7 ms·
Noise Protection for Short Term and Vacation Rentals
- wehadfun 10y agoThey charge a $200 annual fee
- burntwater 10y agoIt's a stupid simple dashboard. A dollar a month per sensor is the very most I would consider, with maybe a minimum $20/year.
- AtheistOfFail 10y agoThat's pricy...
- ithinkinstereo 10y agoIt's insanely cheap if you're one of the many "landlords" that have turned their properties into AirBnB-only money printing machines. In NYC/SF a 1-2 night stay covers the cost for this easy.
- paulcole 10y agoCrazy. I pay good money to watch/listen to people on hidden cameras. Seems like I should disrupt the smoke-alarm-for-noise industry by creating an efficient block-chain marketplace to connect voyeuristic perverts with sharing-economy-landlords. Everybody wins!
- r1ch 10y agoThis is ripe for a Chinese rip-off at those prices.
- ultrafez 10y agoI imagine that you could build a functional equivalent with an ESP8266, a power adapater, and a Twilio account - no server required, since you should be able to measure volume directly on the ESP8266 itself. The parts would cost you less than $20 - probably less than $10.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoNodeMCU (basically ESP8266 + USB-to-serial and power over USB) is ~$3, if you can find a reliable USB charger for less than $7, then this project will definitely cost less than $10 in parts.
- rebuilder 10y agoOne that emits an ear-splitting siren if the noise gets too high? Much cheaper and more convenient than reporting to the owner. The kids will get the point pretty quickly.
- mox1 10y agoConsidering this is recording (or at lest intercepting and processing in some form) audio in a place where most people have an expectation of privacy, I assume you have to inform the renter that this is on and monitoring....
- cheeze 10y agoAlmost certainly illegal in my state if the tenant is not aware.
- JonFish85 10y agoI'd fine it humorous if this gets shut down as illegal if Airbnb units continue unchecked.
- empath75 10y agoI wonder how many people actually have cameras in their rentals and don't tell anyone?
- vesinisa 10y agoThat's pretty high risk on the host's part. If your guest happens to discover the camera and informs the police, at least where I live you would be looking at a pretty hefty fine and possibly even a short prison term + felony criminal record. It doesn't help much if you are mostly spying on foreign tourist guests, since the act of visual spying of a private household is itself a serious crime - not only as a tort against a victim, but a criminal offence likely of interest to the public prosecutor.
- TylerE 10y agoThere's no need to record audio for this to work.
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoIt's crazy to me that we've moved so far away from privacy-considerate technology that people have begun to assume we can't measure volume without "recording" and "processing" audio.
- feedjoelpie 10y agoI am suddenly unreasonably angry that this exists. Not because of the product itself, which is clever. But because this is how normalized the u̶n̶r̶e̶g̶u̶l̶a̶t̶e̶d̶ illegal short term rentals have become, that especially in some tourist-heavy regions are creating long-term housing shortages that displace residents. (See New Orleans, where housing prices have skyrocketed without any commensurate boost in residents' incomes to compensate, and it really is just that homes are being converted into hotels.)
- resolaibohp 10y agoI think it is more than just short term rentals. It is this idea that a home represents an investment, a way to make money. People around me who buy a new house for the first time start talking about how they can't wait for it to keep increasing in value, however prior to their purchase they couldn't wait for them to decrease. The idea that homes are just another path to making money needs to end, they are supposed to be a home for people to live in. This is what I believe is driving up prices so much these days.
- ng12 10y agoI've heard this argument a lot and I'll never understand it. Do you get angry about hotels and traditional Bed-and-Breakfasts too?
- jmspring 10y agoI keep seeing short term rentals blamed for sky rocketing rents. Here in Santa Cruz, the University has grown by about 6-7000 students since when I first got here. The UC itself added maybe about 1k beds in the last 20+ years, some of that by cramming more people into existing rooms (doubles to triples, etc). The 2-300 short term rentals in/around the city would not make a dent on the availability of housing. (Let's say, 1500 beds). Yes, it will impact price, but there is a larger issue than the rentals themselves. In this case it is unrestricted growth without building the housing to go with it.
- jrowley 10y agoUCSC is an interesting problem. There are have been serious plans to expand into upper campus - which would destroy some beautiful redwoods which people don't like. But is it better to build an entire new UC campus somewhere else? That seems inefficient - there are already serious resources devoted to that campus and I think that more people experiencing UCSC will lead to a better, more educated, more socially conscious world. Maybe we should just increase capacity and build more housing in upper campus. But by increasing capacity we further increase demand for water in a drought stricken area... We can't win without more water. So maybe we need desalination, but to make that work we need obscene amounts of excess electricity... environmentally and socially conscious growth is hard.
- alvarop 10y agoI've been using the Point(https://minut.com/ https://minut.com/), which is half the price and no annual fee. I mostly use it for temperature/humidity sensing, but it also has sound level logging/alerts.
