We already got an earthquake which happened on August 23rd. It was based in Washington DC but some of my friends said they felt a soft swaying in the Hudson Valley / Saugerties / Kingston area and earlier this summer nearby Massachusetts was hit by some powerful tornadoes. It probably doesn’t hurt to prepare for this or other possible natural disasters which may occur.

They’re saying Irene is going to be a Category 1 and from the current storm track it’s not going to hit my area directly but stay more towards the coast. This just means high winds and a lot of rain but nothing extremely serious. If you’re in an area that’s going to get directly hit you’ll need to do a lot more to be prepared some of which are covered in the second part of the list.

A few of the things I’m going to do just in case Irene is going to pass by us, but indirectly hit us:

• Make sure that any and all loose objects around the property are secured pretty good. I have a couple of carpentry projects on the porch that will need to be relocated out of the possible wind.I certainly don’t want my stuff blowing into the neighbors house!
• Add some more weight to the base of the BBQ grill. I already have a paver holding it down which has worked fine when we’ve had 60mph wind gusts, but I’m going to put a nice big cinder block on the base too. Either that or move it into the shed (probably a better bet) might need it later for cooking.
• Move the trash bins into the shed as well, those things will fly around like kites and I don’t want to have to go hunting for them after the storm.
• Check the gutters and make sure that they are clear of leaves, twigs, etc as much as possible. There’s supposed to be a lot of rain coming with this storm as well and I want to make sure as much of it as possible goes well away from the house.
• Check the sump pump and make sure it’s working good.
• Get some supplies together just in case.  Some bags of ice in case we need some for a cooler, water( 1 gallon per person per day), some food that doesn’t need to be cooked in case the power goes out, fill up the vehicles, fill up the gas cans. I already have tons of batteries and numerous flashlights floating around here. Charcoal is good to have in case you need to boil water or cook (outdoors!)
• Park the cars away from the barn and the trees. The last thing we need is flattened vehicles.
• Maybe it’s also a good time to trim some branches away from the house and look for any sickly trees on the property that I’d rather have fall where I want them.
• Charge up the portable jump start pack and hook up the power inverter just in case we need some power to charge phones, turn on the TV or run the sump pump during a power outage. Fortunately the inverter can run off the car batteries too so it’s kind of like a makeshift generator.
• Keep cell phones on the charger, so if the power goes out they’re fully charged. (Emergency services in most of the Hudson Valley area is 911, but if you’re in an area that’s not covered make sure to get the numbers for medical, local police, state police and fire emergency services in your area.) Ulster County Emergency Services, Greene County Emergency Services, Orange County Emergency Services, Rockland County Emergency Services are some, you can also check out NYALERT.org an emergency notification service by NY State or their iPhone app i-Alertz.
• Find or buy a battery powered radio and have batteries for it. With modern technology battery powered portable radios aren’t all that common but it’s good to get a small one and keep batteries for it. (Thanks for the tip Nermel!)
• Charge up the camcorder and camera and clear the memory cards so I can get some good hurricane footage.
• Unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to build a moat or a sniper tower around the house this summer, so if things go real bad and there’s a resulting zombie apocalypse I’m going to have to figure something else out.
• Keep clean clothes, important documents, identification and other documents ready to go if things get worse or an evacuation is called for.
• Report power outages and downed power lines or trees on roadways as soon as possible so emergency services can take care of them and protect people. Make note of the phone number for Central Hudson or your provider on a piece of paper as internet or directory service may not be available in an emergency situation.

Some other things you might do in your situation

• If you fill your bathtub with water, you can use it to fill the tank of your toilet to flush it if you don’t have water. If you really really clean out your bathtub and drain opening well you can use it to store water for drinking.
• Keep your pets indoors well before the storm, they can get scared and run off.
• If you have a generator, test it out and make sure it works and has fuel and oil. Don’t run a generator indoors or outside by open windows, the exhaust can poison and kill you.

If your town is going to be directly impacted, then you need to take many more steps. I’m going to be keeping an eye on the storm track and if it starts tracking inland AND we get an evacuation order or similar I’ll do as much of the following as possible.

