Hi All, been a while since I posted here...

So after moving up to Auckland after the Canterbury earthquakes a couple of years back we've been hit by another disaster. This time, a blender (switched off, jug disconnected, but plugged in) failed and filled the entire house with smoke. And this only a few months after we cancelled our contents insurance because it was too expensive following the earthquakes!

I've fired up my air compressor and blown off as much soot as I can (I even went over all the PCBs in my HTPC with cotton buds and iso and replaced all thermal paste afterwards, just to be sure), but I'm still pretty dubious about bringing all this kit back into the house. I'm not sure if it's a fire hazard (I don't think so but after having an appliance fire once, it still makes me feel uneasy), but there are probably traces of (plastic fire, so very toxic) soot, and we have a toddler. If it was just one piece of equipment I wouldn't be too worried, but bringing back a large LCD screen, computer, AV receiver, not to mention couch, bed, etc, all at once seems a bit dodgy. And frankly, I've been moving/cleaning sooty crap for almost a month now and I'm pretty tired of it. It'd be nice to get rid of it.

Anyone here have any experience/advice with dealing with sooty electronics? How salvageable/dangerous/toxic is this stuff likely to be?

I'm sort of considering selling much of my old stuff more or less as is (give it a quick clean, ensure it's currently working, and make sure to make the buyer aware of the gadget's history), and then just replacing it. Anyway, here's what I have:

Phillips 47" LCD TV (1080p)
LG 23" IPS234 display
HTPC I built (gigabyte mobo, Hauppauge DVB-T card, radeon 4870, 1.5 + 2 TB HDDs, intel i5-760, 8gb 1333mhz ddr3)
onkyo tx-sr575
Monitor audio speakers x5 (bronze range, baby centre, etc)
time capsule (1tb, wireless-n)

So I've already bought a Seagate expansion 3TB and backed up all my data. My iphone 3gs died a couple of days before the fire, and I mistakenly thought the HTPC was completely ruined (it actually boots OK, at least for now) so I bought a Surface Pro 128mb as a replacement for both.

The only thing the surface pro doesn't do is act as a TV tuner. With windows 8.1, though, it does support miracast. I'm thinking I could pretty well replace most of the above stuff by just getting a smart tv. I've got my eyes on the 42" LG LA6620.

I went into Harvey Norman and the rep let my try screen sharing via miracast. It wasn't too tough to set up, though I did notice a pretty hefty latency - perhaps using the release version of 8.1, or a firmware update for the TV would improve this. In any event, it happily streamed a movie over an ad hoc wifi connection in the store. I wonder whether it would benefit from wireless AC (and whether it's even possible to get the TV to use a router's wireless AC for miracast instead of its own wireless-n)

I've been out of the loop with TVs. If I plug my Seagate expansion drive into the USB port on the LA6620, will the hdd be shared with other devices on the network (just as if it was connected to a router or PC)? Or would I need to attach the HDD to a router/PC/NAS to accomplish this? (Unfortunately, my bloody time capsule won't read/write exfat so is pretty useless in this regard. I don't want to format my usb 3.0 drive HFS+ as I don't actually use any apple computers these days!) Also, will the TV record to a network drive? Will those recordings be in a format that is readable by a windows PC (i.e. will they just be mkv or something?)

Perhaps it would be worth getting a wireless AC/gigabit/USB3.0 router then. It would allow my to share my exfat HDD over the network - both to the TV and to the surface pro. Obviously I'd need to pick up a wireless AC dongle for the pro to benefit (and I was thinking of holding out a bit longer to see if they start making combo 11.ac + NFC dongles - it seems Marvell might be heading in that direction anyway and it'd be nice to be able to add NFC to my tablet). Very few wireless AC routers seem to actually have usb 3.0 so far though, which strikes me as very odd. All I could find was a Linksys model.

In terms of audio, I was thinking that's something I can do without for now. The budget is tight, really tight.

So yeah, that's the plan at this stage:

Pawn off old crap after quick clean, test it goes, and disclaimer (that it might have reduced lifespan thanks to soot)
LG 42LA6620 <- tv, tuner, wireless monitor for tablet
Linksys EA6700
Plus my surface pro (with eventual wireless AC dongle)

Any suggestions?