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Elite Screens ELIM92UWH Pull Down Projector Screen Review

JonC — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 05:48:25 +0000

I just received the Elite Screens ELIM92UWH pull down projector screen today and installed it and I really like it!

The screen came in a couple of days after my Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 8350 1080p LCD projector arrived. I originally had used an Epson Duet screen for the projector until this new screen arrived.

The Elite Screens ELIM92UHW / M92UHW is a 92 inch 16:9 ratio pull down projector screen. It’s not an ultra-high-end model, in fact it’s a really cheap screen that can be had for around $90 but it’s quite suitable for someone building a budget home theater setup or someone who just wants to have a big screen in their living room. The screen certainly lives up to the big part. The viewing area is 45 inches tall and 80 inches wide and in reality it’s 91.79 inches diagonally, I won’t ding them for the .21 inch difference though.

The screen was fairly light in the box and was not a problem to mount. I wanted to mount the screen so that it would pull down just in front of my 47″ wall mounted LCD screen so I did the proper measurements and unfortunately there was no joist available within a few inches to hang the display from so I used some Hillman hollow wall anchors rated at 80 pounds a piece as well as a double hook setup to hang the screen from it’s D rings.

The Hillman fastener looks like a cylindrical slug but once you place it in the hole and tighten the bolt it mushrooms out in five directions to brace against the ceiling. I gave a reasonable tug on each fastener and everything held in fine. If you’re doing your own installation you’ll have to decide what the most appropriate way to hang the screen is for the environment that it is in.

The Hillman fastener came with a normal screw in it. I found some closed loop studs that had the same thread as the bolt on the Hillman fastener. I used the original bolt to clamp down the Hillman fastener and then install the bolt with the closed ring on the end into the fastener and all was good. I used two closed S loop link pieces per side and spread the tops and bottoms open. I tightened the S back down around the O shaped part attached to the Hillman fastener and left the bottom ends open enough to slip around the D ring on the projector screen housing. The S loops oppose each other so there’s no way that the screen is going to come loose from them. Click on the pictures below for a large version.

The screen looks wider than I expected it to look at first. The viewing area is 80″ across but the actual screen housing length is closer to 86″ over-all. I’d certainly recommend measuring everything and not just assume that the length or height printed on the actual box is the right measurment to make holes for, etc. With the screen all up and mounted it’s not really that obtrusive and the black housing fits in with the rest of the decor in the house, it’s my favorite non-color.

You can see a few ripples in the screen in the picture above. This screen being a lower end unit does not have tension springs or anything of that sort on the sides to pull the screen out, so I suppose some ripples will always be present. Honestly when the lights are out and I’m watching TV I can’t even see the ripples. They’re just slightly visible when the lights are on in the room.

Below are some of the photos I took of the screen with some 1080i TV stuff and below that are the pictures I took of a Blu-Ray 1080p source.

The following pictures were taken of a Blu-Ray movie in 1080p. The difference in quality over the TV HD at 1080i is incredible. Please keep in mind that my cable TV provider heavily compresses their HD feeds so while they are in 1080i format the quality is seriously lacking on many channels.

Overall I’d say the ELIM92UWH is a great budget screen. The model I have is the Matte White, which refers to the display surface, not the color of the case. If you’re ordering one of these and want a white case or a black one, make sure to contact the seller and tell them that so you’re not dissapointed. The screen also comes in the gray color surface which is supposed to provide deeper blacks. I’ve like to see the details in the shadow so I went with the white matte. You might want to go see the difference in person at a store that sells projectors to help you decide which style you want.

We Finally Got Some Snow

JonC — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 00:22:33 +0000

Well after watching everyone else in the country get some snow we finally got a little bit over the weekend. I don’t know how much snow actually fell in our area, but it came along with high winds and drifted quite high in the yard. In some areas around here it was blown down to where you could see the grass poking through the snow, but something about living on a hill apparently caused a lot of it to drift right up onto the property which was nice.

Unfortunately it fell on Sunday night and Monday morning and the office wasn’t closed so I didn’t get much time to ‘play’ in the snow, it was pretty much ‘clear it enough so I can get to work’. I didn’t get many pictures but I did get one of the snow blower and the roads in my area. Hopefully the next storm will either occur near a weekend OR it will be enough snow to actually shut things down. This was a good start though, hopefully the winter weather machine will keep on churning and throw some more of the white stuff our way.

The snow blower worked great as usual but I did manage to snap a shear pin on one of the augers about halfway through the job. I had a couple of spare so it only took about 15 minutes to repair, otherwise I would have been shoveling the rest. I snapped another shear pin this evening doing some extra cleanup of some spots in the driveway, but the snow is starting to take on an icy state after a day of above freezing temps so no surprise there. I’ll replace it on some day when I have daylight to work on it and also need to pick up a few extra ones. I’m not sure if they’ve just become weak over several years of use.

Review:Monitoring Power Usage With TED 5000-C Part 2

JonC — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 06:46:05 +0000

In part one of my TED Power Monitor Review I covered the installation of the TED-5000 Energy Usage Monitor. In part 2 I will cover the software features and functionality of the Footprints software included with TED. In part 3 I am going to cover the setup and usage of Google Power Meter.

Please remember that the screen shots below are taken right after I installed the meter. You can click the pictures (below) to view a large readable version of them. As time proceeds the meter will keep a log of second, hour, daily, weekly and monthly statistics for you and provide you the ability to see your power usage over time. Already I find myself wishing that TED had an additional MTU and sensor or meter for the consumption of liquid fuel, such as heating oil, or gas fuels such as Propane and Natural Gas and later on I will talk about these things in relation to the TED series of meters.

Please remember that you can click on any of the photos below to make them larger for more detail at any time while viewing this page.

This first photo before is the screen you should see when you type http://ted5000/ into your web browser once you have TED installed. That address is actually the machine name of the TED Gateway and should resolve automatically to the right IP address, if it doesn’t you may have to log into your router to find out it’s IP address.

In the screen shot above you might feel a bit of information overload, at first. In the top left you see the days left in the billing cycle and the current rate in effect, as well as the plan type. You can also see money spent since midnight on my power usage as well as money spent this month on power consumption. The system will also project the power bill for my the month. I calculated the use of energy based on my power bills, and while I’m billed once every two months I did a little math and figured it out to a kWh billing rate which should be relatively accurate over 1 or 2 months. As of now TED does NOT support bi-monthly billing, a shortcoming, but they will hopefully be fixing that soon from what I understand. I also get a report on my present voltage (more of a nerd plus-up) Low voltage can cause electrical equipment to operate improperly. Most devices are tolerant to at least +/- 10% though (12 volts over or under) but any voltage that looks way off should be investigated. Also extremely low voltages while operating high power equipment such as a stove, dryer or other device can mean there is excessive resistance in a power supply line somewhere which can mean trouble. High resistance lines result in heat which can result in a fire!

My power company does not share their billing process with me in my bills and they don’t provide a detailed billing list. I’m going to try to get them to start providing more detail on my bill. I believe power companies should provide extensive detailing on the bills so that consumers can be properly informed on their power consumption and also be able to make decisions about their electricity provider. Because of this lack of available information I used the KWh usage and bill prices to derive an average cost per kWh. I know, I know.. there’s flat rate fees and delivery charges, regulatory fees and other things but when it comes down to it, this is how much it costs me per kWh, no matter what, on average so it is what I used.

On the screen below you can see the cost screen of the TED 5000 unit. It uses the information I provide about my power service and calculates how much money I am spending on the power I’m using at any given point as well as over time. This can be another good motivator to start reducing the amount of power used. When you see your money disappearing at the rate defined by “Present Spending Per Hour” it sort of gets your attention.

The spending screen is pretty informative and provides all your electrical spending information. I can’t believe I was spending $4 on electricity per day. The space heater is a large chunk of the constant power use at 1000 watts, the PC, TV, etc take up another 7-800. In reality, this is cheaper than running the oil furnace in my basement. Oil is over $3 per gallon and I know I can burn more than a few gallons a day to heat the whole house. The last 2 years my energy cost in the middle of winter have been over $100 a week just to keep the house at 55-65 degrees. By reducing the heat in my home and using space heaters to heat the active living areas I’ve been able to reduce my costs extensively!

The third page under “Present Readings” seen below is more for the tree friendly crowd. We need to love our trees. God, gods or evolution (I’m equal opportunity here) put the trees here for obvious reasons, to be our giant green air filters. As taught in high school science, trees help remove Co2 out of our atmosphere and release oxygen which we love but we also love carbon spewing coal and gas power plants, cars, fires, etc. Well, that junk has to come out of the air eventually.

So here’s my carbon footprint for my electricity down below. I just used the default calculation of 1.5 pounds per kWh as I didn’t see anything on my electrical providers page about how much carbon they generate.

OK!!! Past the tree hugger part (yay!). The next feature of TED is the History Tab. The history tab is pretty complex but easily broken down if you just focus on one piece at a time. There is the Month History which shows your usage per month. On a new system like mine there isn’t a lot of information but you have to remember that it builds over time. TED (The Energy Detective) Footprints software is kind enough to provide a comparison from this year and last year. So you have at least two years of history to compare to. You can also use these numbers to compare your bills to you TED estimated costs and see how well your configuration is doing. Do you feel empowered? You should!

You also have the Hour History, this shows you comparison of today vs. yesterday so you can compare today’s usage vs yesterday usage. I’ve included a slightly updated image since TED has been on patrol for a while now.