• Install storm windows and board up windows. (it makes some holes, but it’s cheaper than fill holes than replace windows)
• If you expect heavy storm damage to your home, protect the valuables you can’t take with you as much as possible by sealing them in waterproof bags, storing them up out of flood areas (second floor, or high on counters). Lock your windows and doors, close your shades.
• Turn off your gas, water and electricity if possible. Gas and electricity in a damaged home increases the risk greatly to emergency workers and when you are returning home and broken water lines can cause damage which may be difficult to claim on insurance if it was the result of a hurricane.
• Get a few hundred dollars in cash or more to last you and your family at least a week. If power-lines and communications are going to be down, an ATM might not work. You know the old saying, “In God We Trust, all others pay cash”.
• Keep your clothes, important documents and identification waterproofed and packed by the door so when you leave it’s already there.
• Don’t wait until the last minute if an evacuation order has been filed
• Book a hotel room in advance in an unaffected area if you need to stay in one
• If you’re going to be driving for a while, make sure you have checked your oil, transmission fluid, windshield washer fluid, tire pressure and other things as well as have already topped off your tank.
• Check with neighbors and friends to see if they need help evacuating or getting prepared.
• Plan in advance where to meet if you get separated from friends or family during evacuation.
• Don’t ride the storm out when everyone else in town has left, it’s a bad idea and it’s not worth playing the odds. If you decide you’re going to, write your SSN on your arm under your shirt so that your body can be more easily identified by the rescue workers in case you don’t survive.

Important things to do / not to do in any emergency situation:

• Because we’re not regularly hit by hurricanes, many homes in this area are less resistant to hurricanes than homes built in places like Florida. Don’t trust your house to stay in one piece throughout a hurricane where local authorities have ordered evacuation. Here’s a good read on hurricane damage
• If your town has been heavily hit, don’t count on the city water being clean. You need to sterilize it. You can boil it for 1 minutes (though longer is better), use unscented bleach to do this (8 drops per gallon, or 16 if it’s cloudy) or you can buy water sterilization tablets from a outdoor outfitters store.
• Don’t ever use charcoal or propane grills inside of the home or garage for cooking or heat. This will, more than likely, kill you and your family with carbon monoxide poisoning. Charcoal is only good for cooking outside and if you waited till the last minute you’re going to have a hard time finding some anyways.
• Stay away from downed trees and power lines, don’t even get close to them. If a downed power line is active the electricity can be conducted through the ground or other objects such as trees and into your body, killing you. There’s no way to tell if it’s live, they don’t always spark and spit like you see in the movies.
• If you return to a damaged home, don’t stay inside of it until a structural engineer or similarly knowledgeable person has deemed it safe. It’s possible for damage to look less than it is and then have the building collapse at a later time.
• Double check yourself to make sure you’re making the right decisions, it’s easy to make a mistake when your in a rush, when in doubt, ask a trusted friend or neighbor.

It sounds like a lot or maybe excessive and panicky, but it’s really not a big deal if you go step by step and react depending on the severity,  it’s just some planning ahead (Some of the general stuff is maintenance I should have done over the summer anyways.) Hurricane Irene is still a few days out and it could change it’s direction but I’m not going to count on lucking out for this one. You can find out more about Hurricane Irene and watch this storm at The Weather Channel.

There’s also NOAA’s updates: Public Advisory which they update regularly with the latest info.

This is by no means the end-all be-all  survival guide or a ‘do this and you’ll be ok’ list. It’s a bunch of good ideas that will help you out. Always listen to your state or local emergency management staff to know when you can stay, when you should go and everything else about a storm. That’s what they’re paid to do and should have up to the minute news that will help you decide the best options and decisions to make.

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The room is part burnt-orange paint on cracked plaster, part unpainted drywall, and part burnt orange on drywall. The doors looked horrible so we painted one, and the other one was so bad that we pulled it off and stripped the paint with chemical stripper. It’s still sitting on the front porch waiting for a final sanding and some coats of paint and new hinges, but it will look nice.

