I have to say, that just sounds dangerous to me. A roll-your-own solution connected to a powerful (not to mention expensive) piece of electrical equipment, sitt

I have to say, that just sounds dangerous to me. A roll-your-own solution connected to a powerful (not to mention expensive) piece of electrical equipment, sitting on the open internet? I love hardware hacking and things, but this just looks like a big ole target to me. Not to mention, as much as I love Arduinos, in my experience it doesn't have a very mature codebase - I wouldn't be surprised if you could leverage that open port into an attack on other devices on the LAN (like the router). I could see maybe doing it if I were running an OpenVPN server and restricting access to LAN+VPN Clients, but even then it seems like it's not worth bothering, since you pretty much know when you're going to go home anyway, so you can just put it on a timer. If it starts an hour early, does that really cost that much?