The thought of going through all of my storage boxes to catalog hundreds or thousands of items so that I might search for them one day via a web UI seems a lot less productive than simply knowing that old USB supplies are in the “USB junk” box and Christmas decorations are in the “Christmas decorations” box
I think it becomes more useful as you accumulate stuff - I get frustrated when my wife buys crap on Amazon that we already have. So while I don’t have the time or energy to sort everything in our house, I am beginning to catalogue things as we buy or find them in the hope it becomes more useful over time to find things we rarely use and/or avoid re-buying excess items
There’s also the insurance angle.
Heaven forbid you have a fire or flood from a water line break. Insurance companies aren’t your friend and will shaft you if they can - I’ve seen it happen with friends.
So now I have an inventory (and pictures). I have about 4x the stuff in my place than the average person in a house this size, so the defaults from insurance would make me lose lots of money. Once they see an exported spreadsheet with counts and dates (plus the pictures), they’ll cut a check and not argue.
Plus the inventory helps me keep track of what I have so I don’t buy it again.
God forbid the poor insurance dude getting the whole list of damaged items ;)
So now I have an inventory (and pictures)
So it will import associated pictures of equipment with a pic of the serial number? Cool
Nah, it’s 2 different things.
I could add pictures in the shopping list app, I just don’t want them there.
Instead I slowly took pictures of everything I own. And when something new comes in, I take a pic of that. I have a folder for inventory photos.
Those photos are only a just-in-case for insurance.
Those photos are only a just-in-case for insurance.
Cool. The insurance angle has helped me on a couple of occasions. Had a piece of farm equipment disappear. Had all the surveillance replete with photos of the equipment and snapshots of serial numbers. The process was rather painless with all of that. I highly recommend people go through at least once a year and take a digital inventory, especially big ticket items.
The current version does have the ability to create QR codes for your assets and scan them later for identification, but I don’t know of a way to scan a new item and identify it automatically.
Maybe I’m too poor or too young (or both), but I know exactly where everything in my home is. And if I don’t it’s because I’ve misplaced it, and the program isn’t going to help with that :(
And if I don’t it’s because I’ve misplaced it, and the program isn’t going to help with that :(
In that case it will help you with where it was supposed to be
LOL me too my brother. However, one thing I do use is Grocy for pantry and other inventory. Homebox seems to be in that inventory genre of apps. I’m somewhat of a prepper, but ‘prepping’ was very common in my generation along with Victory Gardens. I don’t do EOTW scenarios, but I do stock for social or political unrest and upheavals, weather related hazards or catastrophes, food shortages, etc. During the pandemic, I rarely wandered from my compound.
I have a UPC scanner that I scan all groceries and food stuffs into Grocy, and when I use the item, I scan it out. I’m the only one who is authorized to use it which gripes my lady friend when she comes to visit. LOL So, when I am doing my monthly shopping, I can pull up the app and check against the inventory to see if I need to pick up a couple 50 lb sacks of rice that are on sale.
I could see how Homebox would be useful in that you could take inventory of all your household items for perhaps insurance claims reasons. I take pictures of all such items along with their serial numbers and store them just for that purpose. I wonder if Homebox could import such data to securely store.
Yup, that’s my use case. I set it up in case of theft or loss. Now I just actually need to go around and put my valuable stuff into it…
And also find my Dremel. I bought a mini cordless one that worked great, but it’s so portable I have no idea where I left it!
but it’s so portable I have no idea where I left it!
LOL I can feel your pain. I have to force myself to put the tool back in its proper place when done, or I’ll never find it again for years. Put your toys back in the toybox.
The worst case scenario is when you know you have something, you cannot find it after multiple raids, and you end up buying it again. Then of course you eventually find it during the course of doing something random.
I have 800+ items in my home inventory list. Lots of different tools, household stuff, seasonal, and cooking stuff.
I used to be able to keep track just by having a few containers, but then I started forgetting what container something was in.
Now containers are labelled with a container name and list of what’s in it, my inventory app (just a shopping list app) indicates the container name.
Edit: You’d be surprised how much stuff you actually have until you start inventorying it. It’s a tedious task.
Yeah one thing I find these kinds of tools good for is warranty tracking I’d something breaks and insurance claims if there’s a fire or robbery or something.
It’s probably a bit of both, plus still functional memory.
Thanks for sharing this, I am currently looking into these and so far found Dumb Assets and also partially Warracker which seems to be super active in adding features, but so far is focused mainly on warranties.
Any suggestions for alternatives while we’re at it?
I’m currently using Google Keep (don’t judge) with special title format and gotta move out of there.
I’ve been attempting to test shelf.nu . they have a docker container but not working for me after a bit of tinkering. What made me want to try shelfNU is they sell QR codes you can put on boxes and assign that as an entity and say these items are there so it’s easy to find what’s in what storage container.
Homebox has this capability too, you can generate QR codes for assets and scan it later to identify whatever’s inside.
Oh interesting, thanks for the information, I did poke around homeboxs documentation but didn’t see anything mentioning QR codes where as ShelfNU has it as a main feature. Since I can’t seem to get the latter up on unraid may have to givehome box a spin soon.
That’s nice. I suppose you could do the same by printing a bunch of UUIDs on QR codes and add the UUIDs to the respective location in the system.
What I’m doing is even easier. I use an X-Y coordinate system. I assign a letter to a storage unit, e.g. a Kallax is assigned “A”. Then each bin horizontally is X and each bin vertically is Y in A:X:Y. Then fairly easily I can determine that the third bin on the second shelf is A:3:2. That’s short enough to type in a search field. It’s also easy enough to locate a shelf coming from A:X:Y. If the shelf has only one dimension, like a bunch of drawers, I use just one number. This system is fairly easy to learn and eliminates the need for physically tagging every bin or drawer. Doesn’t work for unstructured storage, like boxes on the floor or other shameful things that we all have. 😄
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventory_management_software
Here’s a good list