Huh, interesting! Power usage varies quite a bit. You can tell when I was awake because the power usage jumped. When the power is .2kWh I was asleep (with a shotgun and one eye open, so don’t try anything ) and had the heating blanket on plus my evil VAMPIRE DEVICES (oooo) powered on. Once I was up and downstairs I turned on the ‘dish heater’ which is a parabola shaped radiant heater which uses about 1000 watts, the TV which is about 300 and the computer which is another 300-700 depending on what I’m doing with it.

The next section of information is Graphing. The graphing tab provides a huge amount of information. You can break it down by the second, by the minute, by the hour, date, KWH, Cost Per KWH and a bunch of other cool stuff!

A lot of the power from the TED Footprints interfaces comes from how you set it up. The engineers at TED have spent a lot of time to set up the Utility Pricing Wizard as you can see below. TED allows you to set up your utility information to some detail. You can set your billing date (monthly only, no bi-monthly, yet) and how many seasons your provider charges you different rates for. Some utility companies (power delivery) may charge a different rate for 2-4 seasons where the rate varies depending on if its fall, winter, spring or summer. Other companies may go three ways or have a simple two or one way billing season. You need to ask your utility for EXCESSIVE DETAIL if you want to be super accurate on setting up your rates. If this seems like it can get really complex, it can, but if you can get this information from your power company it’ll go a lot easier. If not, do I what I did and average your power cost from your last years bills (I got mine online) and use the flat rate.

Once you’ve set that you need to go through the Plan Type as well which lets you choose your billing for a Flat Rate (I used this with my average), Tiered where you pay different amounts per kWh from 0-500 then 500-1000, then 1000-2000 kwh, or similar, Time of Use where the amount you pay for your energy depends on your the time of day you’re using power, such as daytime or evening. Generally evening is cheaper than daytime use. Also you may be billed on Tiered PLUS Time of Use. You need to know this information for accuracy if you don’t want to do estimated billing.

Once you’ve set up your utilities plan types you need to set your Energy Rates. These numbers will vary depending on the plan type you’ve selected but the TED engineers have made sure to add the input fields for all different types of billing plans so that most people are covered. If you’re not covered and want to use a TED system you should contact the engineers at TED and let them know!

If you’re on a tiered system for example; TED lets you define the number of tiers as well as the start and stop for each level of your power usage tier, you don’t enter your tiered rates yet, just where the tiers start and stop for each one, up to 4 tiers.

If you’ve enable Time-of-Use on you TED system you’ll need to enter the Time-of-Use ( TOU ) data as well on the following screen.

Finally after entering all of that information you get to enter the Energy Rate data. This is the information that tells TED how it much it should be calculating your energy cost. Depending on the options you’ve selected you may have to provide more or less information about your energy costs. If you’ve selected Time-Of-Use as well as Tiers you will need to enter the data shown below which is your 4 tiers, plus your peak/off-peak power usage. You’re almost there, don’t freak out!

Finally, if your utility charges any additional fees, taxes or other things you can set that up in the TED 5000 system as well. Again, I just used an average number based on my bill over the last few months since my power provider doesn’t willingly provide detail billing information.

Huzzah! You’re more-nearly there, the final decision is to go to the ‘Write to Device’ and upload the data to the device. This sends all of the information to the TED Gateway and saves it. Since the TED Gateway is also the web server, all of your information is there and NEVER saved on your computer which may crash or error out. Although it’s possible to lose the information on the TED Gateway as well if you have to do a firmware update or reset it. You can back up the data before a reset though and save it somewhere safe to reminisce.

Now that you have the critical information setup, or you don’t have it setup but want to go on anyways, you should look into the System Setup Wizard A lot of the settings are covered in the manual so I’ll go to a few which I’ve found interesting.

The first part of the System Setup Wizard which you may find interesting is the Operational Settings.

TED Offers an ‘Normal Mode’ which is what you see when TED is operating normally (go figure) as well as an enhanced mode. The normal mode is what you might view on a daily basis out of interest, or maybe on a weekly basis depending on how much you want to cringe. The enhanced mode allows you to set ted to update more often and provide higher resolution data for the voltage and energy usage. You may use the advanced mode when you have a small load placed on the line that you wish to monitor or you’re trying to nitpick energy usage. Say you want to harp on the old lady for using too much power on the clothes iron or the curling iron, hair dryer, coffee pot, etc then advanced mode is for you. BE FORWARNED! Non-geeks don’t appreciate you nit-picking their power usage, keep it to yourself for your own self gratification because TED also collects information about all of the things you’re doing too! Sharing the detailed power consumption information of a hair dryer is NOT a benefit to your happy abode and may find you on the couch.

The display unit for the TED 5000-C (the -C denotes it comes with an LCD display) is a generally nice looking display unit which should fit into most homes. Apparently it communicates with a 2.4Ghz protocol though which is unfortunate as other 2.4Ghz devices in the area can interfere with it’s updates and drastically reduce it’s range. This includes WiFi and BlueTooth communications devices so you should seriously consider this in your extended purchase. I knew this in advance, not what I had that would interfere with it, but that it may be interfered with. In the end for my situation it turns out my BlueTooth Logitech headphones cause it problems. I decided to keep the LCD screen near the gateway to limit interference and it’s next to the TV so I can always keep an eye on it when my computer is in sleep (to save power) or I’m not at my computer (usually the same time as sleep mode). The range for this LCD display is also short. The box shows going to your thermostat and adjusting it to reduce your power consumption which is lame but the concept is conveyed by the picture. In reality you might not get this far, still I recommend it.

The LCD has a green light on the button which blinks each time it receives an update, so if you’re not getting a blinking green light on your TED 5000-C LCD display you should move it closer to the TED gateway until you do. I would recommend experimenting by moving the device around and finding out your true range. My personal opinion is that TED should put a much better battery in their little LCD device and include one of the many available OEM WiFi modules which is compatible with most peoples homes to transfer the data. For homes without internet connectivity they could even make a few bucks selling pre-configured routers and setups. There’s a lot of communications stuff in TED which results in interference or ease of being interfered with which could be solved by a B or G WiFi connection. Hopefully that will be in a model like TED-10000 or something.

Below is the configuration for what the TED 5000 LCD Display will show when you hold it and push it’s buttons to change screens.

Click to enlarge the above photo! Here you can set the normal and enhanced modes back-light settings. When you’re in enhanced mode on the TED 5000 it changes how the display responds by increasing back-light power. You can also set a timer to dim the TED 5000 LCD Display’s back-light as well as set a timer for the scrolling of the display information and how soon the display falls asleep. Almost finally you can set the contrast.

On top of all that you can set which displays are shown Real-Time Use, Recent Usage, Month To Date, Monthly Projections, Co2 Nature Abuser Status, Voltage, KW Detail for Today, Spending Detail for Today as well as Multi-Panel which supports multiple MTU usage if you are monitoring more than one set of power leads.

Once you’ve setup the TED 5000 LCD Display the final setting before you write them to the device is to set the Footprints Settings. I find that most of the footprint settings are adequate and adjustable on the main info displays but you may want to fine tune them, you can do that in the screen shown below.

Once you have set all of the settings to your preferences you can go into the ‘Write To Device’ tab and update the settings with your preferences. This will send all your setting to the TED 5000 gateway and to the LCD display itself.

There is another feature of TED which I haven’t gotten into yet, and I would consider this an experimental feature. They have a function called ‘Load Profiling’. If you can accurately provide information on a known load you can track it separately without needing an additional MTU. The idea is that you tell TED Footprints how many kWh or Wh a devices uses and if it’s a multi-stage unit and TED can tell when that device turns on! While it’s good in theory the execution has been mostly good but partly hit or miss.

In the screen shot above of the TED 5000 Footprints software you can see that I have setup a load profile for a Dish Heater. This is the radiant heater mentioned earlier that uses about 1000 watts. I added this to TED as well as my 6kW water heater (50 gallon) and my clothes dryer (set on ‘auto dry’). My main experience has been that it detects the dish heater mostly okay, but occasionally determines it’s a dryer if the dish heater and water heater turn on at the same time. This is not so much a problem of the TED Footprints software as it is the method that TED Footprints uses and the data it has access to. If two devices turn on near the same time which have the same power consumption as a water heater, it’s going to show as water heater on rather than dish + something else.

Overall I would have to say the load profiling on the TED 5000 has limited uses and flexibility. They’re trying to offer a solution based on limited data so the results can be not too great. If you really want to be able to monitor another device accurately you should probably just buy an additional MTU for the TED and clamp the lines you want to watch. I’m sure with some time you could get the profiler to be more effective than I did, but it would take a lot of time and an assistant running back and forth to turn the device on and off for you since the ‘auto-detect’ for the load profile setup times out fairly quickly.

Also if you have loads who’s power usage varies constantly, this may cause problems. I have an Oil Furnace and that device has two power stages. The oil pump to the burner and the inducer motor turns on before the main blower on the furnace starts. The pump and inducer run for 2-3 minutes before the main blower turns on. Unfortunately the oil pump motor is an older version and it’s power draw can vary by up to .2kW every second then the OLD blower turns on and it’s power consumption varies about the same. This can throw the TED unit even with the ability to adjust the sensitivity. The better option for detecting this current draw may be a separate MTU. I may order a couple more but I want to research the forums on multiple MTU usage first. I’d also love to see a TED 5000 oil/gaseous fuel consumption monitor as well before I go nuts.

