phughes

I keep a spreadsheet with every outlet/light in every room on it and their corresponding breakers. Much easier since breakers often span multiple rooms, sometimes only powering one or two fixtures in each.

I hook a cheap webcam up to a USB battery pack and load it up on my phone. Then I plug in a light and point the camera at that. It makes it a single trip and doesn't bother the neighbors.

Great comment, though I disagree with

Electric and water generally* pretty are easy. Don’t mess with the gas lines.

I've done all three in multiple houses now, and I'd say that water and gas are pretty easy. Electrical is where you can get yourself in real trouble.

If you screw up water or gas you're going to know it. The tiniest gas leak smells noticeably even in larger spaces. Water leaks usually become evident once you turn the water on. If you inspect your work afterwards you'll find it.

Electrical is another story. You can turn on the circuit and everything works and you think you're good, but you've somehow switched the hot and neutral, which is dangerous. Or you used 14 gauge wire on a 20 amp circuit, which will be fine until you put a huge AC unit on that circuit and start a fire inside your walls. I'm not suggesting you shouldn't do your own electrical, because once you know the basics you're going to be fine, but as far as dangerous conditions go electrical is the one I worry most about.

I was looking for information like that when I last bought a TV in February and couldn't find anything.

I punted and bought a SAMSUNG 65-Inch Class Crystal UHD 4K CU8000 Series (that's like 1/4 of the amazon title) and have not connected it to the internet at all. As far as not being connected to the network, it's… fine.

• There have been no issues with it trying to lock me out of features.
• I didn't try to opt-out, but my intuition tells me that's unlikely.
• No camera that I know of. I think there's a microphone in the remote, but I've never used it, and since I've never connected it to the internet (and I never use the remote) I don't really worry about it.
• I've not experienced any nag screens.
• I have not measured the power usage directly (and would have nothing to compare it to since I'm not willing to connect it to the internet even as an experiment) but I do have it connected to a power-usage sensing outlet strip and it uses dramatically less power than my previous Samsung 42" HD LCD (with florescent backlighting.) So much so that for it to not turn off the switched outlets I had to add my AppleTV to the control outlet (and for extended dark scenes even that's not enough.)
• If it's connecting to networks surreptitiously I would expect to start seeing ads or some change in behavior, which hasn't happened, so I'm going to say probably not.

As far as how good of a TV it is, (which you didn't ask, but since I'm here):
I'm not the most discerning viewer, but I think it's got a good picture. Sometimes I can see the backlight adjust itself on very dark scenes, but it's hardly a show stopper. I have an external speaker system, so really the only thing I do is turn it on and off (with the AppleTV remote). My only other gripe is that it takes a few seconds to decide to display the selected input full screen.

just like Brexit, the vote is final.

Brexit was a non-binding proposition, but right wingers didn't actually care what the people wanted.