Like many families with growing children, our loft was a depository for all manner of things. It got fuller and fuller until, at the end of 2004, I OFC’d our loft, and created a digital system to help us manage the contents. Each of the elements were specified as an Item or a Container or a Position, numbered and photographed, and recorded together with their photo in a database. I’d wanted to use RFID technology to tag each element, but costs were too great at that time.

The system served us well in our house until we moved a year ago. Despite having got rid of a lot of stuff in the move, we still have things in our new loft, and, when I went looking for something the other day, I realised that we could still make use of some digital support and that, possibly, RFID costs may have dropped sufficiently as to be within reach of the average householder. Initial investigations on the net revealed at least one RFID solution costing less than £500 – an RFID Reader which plugs into a smart phone, from a US company called U Grok it. The reader costs £359 +VAT, and the tags cost about £16 per hundred. So, this journey is going to be about reflecting on the lessons I learned from my earlier Loft Phase 1 experiment, and defining and implementing a solution for our new loft which, hopefully, will include RFID technology.