Thank you for viewing part II of my TED 5000 review. In part III I’ll provide a final evaluation of the unit, cost analysis(simplified) and let you know if this was a worthwhile investment for the home user who wants to save power and how it may apply in real life. Please stay tuned!

Amazon.com Widgets

Still here? Did you read Part 1 of my TED Home Power Monitor Review?

Review: Monitoring Power Usage With TED 5000-C Part 1

JonC — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 05:12:23 +0000

I’ve been wanting a way to monitor my home power usage for a while and recently did a lot more research. The folks at TED (The Energy Detective) had a selection of products which rated well and I ended up buying the TED 5000-C.

These are not installation instructions, just showing you how I installed my unit. Always follow the manufacturers instructions.

With that said, TED’s selection of products vary from the pretty basic to some pretty snazzy equipment. I went for the TED 5000-C system which lets you monitor one set of mains power lines and includes a nifty LCD display. I searched around for other options, and there were some pretty high end units which allow per-circuit monitoring, but you pay for the price. The TED with the display was around $240/USD and as package can monitor one 240VAC circuit or 120VAC. The most common usage is to monitor the main feeds into a persons home.

If you have an X-10 unit used to control your home lighting you may wish to check the TED support forums in advance. I’ve read that since TED uses power-line transmission for it’s data like X-10 does, it can cause erratic behavior in some X-10 switches and units, causing them to turn on and off at random times. It’s best to read the forums or contact TED and find out what the conditions are before investing in a system. I don’t run X-10 at home and have been looking at other brands of devices that don’t use power-line transmission so I am not too concerned about it.

I ordered the TED 5000-C on the Nov 14th and received it today, Nov 22, despite some possible back orders on their end. This gave me some time to read over their website and user support forums to see what sort of things I might expect to run into. As with most support forums there were a lot of requests for support with good answers, or answers found elsewhere on the forums for questions which have been asked multiple times. My impression from just reading the forums is that they seem to be putting in an effort for supporting their customers.

Here’s what I got in the mail today. Oh sweet I can hold the LCD Panel while adjusting my thermostat! I though it would have been cooler to push a button on the LCD display and vaporize my power bill, but it’s not going to be THAT easy. (Click pictures to embigginate them)

Open up the lid of the box and you’ll find 3 nicely packed sub-boxes. One box for the MTU components, one box for the Gateway Unit and one box for the LCD Display unit.

Taking a closer look at the components we’ll start with the MTU and the CT. The MTU (Measuring Transmitting Unit) is a small box that will live in or near your main electrical panel if you are using it to monitor your household energy use. The MTU is relatively small and unless your electrical box is packed you should have no problem finding room for it. Additionally the MTU box also contains the two clamp-on CTs(Current Transformers) which are used to monitor your 240 volt power feed into your home. Most often in the US and Canada a home power feed consists of two 120 volt lines which are 180 degrees out of phase with each other, so you get a clamp for each line. The clamps have a red dot on them, the red dots face towards the incoming side of the lines(towards the power meter). As you’ll see in my photos later, I actually had them upside down. I don’t think it should technically be a problem as long as both face the same way, but I flipped them the other way as per the manufacturers specifications.

In the next box is the Gateway. This is a rather unimpressive looking unit. The entire unit is built into shell with an Ethernet network connector, some LEDs and a 3 prong electrical plug. The LEDs near the Ethernet port show network activity. The LED on the right side of the box shows communication status with the MTU (it should blink about once per second when operating properly) and the LED on outward facing side shows connectivity to the LCD display. If no LCD display is present, then the green light stays solid, otherwise it blinks about once per second as well.

The final package contains the LCD Display unit. The unit is shiny and it has a base docking station with charger. The unit is able to be removed from the base station and carried around with you. I have a blue-tooth headphone transmitter in my living room which seemed to interfere with how far away I could carry the LCD display away from the Gateway. Some experimentation may reduce the signal and improve the range and I’ll make sure to update this post with the latest information as I go.

One thing that isn’t included in the package is a two-pole circuit breaker which you may need if you’re installing the TED in some locations. It depends on what your electrical code approves of. Some electrical codes will allow you to connect the TED power supply lines to an existing 2 pole circuit breaker, others may require that you use a standalone breaker. As I could not find the code which this was specified in, I decided to go the safe route and buy a separate breaker for the TED MTU. The breaker cost around $15 at Lowe’s.

Please read the installation manual and don’t use this as installation instructions, but simply a story on how I installed and got my TED 5000 up and running. Every situation is different, however what is almost always true is that working in your electrical box can be hazardous if you are not used to working with the voltages and configurations involved. I have experience working with multi-megawatt high energy / high-voltage capacitor systems, high voltage projects, and even some limited household wiring experience as well and I know how to be safe. If you’re not sure, hire an electrician for this part.

Below is a picture of my electrical box with the panel removed. You can see the breakers, and the wires going to the breakers. The feed lines are the big black lines at the bottom which come in from the right. The left and right lines are the 120 Volt feeds and the center line with the white tape wrapped around it is the return which is tied to the ground and neutral bars in the breaker box. This is what’s called a combined box meaning that the main breaker and sub-breakers are in the same panel. Even when you turn the really big breaker off for a combined box, the 3 silver colored blocks that the thick leads go into will still be energized(!).

You’ll notice in my box on the left hand side that someone used a black wire and a white wire to make a 240 volt circuit, but they didn’t bother marking the white wire with black tape which I’m pretty sure is a no-no in electrical circles. In some places you’re not even allowed to do that. That was corrected before I put the panel back on but it may have to be replaced with a proper red and black wire set to make it legit.

I connected the leads to the two-pole circuit breaker in advance. The red lead to one side and black lead to the other side and made sure to screw the terminals nice and tight. I connected the return wire (white) to the return bus bar in the box and after making sure the new circuit breaker was off I carefully installed it into the box.

With the breaker installed I installed the CT (Current transformers) around the feed lines. This is the area you have to be very careful about in a combined box because there is always live voltage with more than enough current to roast you and kill you pretty good. Again if you don’t feel comfortable doing this, get an electrician to do it for you. The clamps are supposed to be positioned with the red dots facing down the feed line towards the meter. I originally had them upside down, but the readings were the same either way. TED says if they’re upside down they’ll read wrong, but I think it’s mostly important to have them both face the same way as my reading didn’t change any after I flipped them over. When in doubt just follow every word of the manual!

I mounted the TED MTU box at the top of the electrical box and connected the MTU power cable from the new circuit breaker and the cable from the CT’s into the MTU itself. They are keyed and only go in one way. Look at the keying before you connect the box though so you don’t bend anything up.

Once that was installed I flipped on the circuit breaker and green LED on the MTU started flashing. I then proceeded into the living room, grabbed the TED gateway and plugged it in the nearest place that I had an open outlet and a network cable. I then went to my web browser and typed in ted5000 into the URL bar and the TED Footprints interface came right up. After setting the serial number for the MTU and Display, the MTU was communicating, I was seeing power usage, all was good. The display is another story, but I resolved that as well as you’ll see a bit further down.

Then I downloaded the latest firmware update from the TED website and sent it to the TED module. You have to install the Gateway firmware before you install the Footprints software, which I did. Once I had updated the software the Gateway and MTU quit communicating. It drove me nuts for a bit, but then as a sanity check I grabbed the TED gateway and plugged it into an outlet near the electrical box. Immediately the green light on the side of the TED 5000 Gateway started to flash indicating it was receiving data. I brought the Gateway back to the original plug and disconnected the power strip that was below it, which solved the problem. And I got great info like you see below!

Because the TED 5000-C uses power line transmission it is a bit sensitive to interference on the circuit it is trying to communicate with. Additionally a circuit which has filters, suppressors, UPS (battery backups / uninterruptible power supplies) are not TED friendly and can cause interference or actually filter out the power line transmissions which are used to transport data from the MTU to the TED Gateway. Apparently for some reason the TED could work on that outlet with the other devices connected with the older firmware, but the new firmware made it more discriminating and made it look like my TED 5000 was busted (oh no!). If in doubt plug your TED Gateway into another outlet and see if the green light on the side starts flashing again.

Now that I had the MTU and the Gateway communicating, I had to figure out why the TED Gateway couldn’t talk to the LCD Display. The display was powered up and sitting on my desk about 15 feet from the TED Gateway. I picked up the TED LCD Display and moved towards the Gateway and all of a sudden the LCD display came to life with the proper date and time as well as showing power statistics… when I was about 3 feet away. Okay, that’s frustrating, what’s going on?

Since the TED Gateway links to the TED LCD Display via a wireless link the first thing I did was check my most suspicious wireless device nearby. This is the BlueTooth headphone transmitter which I use for my computer. I brought the LCD display back to my desk and removed it from it’s cradle and reseated it, again it lost the signal. (apparently it reconnects every time you remove it from the cradle. I’m not fond of this myself). I then disconnected the bluetooth transmitter from the computer and the LCD display immediately picked up and noted it’s communication by flashing a little green LED on it’s button. So finally all three components were working well together. The MTU, the TED Gateway and the TED LCD Display.

Overall the installation didn’t go that bad, though I think it could have gone better. I understand the reason for the communication methods they use as it can be viewed as a simple and low cost for communication throughout a household without having to wire Ethernet cable up and route it, etc. I think a WiFi capable version would be really nice, but then you would have the costs involved with building WiFi into the MTU (at minimum) and LCD Display (would be a nice bonus).

