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6 articles
Five outdoor smart sensors, one British winter and a set of IP ratings that promised more than they could deliver. We compare claimed ingress protection with condensation, cold batteries and the realities of a wet garden.
Smart thermostats and hubs promise convenience, but their network behaviour is rarely examined. Using a mirrored WAN port and local DNS logging, we mapped a week of traffic from common UK smart-home devices and tested how much control survives without the cloud.
Eight soil-moisture nodes, one solar-powered gateway and a Grafana dashboard, run across the 2026 growing season on a UK allotment site. Here is what the radio link, the batteries, the enclosures and the data actually did when the weather stopped cooperating.
A 900 Mbps full-fibre service was instrumented for 30 days to separate access-line performance from Wi-Fi and home-network effects. Wired throughput held close to the advertised median at peak, but latency and the tenth percentile told a more honest evening story.
CavLab put four UK-market e-bike packs through a controlled discharge and charger test regime, then rode a fixed Pennine loop to see how bench watt-hours translate into real miles. The gap between nameplate capacity, usable energy and advertised range turns out to be engineering, not marketing alone.
The UK three-pin plug is heavier, bulkier and more expensive than almost any rival — and it is still the safest domestic mains connector in common use. We dismantled one, traced the design decisions behind BS 1363, and asked whether a standard written for post-war copper shortages still fits a home full of EV chargers and heat pumps.