In the pictures below you see the old room and may think the orange isn’t super terrible, but that’s with the camera flash. Imagine that orange with a single 60 watt lightbulb in the middle of the room, dimly lit.

Bleah! terrible looking, plus the drill press and tons of junk stacked on top of the dryer (great table to have next to the drill press.)

We sanded and removed the dust from the drywall, patched the cracks, sanded those and cleaned the dust then painted the walls with a nice white flat latex paint. We went to paint the ceiling with rollers and the paint on the ceiling started peeling! We switched to brushes which didn’t peel the paint, but after 2-3 hours huge sections of the previous ceiling paint were just falling off the ceiling onto the floor.

We ended up scraping as much of the original paint of the ceiling as possible, most of it just peeled like the skin of a grape, leaving a perfectly brown surface. For some reason the previous owner had put the drywall in with the brown side down. I’m guessing he probably bought some damaged drywall cheap that only had a good bottom side and figured it was good enough.

Since we wasted almost a gallon on the ceiling, which then peeled off, I just bought some more of the white bonding primer I had been using on the outside of the house. It looks great on the sealing and soaked into the paper, it won’t peel off now!

We painted the trim in a color called ‘portico’ I think it still needs another coat but it’ll look nice when it’s completely finished. Here you can see some of the shots of the new paint.

It’s amazing how much nicer it is. Even with just that one 60-watt light bulb the room is still extremely bright and well lit. When we come home it’s more like ‘ahh I’m home’ than ‘Agh! I’m home’ feeling. Soothing colors. We’re thinking of doing the hallway (now a wheat color with white trim) in the same color and combining it into the steps somehow since the upstairs hallway is all white as well.

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The other day I was looking out the window and saw the culprit so I took some photos of it. You can see in the picture below an innocent looking bunny rabbit, which seems to be healthy and well fed. I’m guessing this little guy/gal has been nibbling at the plants. I took a lot of pictures but this is the one which turned out best.

There’s been some other creatures wandering around the yard, but I don’t think this next one has been eating my plants. Probably just hunting bunnies.  The video below was taken with a Bushnell ‘Trophy Cam’. It’s a motion activated wildlife camera with infrared lighting that can shoot video or stills when the sensor is tripped. The camera shoots black and white and night and full color during the day.

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Bryn’s car is a West Coast 1987 Honda Accord DX with the carbeurated 2.0 liter 4-cylinder (it’s actually 1.996 Liters) so it’s in pretty good shape and worth maintaining. One of the guys at the parts shop couldn’t believe how good of condition it was in when he looked at it to determine which parts he needed to order.

On Thursday we replaced the air filter and valve cover seal. We went after the air filter because Bryn noticed his fuel mileage was getting worse, and I wanted to start at the top. If an engine can’t breath right it’s not going to run right. It’s a good thing we replaced the air filter because that thing was looking just nasty, it should have been done long ago and I showed Bryn how to do it so he can continue to maintain his own vehicles rather than having to pay people to do it.

As you can see in the photographs below the filter was jammed pack full of all sorts of nastyness so I was hoping that replacing the filter would give him some greater performance.  Well, after all was said and done he didn’t think the performance felt much better at all.  But at least his engine can draw in as much fresh air as it can use now.

Valve Cover Gasket
We also replaced his valve cover gasket because he was getting some smoke out of the engine compartment. I could see where the oil was leaking down on top of the exhaust manifold and boiling off.  There’s only one place on that engine that the leak could be coming from and that was the valve cover gasket. There was some oil mixed with crud around the joint where the valve cover meets the head of the engine and some wet oil, but no visibly flowing weeks.  He ordered the valve cover gasket along with the air filter earlier in the week so we had both parts.

The valve cover gasket was old and crusty, and we could once we had the valve cover off where the oil had been leaking through the seal and onto the engine.

Unfortunately I did not take many pictures of this part but I can give you a run down description of how it went. These are just the steps we took and if you’re reading this and thinking of doing your own you may want to also refer to a manual like Haynes or similar. I can say that this description is more detailed. If you’re not interested in knowing how to do this you can skip down to the brakes pictures and stuff further down the page.

The valve cover comes off easily on most vehicles, the Accord was no different.  The steps were as follows.