I’ve taken a bunch of screen shots of the display and footprints software and I will post Part 2 of this review tomorrow Nov 23rd or Nov 24th with information about the display, software, configurability and possible pitfalls. I can say right now that I’m pretty happy with this so far. Once I post the next part I will include a link under this paragraph and a comment. So make sure to bookmark this page and check back tomorrow. While your waiting please check out my other sites and pages linked to the right!

Painting and Yardwork in 92 degree heat

JonC — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 02:13:10 +0000

Wow, today was a scorcher once again, it’s been pretty warm out lately but that didn’t stop work from proceeding on painting the house and doing some yard work.

Fridays are half day for me and it feels like we worked all day on some of these projects. We’ve been slowly scraping and priming the back side of the house. The paint on the house is not that old but was not applied very well and it’s starting to peel and chip, additionally there are cracks between the slats of the wood. I’m sure the house could use a nice vinyl siding job or something, but paint and caulk are much cheaper for now.

A while ago I scraped, caulked and primed the lower 8 feet of the wall which you can see in the picture and today we scraped another section and began to caulk any gaps and cracks between the siding. Tomorrow I’m going to try go get further up the wall, then caulk it and we’ll put some more primer on.

I’m using a bonding primer from Valspar and it works pretty good. It’s very thick and covers up spots, wood grain and stains very well.

Bryn started scraping out the planting beds today as well and managed to strike and ants nest in the process and got swarmed. Ah natures aerators and largest annoyance in the yard. At least for now they’re staying mostly in the yard! Once the planter is all cleared out of the weeds and such we’re going to put some landscape fabric down and to try and prevent weeds from taking root. then insert a few flowering plants before mulching. Colorful flowers are nice but they’re so high maintenance to keep the weeds and such out of the area it seems like more trouble than it’s maybe worth.

Repainting the house

Ah! I Was Attacked by a Giant Ugly Spider

JonC — Thu, 27 May 2010 02:23:08 +0000

I know we all love big ugly spiders! I was sitting on the floor in the laundry room painting a stand for my new Evader ducted fan model jet. I stood up and turned to walk down the hallway. I just happened to looked down and realized that I had been getting spied on! (spidered on?) by a good sized man eating spider! OK, it wasn’t the size of a man eater and it didn’t really attack me in a physical sense, just caused a little mental *piff* noise as some brain cells were startled. The big spider didn’t move all that much and just sort of shifted one way a little bit. I stepped the other way, quickly, and went into a kitchen and grabbed a plastic Glad container, then came back and put the relatively thick container over the spider. I say relatively thick because as far as I know, and I’m probably wrong, a spider this size has diamond tough sharp fangs which can penetrate even hardened steel. I didn’t really want to let the giant spider bite me so I was very cautious.

When I covered up the spider it didn’t freak out or panic, it just sort of moved towards the clear plastic wall and poked at it a bit with it’s legs as if it were checking it out, and just settled in as I went off to find a piece of thin plywood to slide under the plastic container and create the perfect spider cage / spider transportation device. I slid the plywood under the container and Mr. Cool Spider. He just crawled up onto the plywood and sat there presumably not to worried about anything going on. I then picked up the container and stepped outside with it. When the spider saw the great outdoors he seemed a bit more interested and moved towards the wall of the container and placed a couple of those long legs on the side of the container, looking out and about.

I let my creepy new spider ~~friend~~ acquaintance out by the wood pile, that’s usually where I find big spiders so I thought it might like the cover and bugs provided there as long as some bigger spider didn’t come along and eat him. The spider didn’t move all the much when I put him into the lawn, I think he was in shock, or didn’t want to draw attention to himself or something. I don’t ‘get’ arachnids in general.

About a week later another giant man eating spider found it’s way into the house. This time Bryn whacked it twice with the broom and picked it up with a piece of TP. The thing was just stunned and not dead! It started to squirm and wiggle and right itself right on top of the toilet paper! Bryn quickly dumped it in the toilet and the spider climbed to the top of the TP and looked like it was about to spider jump out of the bowl so I slammed the lid and flushed it down. Then I flushed again and ran the tub a bit, I don’t think it’ll be coming back that way. I doubt many spiders are actually reading this but the trick to spider survival is to STAY OUT OF SIGHT lest you be destroyed.

I wish my Scutigera Coleoptrata would eat these things when they were little so I didn’t have to deal with them. I suspect these are the spiders that leave the creepy looking empty Scutigera shells in the crawlspacement in the spider webs with thick webbing.

I always love to share the horrors of nature with friends and family and the random passer by unfortunate enough to find the spider pages of this site. I hope you’ve enjoyed the spider pictures. The spider looks pretty cool in this photograph it’s dark body and those big striped spider legs transposed over the leafy and flowery ground cover.

For the record, this isn’t close to the largest spider I’ve seen around here. I think the last home owner must have collected large spiders as a hobby and decided to move after accidentally letting his collection loose on the property! That’s my guess anyways, it could just be that the property is really old and there’s many generations and breeds of spiders here.

This guy also has a great spider story to read if you’re into that kind of stuff!

My Plans for the Upcoming Week of Vacation at Home

JonC — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 06:07:41 +0000

Hi folks, I’m taking a week vacation finally. It should be great to get some away time and recharge the batteries so to speak. I’m planning on painting some of the house, flying some R/C and working on the FPV system some more. With so much time available there should be quite a few blog posts.

I finished the mods to the Trimersion video headset for the FPV and took the pictures, I just need to post them up. I have a couple of planes on the way. I got some good tips for painting the house from a professional painter who is actually professional with the work he does. There will be some stuff about painting an old house, some stuff about general R/C flying and some FPV stuff so it should be a good week all around!

Unlike some folks, when I take a vacation I hang around the house. I don’t think that planning out and doing complex things during one’s time off is a beneficial thing, for myself, but I know everyone has their own idea of what they find relaxing and everything else. No matter what you do, do something that will build good memories, or alternately just sleep for eternity till you have to go back to work.

The weather for the next few days is supposed to be beautiful out here!

I hope to have some great stuff to share with everyone. Take care and be well!

The LED Christmas Lights Have Been Put Up

JonC — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 01:38:33 +0000

We’ve gotten some of the Christmas lights up around here, I was a bit slow in initiating it and the holidays are sneaking up on us quickly. These are the lights we’ve put up this year so far, all of the Christmas Lights installed this year were LED, they have a nice cold glow that goes well with the ice and snow.

It’s kind of weird around here, few of the immediate neighbors have put up lights. I’ve always been a big Christmas light fan. They’re fairly easy to put up and take down and add a festive look to things. Still to go are the 600 or so blue/white light string, plus the big RGB LED bulbs which color shift and do different things. Those will go on a tree in the left side yard this year.

LEDs are of course a wonderful option if you wish to be environmentally conscious with your holiday and Christmas lighting. LEDs are much more energy efficient than a normal lamp light bulb. Incandescent lamps provide a warmer glow, one of the reasons for this is that they use a small piece of tungsten wire for a filament. As electricity runs through the filament it heats up to the point that it glows and puts off light, but in order to create that light they also create a lot of heat. As much as 80% of their power consumption can be waste heat. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out that we don’t need to be heating the great outdoors in the middle of the Winter.

It used to be that LED Christmas Lights were much more expensive than the standard glass bulb type, but over the last few years the prices have rapidly decreased and become much more competitive. While you may still pay a bit more for LED lights, you also get the benefits of long life, high brightness and reliability. Most LEDs manufactured have a lifespan of 11 years, if they’re run at full brightness non-stop. Assuming they do not get damaged in storage or while being put up, they should last a long. Occasionally an LED lamp does fail before the 11 years, but replacements are usually included with the strings when you buy them. Just make sure to put them in a safe location should you need them later.

Radio Control Hangar 9 Twist 60 and Work on the Front Sidewalk

JonC — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 01:02:45 +0000

Hi folks, I know it’s been forever since I posted. I’ve been caught up with work, it’s the busy season and I don’t get a lot of time to post on the blog.

I do however have plenty of time to work on the front sidewalk and build a radio controlled airplane, go figure! The plane is a good break from the rc helicopter. I’ve been getting that back into flying shape too, but for some reason I have a lot of flutter on the rotor at high RPMs. I need to diagnose that this week sometime and figure out what is going on there. The setup is the same as it was before, the only difference is the blades and a different radio.

Hobby Shops
First at the top of the list is the Twist 60. I went to Barn Speed Hobbies in Lee, Massachusetts which is about an hour each way. I went for a mini-heli pitch gauge, but ended up buying a Hanagar 9 Twist 60 and a Saito 1.15 4-stroke nitro engine. I also bought some high-torque servos which they said were pretty good for the price, and which turned out to be total junk.

Not much I can say about that but I’m doing a bit more mail order for the time being. I don’t mind dealing with local hobby shops, like J&J Hobbies in Kingston, Jan is pretty nice and good to me. What I don’t like is being told servo is decent by someone and having it turn out to be a big pile of junk TO THE EXTREME. I guess if I had an iPhone I could have looked those things up, but it’s not worth the $100 or more a month for that thing. I think it’s a great device, but the service rates are stupid pricey just to look like a hipster. I do have an iPod touch which I don’t bring out in public and show everyone, it just plays my music and runs a few necessary applications.

