Most people have a vague idea when the car’s due an MOT and that the boiler man should be called “around this time of year”. Beyond that, home maintenance is usually a mix of Post‑it notes, emails from utility companies, and the occasional guilty 3am thought of “when did we last check batteries in the smoke alarm?”.
This is me as well. For someone who spent years around proper maintenance systems in the workplace, my own house, campervan, gadgets and random projects were basically running on vibes.
Over the last couple of years the list of “things that really shouldn’t fail” has quietly grown:
- A house with more quirks than the average soap opera set
- A campervan that is both transport and spare bedroom
- A small zoo of electronics, from NAS boxes to drones
- Heating, alarms, smoke detectors, solar bits, IOT, odds and ends
Every one of those comes with some kind of maintenance: inspections, tests, filter changes, battery swaps, firmware updates, warranty dates, insurance renewals. None of it is complicated on its own, but taken together it’s a lot to keep in your head – especially when some of it actually matters for safety and insurance.
At work, the answer to this problem is CMMS: Computerised Maintenance Management Systems or an IWMS: Integrated workplace management system. You get assets, locations, job plans, work orders, and a grumpy report on what’s overdue. In industry that all runs on heavyweight, eye‑wateringly expensive software.
At home, we generally wing it.
This series is about what happens if you stop winging it.
I’m going to walk through my “home CMMS” journey: why I decided to treat my house and gear more like a small estate than a random pile of stuff, what software I chose, how I’m hosting it, and how far you can go before it all becomes more faff than it’s worth.
If you’re the sort of person who:
- Knows roughly how old the boiler is but not exactly
- Has smoke alarms that “must be fine, they beeped at some point”
- Owns more devices with firmware than you care to admit
- Likes the idea of systems that quietly nag you before things break
…then this might be your kind of nerdery.
In the next post I’ll talk about the tools: why I ruled out commercial SaaS, what I’m running on my own kit, and how I’ve tried to keep the whole thing simple enough that Future Me will actually keep using it.