey curved monitor. I have tried it in the store and it is awesome to work on but it is too expensive.

These things make sense if you have a way of making income from video games like uploading videos on YouTube or participating in pro game leagues.

Note that computer monitors lose value as quickly as a microwave loses heat. So, it would be better to stay away from high-end monitors unless you have fallen in love with them.

#10 Keyboard

Logitech keyboards are reliable and long-lasting as well as pocket-friendly. Here is what we are buying:

#11 Computer Mice / Mouse

My son has his heart set on the fancy Logitech mice even though I want to buy a cheaper one.

#12 Power Cable

These are available for $10 or less in Walmart, Target, and other similar stores.

#13 Operating system

We are buying Windows 11 as Linux is not that user-friendly when it comes to kids. Also, most games are compatible with the Windows environment automatically.

Windows license key will cost about $139 and you can download it directly from the Microsoft website.

There are many sellers on Amazon and eBay who sell Windows-licensed USB drives for $10-20. These may or may not work as these are usually the copied license keys from existing Windows systems.

Are we missing anything? Do let us know in the comments.

Where to Buy?

Amazon is probably the most reliable one. Make sure that the part you are buying is sold by ‘Amazon’ and not any third-party seller to be sure about the genuineness.

There are other platforms like PCPartPicker (Reddit link) too which offer pre-built configurations to help you with a starting point. They allow you to add memory and other things that you want to change.

If you can buy the refurbished or open-box parts, you can reduce your overall costs by about 30%.

Facebook Marketplace is a good option for buying refurbished parts as you can meet the person in your local area and test the part before buying. I do not suggest buying with shipping on FB as the possibility of fraud increases and then the struggle to get your money back is not worth it.

I don’t trust eBay as much as it is very difficult to find if the item is genuine or a fake one.

Both BestBuy and Amazon sell open-box items at a 10-20% discount and accept returns too if the part doesn’t work. I would strongly suggest buying with them to have peace of mind along with a genuine part.

NewEgg.com is another website that has good support with free shipping. I have found their prices to be very competitive.

The post Gaming Computer Set Up in 2024 – Best Value Parts to Build yourself appeared first on AM22Tech.

This will cost you about $14 per terabyte after taxes. We have ordered one and will use this drive ourselves for backups of our photos and videos and in our NAS setup. Yes, we are moving towards creating our own NAS (home-based network storage) to save cloud storage costs.

I am not sure why the price of a 14TB drive is cheaper than the 12 TB drive. You will find that a 12TB HDD or even 10TB HDD drive sells for about $250. Maybe the 14TB hard disks are not made anymore and hence Seagate is trying to sell off the leftover stock.

Whatever the reason, we are buying it and hope to have a useful life of at least 3 years. Note that we say 3 years because all hard drives have a limited life like batteries. They do fail at some point. Some fail in 1 year and others in 3-5 years. So, you should keep taking backups.

Is it Cheaper than Google Drive or Dropbox?

This will be cheaper than paying for Google Drive or Dropbox if you consider the per-year storage cost.

We own Google Pixel phones which used to come with unlimited photo storage until they abruptly stopped it last year. Now, we are forced to buy Google Drive space which costs $10/ month for 2 TB storage per month per user.

Even Dropbox costs the same as a drive.

If you are seriously considering creating a storage option at your home due to the higher costs of cloud storage (like Microsoft Drive, Google Drive, or Dropbox), we would recommend this external device which can be connected to an old laptop or computer to create a self-hosted Drive at your own home.

Other sellers

Amazon is selling this 14TB Seagate expansion drive for the same price of $179.99 but without the free SD card. Interestingly, the seller on Amazon is Newegg Business.

Costco has the same hard drive for about $199.99 but is showing it as out of stock at this time.

One of the Reddit users reported that Costco had a minimum sale price of $149.99 in late 2023 for the same item. We could not find it on Costco at this time.

Samsclub which usually carries the same deals as Costco is not showing any hard disk data storage deals in 10TB or more space.

Best Buy has this drive for sale at $300+

The post Seagate 14TB External Drive at $179.99 for Home back up NAS is best value per TeraByte appeared first on AM22Tech.