Servos
I bought the Twist 60 last week and after the bum servos ( TowerPro MG995 ) which 3 out of 5 were defective I went and ordered some Hitec MG 5625MGs for a few bucks more a piece. The torque wasn’t as high, but I knew they would have a better percentage of good to bad! While I’ve had good luck with the Hitec servos, maybe out of the last 10 I’ve ordered I had one defective. I pulled apart the case on the defect and rebuilt it and it worked fin. The TowerPro MG995′s were grindy and nasty with bad centering and weird operations. I kept the TowerPros, I hear the amp board is good so I’m going to mod a bunch of S148′s over to digital just to be weird.

Twist 60 Plane
The Twist 60 went together pretty easy. The tail feathers bolt on, and the rudder and elevator servos mount in the tail of the aircraft. Best to have a couple 18″ and 9-12″ servo extensions for this model. The fuel tank was kind of lame because the hole in the firewall was cut bigger than the neck of the tank. A little bit of silicone around the neck of the fuel tanks seals the gap and keeps fuel from spraying back along the tank and into your landing gear block/electronics section.

It’s a shame this plane has been discontinued but there are some hardcore people making short kits and that kind of thing if you look hard enough (hint: twistaholics on google)

It comes with the hardware to run as a nitro-methonal or electric aircraft. As I planned to run it at nitro I did a couple of small modifications to it. The biggest was that I sanded down the firewall and sidewalls of the engine compartment and coated them with 30 minute epoxy to seal it against fuel, I also painted the inside of the fuel tank compartment with epoxy in case any leaks develop. Secondly I went through the fuse and epoxied critical joints in the fuse with a light coat of 30 minute epoxy to strengthen it a bit. This required cutting the covering of the bottom lightening hole behind the canopy but I feel it was worthwhile from things I had read elsewhere.

Electronics
Radio: For the electronics I used an Aitronics SD-10G 2.4Ghz radio, I’ll have to write another post on this radio, it’s pretty awesome. I used the 10 channel receiver. It runs in FH3 modulation mode which causes some problems with analog servos so that’s why I used the Hitec 5625MG servos in all locations, including the throttle.

Regulator: For the power supply plane side I used a Outrage 2s/7.4v/2200mAh LiPo battery powering a Fromeco Arizona regulator. The Arizona regulator is a helicopter regulator, but that just means it has 2 lower voltage outputs for the gyro in a heli. I didn’t use those outputs in the setup.

Servos: As I mentioned I used the Hitec 5625MG servos. They work well and seem sturdy and strong enough for this application.

Engine
When I bought the plane I bought a Saito 1.15 4-stroker along with it. This is my first 4-stroke nitro engine and it was not as difficult to setup as some people seem to make it out to be. The documentation is very straight forward, and this engine didn’t seem to have any quirks or weird things leftover from production. I ran about 1/3rd of a gallon through the engine on a test bench before sticking it on the plane.

I bought Byron 4-stroke fuel. It’s 15% nitro and 16% oil. Saito recommends 20% oil so I bought some oil additive, also Byron brand and remixed the fuel up to 20%. The Byron fuel has about 3% castor in it. The original Saito manual says to run ‘mostly synthetic’ fuel, while the American sources say to run 100% synthetic. I prefer to run a little castor in my mix, and I believe the original manufacturer knows what they are talking about. Not everyone is a super-pro engine tuner who never has an accident. Additionally, fuel system problems can cause lean conditions, and have a bit of castor in there makes me feel a LITTLE safer. It may require more maintenance in the long run, but these engines are so simple that it’s not a problem to tear one down and clean it up!

First Flight

I took the first flight on this aircraft on Sunday the 15th(2009). The plane flew pretty great. I was expecting it to be a disaster but all I need was some down trim and it was great. As you can see from the video it really wanted to go up! Some of that was me of course, some of it the trim. Together it made for a great first takeoff and that Saito yanked it right up into the sky with no problem at all.

I just puttered and played around a bit, adjusting trims and other things. I wanted to get a first flight in casually just to make sure everything was working as desired. Future flights will involve a lot more crazy as this plane is going to be great! A friend shot some video of the flight as you can see here (if you can’t, the link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eLHxliTmDA )

The Sidewalk
Not nearly enough work has been done on the sidewalk. I spent a weekend a while back building new front steps. The new regulations/building codes require a different setup on the steps which means I needed to get them in place to really know where to put the sidewalk. The steps have gone pretty good and just need some ballisters put on the sides and paint to be done. I’ll psot some pictures up once I get the ballisters on and paint them to match the front porch.

Reactor Biplane, Copper Vapor Laser and ‘The Sidewalk Project’

JonC — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:48:28 +0000

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve updated the blog, sorry for the long delay I have been extremely busy with work and non computer related hobbies. It’s incredible how the time flies. We’ve been working on digging the trench for the sidewalk, the soil is tough to dig in and is taking some time, although it’s not nearly as tough to dig in as the back walk was. This soil has much less rocks in it, it’s just that there is a lot more of it to remove.

Here is the most recent picture of the walk aka the kiddie pool during a recent rainstorm. It’s important to remember to add proper drainage to your digging areas, or this happens. There is a drain trench that leads to the roadside cliff edge, but it’s not deep enough. If it were not for this drain trench, the excavation area would have been filled to the top. This weekend I hope to get more material removed, it’s quite a piece of work for me because my body deteriorates quickly with heavy labor due to the rheumatoid arthritis, however I know we’ll get it done eventually, and most importantly before winter. The stairs will be getting removed and the sidewalk concrete will extend to the edge of the deck, then new steps will be built and secured to the concrete pad to make everything nice and solid. The steps are in not-so great condition, though still strong but I think new steps will look great.

New sidewalk excavation

REACTOR BIPLANE

Aside from ditch digging we built a model biplane over the weekend and got some airtime on it. The biplane is a Electrifly (Great Planes) ‘Reactor Bipe’. It’s an electric biplane with a 38″ or so wingspan. I probably would have been better off buying some repair parts for the heli and a new radio but this looked really neat and hopefully it’ll help me blend in with the plane guys more at the R/C field. The electric motor is a .15 equivilant size, theoretically, though I somewhat doubt it, it still does a pretty good job.

Electrifly Reactor Biplane

The Reactor Bipe was originally built with the suggest Futaba 3114 servos, but these tended to strip really easy and it got frustrating running out of servos. I purchased some new gearsets for the servos, but they will be used in some other, lighter project because they just really don’t hold up in this application. I replaced the servos with the Hitech HS-65MGs I was using in the Mini-Titan helicopter and things improved GREATLY, these servos really have the needed strength for the large control surfaces and are pretty fast as well.

The Reactor built pretty quickly, you do have to be careful about a few points. I noticed after assembly that using the pre-cut hinge slots that one ailerone was a bit lower than the one on the opposing wing. Double check the position of the hinge slots and everything else if you are concerned. Additionally where they recommend to use 30 minute epoxy, I’d definetly go that route. The manual for the tail includes and update sheet to use CA to adhear the horizontal stab, rather than epoxy. I suspect this is because epoxy could drip and cause the elevator tie rod thing to become bound. Even with CA this is possible, be careful when applying the CA glue to the horizontal stab. Additionally when gluing the control rods to the clevises, make sure the thin CA doesn’t drip into the joint. It will adhere them solidly, and while you think that you escaped disaster because the arm and surface still moves, you’ll quickly discover that this is only because the clevis is slowly twisting itself apart, instead of actually rotating in the control horn.

The manual comes with recommended control throws for low rates, high rates, and 3d. If you use the recommended control arm holes and low rates, you’ll find that the control is very grainy/low-resultion. You have to turn the travel/ATV down so far, that you are only using a very small portion of the bandwidth for each channel, and you can actually see each step in the control surfaces. This is bad because you loose a lot of precision. I would recommend using the outer holes in the control horns on the control surfaces, and the inner holes on the servo control arms if you just want to start out easy.

I’ve put in 4 flights in the last two nights, all of them were great although the plane is pretty ‘touchy’ on the controls. I will probably work in some exponential to make the middle of the controls softer, as I feel this would be okay for a plane (I don’t like expo on helis).

Electrifly Reactor Biplane Side View

Reactor Bipe Airborne

COPPER VAPOR LASER

Another side project which has been absorbing my time is the Copper Vapor Laser project. I’ve been building a tube furnace for this laser since the bore of the laser, where the copper vapor and helium (or neon) is energized by the electricity needs to be heated up to 800 degrees F for a copper chloride/bromide type solution. While the tube furnace I am building is overkill as I actually wish to build a version of this laser using elemental copper. The disadvantage of using elemental copper is that it requires extremely high temepratures, in the range of 1500 degrees celcuius (almost 2800 degrees Fahrenheit). Because of this I have been lovingly crafting the furnace out of high temeperature ceramic fibers (Inswool), ceramic boards (Insboard) and a variety of refractory mortars. For the bromide/chloride lasers, heat will be provided by a nichrome heater element(s) with no problem. In order to reach operating temperature for the elemental copper vapor laser, I will probably use one or two propane torches inside of the cavity.

The bore for the CuCl/CuBr laser is a quartz tube, the bore for the elemental copper (Cu) laser will be a high temperature alumina ceramic bore.

The advantage of an elemental copper laser is that you do not require a double pulse power supply. With a Cu Chloride or Bromide laser, you have to hit it once with a disassociation pulse, and a second time with the lasing pulse. With elemental copper you don’t need to disassociate the copper from a bromide or chloride solution, so one step is saved there, at the cost of extreme temperatures.