- frenchman_in_ny 10y agoNetAtmo [0] does the same thing as well -- full weather sensor suite, similar pricepoint to NoiseAware, no annual subscription. [0] https://www.netatmo.com/product/weather/weatherstation https://www.netatmo.com/product/weather/weatherstation
- huac 10y agoWhat does it mean to be a "HomeAway Official Partner"?
- Skunkleton 10y agoI assume hardware wise this is a cheap microphone, a microcontroller, and a wifi chip? Software wise, they have a data logger and some sort of notification push? What justifies the $150, and the $200/year subscription? I don't see those prices being sustainable.
- cheeze 10y agoThat nobody else is doing it.
- draw_down 10y agoIf people pay, that is the justification. Pricing is, shall we say, not a science.
- blackguardx 10y agoCan't you say the same thing about any piece of software as well? It costs next to $0 in bandwidth to download an app or program. Why should the price be higher than $0? Hardware costs a lot of money to develop and manufacture. There have been a lot of posts on HN recently about the price of hardware. Niche hardware like this doesn't cost next to nothing when made in small quantities. All the fixed NREs (all the prototype costs, the plastic mold tooling, any upfront factory fees, etc.) have to be amortized over the few units sold. And that is just breaking even. Selling goods at cost is a tricky business model. It makes sense to add in a little profit. If you don't like the price, then you probably shouldn't buy it. If enough people agree with you, they will either change their price or go out of business.
- cptskippy 10y ago> Niche hardware like this doesn't cost next to nothing when made in small quantities. You could use some off the shelf components like an ESP8266 or ESP32 module to dramatically reduce your cost. A hand full a discrete components, an electret microphone, auto gain amplifier, and a voltage regulator aren't going to set you back more than $10. A custom PCB is going to be $5 per unit max. The BOM is easily under $20 for a limited run of 10 to 20 units. The most expensive things are going to be the enclosure and assembly. If you find an off the self enclosure then your costs drop considerably. You could have a working prototype cobbled together in a day.
- infinitone 10y agoThis feels like it can just be implemented by an Alexa skill? Would anyone be interested?
- lowglow 10y agoPut a towel over it.
- anotheryou 10y agohaha, why is the best comment at the bottom of the page?
- lowglow 10y agoMy comments have been forever anchored to the botttom by the mods/admins. :)
- ryanisnan 10y agoExample of something nobody needs.
- Johnny555 10y agoI always figured that the hidden camera that the AirBnB host uses to spy on me already had a microphone so they can monitor my noise level directly....
- bogomipz 10y agoI think this seems like a terrible product, here is why: Call 1: AirBnB host: "Hey I've just got an alert that the noise level has gone above X decibels" AirBnB guest: "Oh hmm it looks like the city is jack hammering the street in front of the house." Call 2: AirBnB host: "Hey I just got another alert about noise!" AirBnB guest: "A bunch of fire trucks went by, there's a fire down the street" Call 3: AirBnB host: "I just got an alert that you unplugged my noise meter!" AirBnB guest: "No I didn't but it looks like your internet is down." While three of these happening consecutively is maybe unlikely just one of them occurring makes both parties uncomfortable and presents an awkward situation. And who is to say what reasonable is? A neighbor can complain even if the noise is under the threshold. This just feels like nanny-nation to me. The real issue is that if you don't know people well enough to trust them to be respectful towards your neighbors then maybe you shouldn't be renting them your place. And yes the same can be said of renting to a longterm renter as both parties enter into the contract with no prior knowledge of the other but the difference is that long term renters generally have a vested interest in being a considerate neighbor since it is now their home.
- yellow_viper 10y agoI'd just wrap socks around it.
- bogomipz 10y agoLOL. I didn't see anything in the FAQ bout it being sock-proof? Maybe the second revision with have this feature?
- pikzen 10y agoI find it hilarious that this product exists. For so many reasons. A noise meter for your (most likely illegaly) rented apartment so your neighbors aren't bothered. I wonder how else that could be fixed... Oh right, regulations on noise and distance to housing, which every hotel has to follow, but AirBnb's litlle grey area abuse scheme miraculously gets to avoid it.
- arjie 10y agoRegulations don't make things not be noisy. They mandate that things not be noisy. Then someone has to go make sure that when things are getting noisy, it stops. In a hotel, that'll be the hotel manager when the other guests or the neighbours complain. This is a proactive means to avoid that. I mean, it's not like saying "Don't make a huge amount of noise in my apartment" enforces that you can't. You can still do it.
- pikzen 10y agoExcept you're going to have a terrible time building a new hotel complex in the middle of already existing apartments. The bill for sound insulation is going to be massive. And if you get inspected and it turns your you are not within the regulations, the fine is going to be a fun one too. Therefore, new hotels are built somewhat isolated from existing housing, or take up an entire building. As opposed to a random person just renting his apartment and getting a tap on the wrist eventually.
- losteverything 10y agoIs there a hand held gadget I can use when I first enter my rental to determine and locate listening devices and/or video? I'll buy or gift one.
- jeffehobbs 10y agoWell, that's creepy as fuck. If you're going to do this, why not also go ahead and don't rent your space out.