Copper Vapor Lasers have been used in some of Pink Floyd’s shows, they produce powerful golden yellow and soothing green laser lines (beams). Additionally CVL lasers have been used for the purpose of enriching uranium. While I am a scientist at heart and love to explore all sorts of different realms, I don’t think that enriching uranium would be a recommended pastime, so I probably won’t explore that part of science!

Here are some pictures of the tube furnace in progress. I’ve gotten much further, but don’t have pictures at this time. I will update my laser site later. This is the furnace for the CuCl/CuBr version of the laser. For the elemental copper version of the laser, this will probably end up encased in an additional external Inswool blanket wrap to bring up the insulation value and retain more heat inside the core.

Weather Slowing Down New Front Sidewalk

JonC — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:15:57 +0000

Well it looks like Summer has -finally- arrive, we’ve had a few 90 degree days this week. Not nearly as bad as they got out west, but I don’t do well in 90 deg days and 80+ % humidity. I was planning to start digging out for the front sidewalk this weekend, but put it off this morning and went out to the R/C flying field I joined last week to hang out with some friends I have there instead, and of course in the afternoon it was too hot to start digging holes in dirt so I sat in the air conditioned room a lot of the afternoon. The one advantage though is that the area we’ll be digging is nicely shaded by the trees in the morning, so this project will probably get some work done on it tomorrow morning.

The plan is to lay out the general design of the sidewalk with string or spray paint, remove the existing blue stone that is there and start digging with the shovel and pick axe. It’s going to be a lot of work because the ground as usual is pretty rocky. As an added bonus the driveway used to go in front of the house. When they decided to cover it up they didn’t remove the existing gravel, they just put a thin coat of topsoil on top of it. this is why there is a driveway sized area across the front of the house and lawn where the grass barely grows at all and there are mostly broad leaf weeds, even after trying to kill them in the spring and planting new seed. It looks terrible and will be partially resolved in September once the weather cools back down and I can plant more grass seed.

I’ll post some progress pictures of the work tomorrow afternoon, hopefully there will be some progress. I want to have a concrete sidewalk in soon, particularly while it’s still good concrete weather. It’s impossible to run the snow-blower over the blue stone pieces that are/were there without shreading the lawn. Someone came and picked up some of the blue stone already and I guess the rest will just go into the pile in the back.

General Update – Toilet Dimming Lights, Lasers, Weather, Air Conditioners, Lawn

JonC — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:00:16 +0000

Sorry, I didn’t get any reall testing done with this problem this weekend. Instead I spent the weekend working on a nitrogen laser. Much more fun than flushing the toilet repetively. I’ll maybe look into it somethime this week and see if I can find the cause. I don’t think anyone else in the world is having this problem with their plumbing. Usually if I hit on a strange topic Google will send at least a few wayward people to this site, but nothing yet. That somewhat reduces my hopes for an easier answer comming through comments, but I’ll get it sorted out!

On the weather front things seem to be heating up quite a bit this week, but still those continuous thunderstorms. I can’t quite think of any time in the past years that I’ve lived in NY that we’ve gotten storms day after day. It reminds me of when I was down in florida, they had a big storm everyday, then the sun would come right back out and everything would be sunny and muggy/humid. I think it’s supposed to be mid to upper 80′s, I was reading that my family in the NE may be getting close to 100. So hot!!! Glad that Mom at least has an air conditioner to help her out. Though I’d trade my air conditioner if we could just get rid of the humidity here!

We put the air conditioner in the window a couple of weekends ago, it was kind of a pain in the neck because of some missing screws for the side covers of the air conditioner. In my last apartment the windows slide left to right so I didn’t need them, and promptly lost the little screws. So of course the local hardware store didn’t have anything like them in stock. As usual every 30 minute project turns into a 3 hour ordeal.

The lawns are coming along okay. The problem with the peninsula lawn still exists, the soil is still to sandy and the nutrients wash out of it quickly and I’m sure the water probably leaches out pretty quick too, even with all that peat moss we tilled in.

If I don’t tear the lawn out and redo it again, it’s going to have to be fertilized once every 3-4 weeks to keep it growing. Otherwise it screeches to a halt and gets a little unhealthy looking. Once it’s fertilized it perks right back up and has normal growth. Tearing it out, again would mean getting a sod cutter, cutting out all the grass and rolling it up somewhere (if we were to try and reuse it, I’d rather replant) then a) tilling in a bunch of good quality topsoil into the sand to bring it to some kind of a ‘normal’ soil level or b) removing a bunch of the topsand.. err soil and replacing it completely with new good quality topsoil which wouldn’t be cheap either and would probably require renting a BobCat for a weekend (fun, but expensive as well).

Hmm decisions decisions

My Lights Dim When the Toilet Flushes

JonC — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 08:06:22 +0000

Okay, right… so this has been bugging me for quite a few months now. I notice that every time I flush the toilet, the lights dim. Well that’s downright crazy! I think I already know what the problem is. I’m thinking that the toilet is plumbed into the hot water line and when hot water is pulled from the hot water tank the heaters turn on, and thus the lights dimming a bit. This stinks of terrible wiring, and plumbing, because the whole electrical supply line in the house shouldn’t sag like that when you flush a toilet or a hot water heater kicks on. It sounds like some heavier gauge wiring is in order. There’s always the possibility that the pole transformer is overloaded with homes in the neighborhood as well.

I may need to do some long term data graphing of the line feed from the pole and see if we experience a lot of power sags around here.

I will probably spend some time on it this weekend as I can imagine it adds quite a bit to the power bill. Some things I’ve already checked are for a water pump from the old well being turned on due to a pressure switch, but a brief look around notes that the old well lines have been cut, and no water comes spewing out of the pump lines when water is turned on. Now I know you should decommission a well when it’s not in use, but that will come in due time. The previous owners quit using the well years ago before I bought the place and never decommissioned it (lucky me). I want to wrap the deck around where the old well cap is but the cap needs to be removed first. Another thing on the large list of ‘to do’s’ in an old home. EPA, if I was wealthy it’d be fixed already, I’m more than willing to accept a grant to decommission my well though!

I’ll let you folks know what I find out by the end of the weekend, if anything. I’ll just update this post, instead of posting another.

My first test is going to be flushing the toilet about 10-20 times (takes forever for hot water to make it to the second floor) and see if the tank on the back starts filling with warm water. Problem solved, if that’s the case. Well.. problem found, still needs to be solved!

I read there is also something called a mixing / anti-condensation valve which is sometimes used for toilets, it’s possible one of these is installed somewhere and has gone bad and is flowing all hot water instead of mixing. The basic premise is that some hot water is mixed into your cold water line to keep your toilet’s tank water from getting too cold and causing moisture to condense on the outside of the commode. Considering how long it takes hot water to reach the second floor, actually having a valve like this installed in the system would be a joke and a waste.

The advantage of fixing this is it will save on the power bills, if it truly is the hot water heater kicking on. My current electric bill is around 130 a month for a 1700 Sq Ft home with no central A/C, that seems a bit on the high side to me. I pretty much had the same equipment running in my apt and I was averaging 60-80 a month in the summer.

Strange Cloud Formations and Yankee Gutter Repair Updates

JonC — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:33:10 +0000

Well I did get manage to get the roof leak patched on the house, but I got so absorbed with things like getting the tools put away, fixing the roof, etc and I didn’t bother getting finished photos. Due to feeling kind of lousy I just ended up patching the existing ‘gutter’ for now and will be saving to hire someone else to do the major re-work on these Yankee gutters which are in such bad shape. I think the final solution may be to just remove them, though I’m not big on changing the look of the house I don’t want to have continuous problems with them for the duration of owning the house.

I find I’m not comfortable that high up, even on a boom lift. If I’m -high- on a ladder, I think every little wiggle is the ladder about to give way, and apparently if I’m high up in a boom lift, I think every little wiggle is one of the legs of the boom lift about to sink into the ground and tip on me! I’m pretty good on ladders up to about 12 feet or so, perfectly comfortable, as I move higher than that I get more nervous. It’s pretty well known if you’re nervous and panic easily with heights, you don’t want to be in precarious situations because you may respond incorrectly and make a bad situation worse. So, if you panic easily with heights, don’t go up high and find someone else to do it, certainly not worth becoming disabled or dead to save some money.

It’s odd though I do not have a fear of heights when I’m in an airplane, building or other enclosed cabins. If I’m hanging over mid-air, with a couple of spindly posts holding me up then I really have some problems.

At any rate, the Yankee gutter is now patched with a asphalt + fiber + mesh tape roof patch and nails and it’s been raining throughout the day and no water has been coming into the house, so far, which was the primary goal of this whole mess. Hopefully it will stay dry in here and we will be able to paint the wall with the Killz primer/stain blocker and then repaint with the room color.

I have some nice photos to share today. The first is a pretty awesome cloud formation that came through right behind a thunder storm. I had stepped outside the office to go to another building when I saw these, so I grabbed the camera out of my car and shot these photos. These bubble shaped clouds are Mammatus or Mammatocumulus clouds which means ‘bumpy clouds’. Mammatas is in reference to their shape like a breast or udder. I hope you enjoy learning these things with me

Mammatocumulus aka "Bumpy Clouds"

Mammatus Clouds

Mammatus Clouds

Bubble Shaped Clouds

These really 3D looking cloud formations remind me a lot of a photo I took a few years back. This photo is of dense clouds which are shaped like ocean waves across the sky. I was accused of photoshopping the picture by quite a lot of people, but it’s not photoshopped and is an original. I’ve never found an official name for these clouds, they don’t qualify as rolling clouds, and they have different characteristics than most wave clouds. If anyone has identification for this cloud type, please let me know so I can update this page.

In Fact, I liked these clouds so much I decided to turn them into evil clouds. Perhaps something you would see on December 21, 2012, when the world ends. Clouds like these are excellent for Photoshop color adjustment and other things. Try it yourself, they also look good in blues and reds and other colors, just please make sure to attribute the image (give credit, such as a link to this page) if you use it elsewhere.

UPDATE: These type of cloud formations are caused by gravity waves according to what I’ve read about the physics behind this kind of cloud formation. While the name does not seem obvious, the description of it’s effects and how it affects cloud formation and weird cloud shapes makes sense. If you do a search on the term you will find some interesting information. If you feel there is some sort of other mechanism at work I am interested in hearing it.

Weird Wave Clouds

I had to mess with this photo as well, again going for the red doom look.

I’ve found similar clouds on other websites, some even more photoshopped looking than this! The ‘Strange clouds spotted by the Cloud Appreciation Society’ page, Photo #3 from that site is a great example.

This video embedded below is from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, you’ve definitely gotta hit the play button, very cool! I recommend clicking the link and checking out the source of the video for more information, it opens in a new window and you can come back here to browse more.

As usual, you can click on the photos to see larger versions of them.

More Fun With The Yankee Gutters

JonC — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:30:35 +0000

I got up on the boom lift today to check out the situation and see what kind of things I’d need. I was thinking that perhaps the gutter was just old and needed some TLC. Well, boy was I wrong. This thing does not even qualify as a Yankee gutter. Apparently the previous owner had a weird concept of how to fix a built in gutter and he just used a really wide strip of aluminum flashing along the gutters length down the whole side of the house. Perhaps it was smooth when it was put in, but it’s just terrible now.

I can’t believe someone would do such a poor fix. I’m a bit more upset that my inspector didn’t mention the gutter was a pile of.. yeah.

It looks like I’m going to definetly have to rip off the fascia, rip off the sofits and rip off the ledgerboard that sits right below the gutter, it’s all rotted or leaking. I may be able to put some kind of drip edge of cap strip over the top cap of the wall framing, but whatever happens I want to make sure I can keep water out of the house, and in a way that will last for a long time to come. I’m having serious doubts as to if I’ll be able to get this done this weekend, and I only have the lift for that long.

I’m thinking that instead of trying to keep the traditional yankee gutter, I may just try to build a large commercial gutter inside of the box, but that raises issues about making sure that the water makes it only into the gutter, and not the house, and that if it were to overflow, it wouldn’t backflow into the box, which means a really good seal between a new drip edge, and the gutter.

I’ll have to figure something out, water inside the house doesn’t work and it’s not going to just quit raining for the forseeable future. I have a friend comming over to take a look at it with me. He’s very good with working with materials and knowing what is compatible and that sort of thing so maybe he will have some good ideas for me, because I’m out of them.

Here are some photos of the previous owner’s ‘fix’. The concrete block is a nice touch…. Just had ANOTHER downpour and collected about 4-5 gallons of water out of the weep holes I put in the ceiling the bedroom… gotta get this fixed!

4th of July Weekend : Roof and Yankee Gutter Repair

JonC — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:00:04 +0000

Well… after that wicked thunderstorm the other day and not being able to find a contractor, since they’re all tied up fixing roofs, I decided to do the work myself. I’m not sure if this will be cheaper, but at least I can get the work done myself this weekend, I think. They say for DIY assume it will take at least 4 times longer than planned, and at least twice what you budget. Accordingly I have budgeted 2 hours for the work, and $5 for the parts and supplies cost! I hope this works.

Well I already blew that budget, I picked up some tarps and some basic stuff to do simple repairs. 2 tarps, roll of flashing, various tubes of adhesive and sealant, roofing nails.. well, $150 later I have that, plus another $310 to rent the lift for the entire 3-day weekend as well. Then there will be the supplies cost for the wood as well. Thinking 5 1×12′s and 4 sheets 4×8 1/2″ plywood plus sealer and exterior paint.

The plan was to get the lift up and running tonight and do a quick patch on the roof due to the thunder storms which are quickly moving into the area for the evening. Unfortunately it took me a while to get the lift positioned on the driveway in a location where I could perfectly level it. It is perfectly leveled now, however the storms are almost here so I’ll have to hope the ceiling makes it one more day.

Last night in the early hours it rained more and the ceiling actually started to drip onto me. I punctured the ceiling at the drop points and put a bucket underneath and managed to drain out about a gallon+ of water. The bed is covered in plastic right now so I bet that means I’ll be sleeping on the couch, since I don’t want to wake up with a ceiling on me.

The rental company dropped off the boom lift, pretty basic usage, just need to extend the legs so the level bubble centers, snd so it’s on firm footing, etc. I have a hitch on my own truck, but it’s a small truck and the trailer boom lift wouldn’t lower down low enough on it’s wheel to attach to my hitch. Fortunately this thing is well balanced over the center axel so I just put the trailer wheel in stow mode and used the legs of the boom lift to very carefully raise and lower the trailer onto my hitch ball. I had to move it a few times to find a spot that the legs would actually level. The driveway has a bit of a slope to it, so it wasn’t as easy as it would be on a flat surface.

So tomorrow starts the gutter and roof repair project, hopefully it will all go well. I’m thinking I’m going to just rip off the facia and sofits and redo it since they look terrible and are rotten anyways. I’ll put updates here as I go along.

Also, my new crystals and RF Module arrived for my RC Heli. The RF module died about a week ago so I ordered a new one. In an unfortunate sequence of events I managed to run them over when positioning the boom lift. We’ll find if they work, later

Here are some photos of the boom lift.

ooo and here comes another torrential downpour and thunderstorm, maybe I should have kept the big metal lift away from the house until tomorrow.. ah well.

June 30 Severe Thunder Storm in Ulster County, NY

JonC — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:59:47 +0000

I know I’ve been posting a lot of these thunder storm and wild rain downpour videos. I tend to get a lot of search hits for the specific areas and dates though, so I will continue to do so. People seem to be interested in it for personal reasons, or perhaps to show friends, or insurance agents.

Anyways this storm on June 30th, 2009 was pretty intense. It came in 4 waves in this area, so it seemed more like 4 separate thunder storms. Unfortunately the house did not get out unscathed in this one, the built in gutter gave way and leaked water into the walls which managed to spot drywall on the top floor ceiling, and additionally the walls on the first and second floor around the window frames which are right under that gutter got wet as well, peeling some of the drywall tape on the joints by the window frames. Thunderstorm rain always seems to be so much more intense than regular storm rain. I guess all heck just breaks loose in the sky and results in massive downpour.

I didn’t notice this was happening until I saw water dripping down the window blinds behind my computer monitor. When I went upstairs the ceiling was spotting and wet up there in a couple of sheets that extent parallel to the window.

I’ve been trying to get a hold of someone all day to come out and fix or at least temporarily patch it but I could not get a hold of one single person. Possibly because the holiday weekend and all, most ‘make our own schedule’ types are taking the rest of the week off.

I’m not a ladder guy myself, and becoming a quadriplegic for a stupid gutter is not going to be my demise. I called a local rental company and I can get a 35′ boom arm lift for the entire weekend for about 250 delivered, so I’ll probably do that and fix it myself, safely.

I also manufactured a ‘low budget pole cam’ so I could get a look up into the gutters, it worked out pretty well, good enough for me to see where the problem was. Also the soffits in that area are in terrible shape, even more so after that storm, so I may be rebuilding my sofits as well if I have all the tools to do that, my budget is pretty thin at the moment.

Anyway, here is the video, enjoy.. at 1:35 I got the camera to focus right on the rain itself, really impressive downpour.

Here are those additional pictures of the water damage

Another Day, Another Thunder Storm

JonC — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 03:35:28 +0000

After weeks of nightly, hours long, rainy downpours they have subsided a bit, but now we’re getting these daily thunderstorms ripping across the Catskills and through town. I posted a video of one the other day which was pretty fantastic and very active for our area. The thunderstorm video below is in the daytime and mostly shows the quantity of rain that comes with these storms. You can see the Scott’s PatchMaster patch in there also after about 5 or 6 weeks of growth. It’s doing well, but of course it looks better than the rest of the lawn.

We will be over-seeding the lawn in September sometime, or possibly just ripping it out and seeding from scratch. I still haven’t decided which is a better way to go. Ripping out the old lawn and laying new seed would definitely be in order since this old lawn has been here for years upon years, and I don’t think there’s much that could make it look good or feel young again. It is certainly a lot more work though, and I would need to bring in more topsoil for some more spots where it’s thin over the rock base.

The gutters on the house are in terrible shape. The one you’ll see in the video is a newer one, but it was not put in properly. There should be a drop in height of the gutter from the non-downspout side to the downspout side, I think whoever did this one just put it in along the edge and went ‘good!’.

You can see the gallons of water pouring out over the edge of the gutters and even at the downspout end of the gutter, although some of the plants in the planter seem to benefit from it. It needs to be repaired to get the water away from the house though, the sump pump has been working overtime to keep things dry in the basement.

I think it’s kind of odd that the water is pouring out from the downspout end of the gutter. I’m guessing it’s plugged with leaves or something, I’ll probably have to get up there with the ladder on Saturday and see what’s really going on with it.

Also near the end of the video you can see where the blue stone pavers have been pulled up in preparation for the placement of a new concrete sidewalk. I found someone in the area who was working on a stone wall and they called up and helped me get rid of this bluestone. I still have some big bluestone curb and slab pieces sitting around, so if you’re in the mid-hudson area and interested let me know.

Anyways, heres the thunderstorm video, if you can’t see the embedded YouTube video below, just click the link to go directly to YouTube to watch it, you won’t leave the site.

If you enjoy thunder storm videos, check out my YouTube channel on the right. I have a few from the last couple of years posted there that you may enjoy watching.

Awesome New York Thunderstorm

JonC — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 02:47:21 +0000

We had a great thunderstorm here in ulster, new york tonight. I got in the truck and shot some video since I don’t have the observatory built into the house yet. Most of the strikes are flashes and such, but it’s still a good video to watch if you like thunderstorms. I’d highly recommend turning down your volume, for some reason it came out really loud when I added it to youtube

Thunderstorm Video 06-25-09 on YouTube– (turn down your speakers/headphones it’s quite loud) or watch below.

P.S. As a side note, do you have enough lighting protection on your home? This isn’t an advertisement, it’s just a really good idea to get some surge protection and other things in place. It may not save your electronics, but it could save you and your house! When I see heavy thunderstorms like this it always concerns me that power or cable lines may be struck and cause an electrical surge to wreak a lot of havoc on electronics or worst yet cause a fire in the wall of my house.

House Centipede – Scutigera Coleoptrata

JonC — Fri, 15 May 2009 03:03:11 +0000

What has 30 legs, eats spiders and insects and can run 16 inches per second? If you’ve found this page you’re probably asking yourself those questions and need answers. I hope to clarify a little bit for you what this creature is.

A House centipede / Scutigera Coleoptrata (oh quit screaming!)

A house centipede aka the Scutigera Coleoptrata centipede are one of those creepy house bugs (it’s not a bug!) you probably don’t enjoy seeing, and I can’t blame you for that, they look pretty terrifying. The house centipede in the photo above was discovered making a dash for the bathroom cupboard but made the mistake of racing into a plastic zip lock bag I had sitting on the floor. Muahahaha! Pre-packaged house centipedes, now if only I had a distribution network setup!

I got at least one nice close up photo of Mr./Ms. Scutigera Coleoptrata, (how do you tell a male from a female? does the male wear a baseball cap?) and a couple of fuzzy ones, and also some video of the little guy/gal moving around inside the bag-o-drome. These creatures, arthropods I guess (?), are pretty cool in design and functionality. I have found a couple of them here at the house and had them at my old apartment from time to time. When it rains they are driven indoors and tend to seek higher ground like your face! (no, sorry just being bad again), in my house at least. Wikipedia says that house centipedes prefer the first floor, but I’ve not seen one there yet. Update: Okay i found two house centipedes downstairs Scutigera’ing around the floors and walls being all centipedy like!

Interesting Note: The number of searches for ‘house centipede’ went WAY up on my stats during periods of high rain in the northeast an every year I get a spike, and every year I update this site multiple times, AND sometimes when I guess there’s a lot of rain in other places. There are big ripples in the statistics which seem to move with the seasons and the amount of rainfall we are getting across the country. Maybe after a few years I will analyze all of the house centipede searches of the long term and be able to make a usable graph for some reason. I mostly just love to watch statistics, so that would be excuse enough for a House Centipede Interest Chart.

Scutigera Coleoptrata / House centipede fuzzy photo, ooo ick!!

They’re claimed to be one of the most beneficial of house pests according to the WikiPedia article on them and as to house centipede bites: “The bite of most house centipedes is incapable of penetrating human skin. Those that do give an effect no worse than a minor bee sting, and the symptoms generally disappear within a few hours.” additional resources say that in rare circumstances they can result in severe pain and swelling, but in most cases it is as stated above, their bites are mild annoyances. Read on to find the terrible truth about house centipede bites!

Further research of mine led me me to find out that house centipedes eats spiders, and insects… excellent! Okay, I let this one free into the planter. I have disposed of them before, and they are incredibly fragile, they almost dematerialize when you even lightly squish them in a wad of toilet paper. Their spindly legs pop off and, yeah, it’s just pretty weird overall. Imagine that, someone touches you and parts fall off of your body!

Also of interesting note, to some, and perhaps a bit scary to others some of these house centipedes can move as fast as 16 inches per second(!) Figure that 2″ is the large size, that’s 8 times their body length per second. So that would be like a 6′ human running at 48fps or about 32 miles per hour ( in actuality and fortunate for most of us, 16 inches per second works out to be a ground speed of about 0.9 MPH, do you feel any better!? )

House Centipede wuvs you(r bugs)!

Here are some additional stats:

Can house centipedes be completely eliminated from a home? My understanding from the reading I’ve done is that house centipedes cannot be completely eliminated from a home or from around a home. Spraying pesticides and placing sticky traps and other things will only have temporary success. I spoke with a local exterminator and he said that the best time to put down a pesticide for house centipedes will be in April if you want to get a lead on them. They will be back, though so you have to continue to treat. The guy I spoke to recommended granular insecticides around the outside perimeter of the home that specify they work on centipedes or house centipedes from one of the home stores. I’d highly recommend checking into one of the pest control companies in your area and see what you can do, some of them are linked around here on this site, but you ultimately decide if you need to go that far.

One other important thing is that house centipedes need a source of food to eat. Much like fellow broke friends in your formative years, if there’s nothing to eat at your place they’ll go to someone else’s place. If they’re hanging out at your place it means the centipedes are getting fed somehow, which probably means you may have a kind of bug-buffet going on somewhere in your house and maybe a reason to call an exterminator ‘pest specialist’ (like I mentioned previously), or whatever other politically correct name they have now, out to see whats going on.

You can reduce the number of house centipedes (scutigera coleoptrata) living and hiding in your home in a few ways. Of utemost importance is to seal the gaps around pipes in walls, seal holes in the walls, seal gaps around doors, etc. Basically seal your home like you would if you were trying to weatherize it. If you do this you’ll prevent bugs in your home AND save electricity or save fuel oil. The bugs can move around inside walls. In older uninsulated homes or open frame homes they have a lot more places to go. Keep your house dry, they prefer cool moist climates such as wet basements, showers, toilets, etc. Good basement and bathroom ventilation and maybe a mechanical dehumidifier can be important in reducing the desirability of your home as a centipede habitat. (same procedure to control molds as well, mold is evil, so prevent this too with one combined attack!)

In the winter months these little guys and gals are more likely to move into a warm area like your garage, basement or home, but they still need moisture as well so don’t be surprised to see more of them from Fall through Spring, most at the start and the end of those periods though. Sort of like college move in and move out times.

How is a house centipede born? House centipede eggs are laid in spring and early summer and they are born with 4 pairs of legs and as they grow they molt 5 times in their life. The female produces an average of 65 eggs in the Spring. Each egg is individually fertilized and ‘planted’ as opposed to some bugs 1000 eggs hatching at once in some freaky alien swarm routine. The centipede babies and the mother centipede live near each other for the first couple of weeks.

What eats house centipedes? Other house centipedes, Dogs, Cats, not a lot of other detail available that I could find. Pets such as dogs and cats tend to eat anything that’s creepy and runs around a lot. If you could actually watch some of the bugs they eat you’d probably be terrified, I don’t doubt that

What do house centipedes eat? They eat mostly smaller arthropods and spiders. They generally won’t attack anything that will outmatch them unless it’s in self defense. (I’m sure there’s always a few idiots in the crowd ‘hey hold my beers and watch this!’ but all species suffer from that one).

How long do house centipedes live? I’ve been doing some reading and have seen numbers like 7.5 year lifespans being thrown around to reach their large sizes. So when you see a really large centipede it means they’ve been there for a while, possibly living outside in your leaves and bushes and underbrush, and just coming in recently when it rained.

A question to my viewers: I seem to get a lot of people searching ‘house centipede eggs’. Are these a delicacy did you find some? Are you trying to get rid of them? Do you have a dastardly plot to seek revenge on someone and need some centipede hatch-lings? Do you have photos? I’d love to hear your input below in the comments because I’m completely baffled why you’d search for eggs.

Additional Photos: I snapped a couple of nice pics of a small house centipede, this one was only 2cm long and wandering around the bathroom. It’s pretty young as far as that goes as some of the bigger ones can be 2-3 times this size. Anyways I thought these couple of photos turned out nice. As I was trying to photograph the little guy/gal I put my hand down in front of it and it just went in another direction.. Every time! Which is about 20 times! I don’t think this qualifies as a baby house centipede as it has quite a few legs already, but it’s certainly young. I have seen smaller house centipedes than this but have never captured photos of them. This one is still alive and well as I left it, as were all the others that I photographed, though outdoors now!

If you enjoyed my page about house centipedes, or at least found it interesting, please share it with you friends or acquainted to show them the creepy beasts you have run across and if you have any photos or YouTube video, please share a link below (just put it right into the comment box).

The follow Short video of a large house centipede video (downloads, then plays automatically)

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