1. Remove the support bracket from between the valve cover and the air filter box, it’s held on with 2 10mm bolts on the air filter box and 2 10mm bolts on the valve cover.
2. Disconnect the crankcase vent hose from the valve cover. It’s held on with a spring clamp, then twisting the hose well pulling on it gets it off.
3. Temporarily move any throttle cables and vacuum lines out of the way. We used the air cleaner clips to keep them up and out of the way.
4. Remove the 3 cap nuts from the top of the valve cover, these hold the cover on. Make sure not to drop them into the engine compartment, we did and had to use a magnet on a stick to retrieve one.
5. The valve cover will be adhered well to the engine head you’ll need to carefully pry the valve cover off. I would recommend using a hard plastic tool as metal objects can gouge the mating surface on the head and keep you from ever getting a good seal again. A thin pointed object should work well, push it into the space between the valve cover and the head block to break the seal in several places then carefully pry upwards. Once the seal has started to separate the valve cover will pop off easily.
6. Make sure to note where the corner tabs were located on the old seal then pull it out, it’s easy to remove.
7. Pull the 3 top seals out of the valve cover as well, the ones that the bolts went through. The ones on Bryn’s car were hard and brittle and actually broke into pieces.
8. Use some paper towels to wipe out the inside of the valve cover while you have it off. Get rid of built up grime and don’t leave any debris in the.
9. Also clean out the valve grove very well to remove any junk, oil and goop. Make sure to do a really good job.
10. Insert the new valve cover seal into valve cover and press it into the groove with your fingers.
11. Clean the top of the head where the seal rests against, use a solvent if you have to. Be careful the machined edges are sharp.
12. Set the valve cover back down on top of the head carefully aligning it over the 3 studs which poke through the top.
13. Set the three new seals on top of the valve cover over the threaded rod and push them down gently.
14. Re-install the 3 cap nuts by hand until you can’t turn them any further, then use a wrench to tighten each one down a bit at time until they stop turning. Because these are cap nuts they can only screw down so far and if you force it you’re likely to break off the mounting stud.
15. Place the throttle cable and vacuum lines back in their clips and reconnect the breath line, replace the clamp.
16. Reattach the bracket between the valve cover and the air cleaner box and fasten it securely.
17. Run the engine and check for oil leaks, take it for a test drive and look again for oil leaks. Make sure to check it in a few more days as well.

That project went great, no more oil leaking on the engine and no more smoke pouring out of the engine compartment. I think Bryn was surprised at how easy it was to do and how much money he saved by not paying a shop to do the work.

Front Brakes
We picked up front pads and rear shoes for Bryn’s accord on Saturday and also a tie rod end for the passenger side (right side) as well since the one there was in rough shape. The total for the parts came in well under $100.

The front brakes weren’t too difficult to do though at all though we did discover the reason why the fuel mileage in Bryn’s car had been getting worse and worse over time and lacked power. One of the brake calipers was nearly seized. It was almost impossible to compress the piston back into the housing with a C-Clamp so that it’d fit around the new brake pads. In comparison the other piston was easy to press back into the housing with the clamp and caused no trouble.  We are going to replace the calipers in a couple of weeks once his budget allows, but since we forced the bad piston back into the housing the Accord seems to have more power, though I am worried about the brakes wearing heavily on one side. Also the boots on both pistons are torn. New calipers are about $50 a piece.

I showed Bryn how to do this on the drivers side first, and then he did a majority of the work on the passenger side.

The pad replacement is straight forward though slightly different from some other vehicles I was used to. Here’s what we did.

1. Loosened the wheel lug nuts slightly
2. Jacked the car up and removed the lug nuts the rest of the way and removed the wheel
3. Removed the lower slider pin from the brake caliper, the upper slide pin head is round and cannot be removed with a socket wrench. It instead acts as a pivot point for the caliper.
4. Removed the two bolts in the bracket which holds the caliper brake line. The caliper may have overstretched and damaged the hose if this bracket was not freed.
5. Placed a C clamp around the caliper with the fixed end behind the caliper and the threaded end against the outer brake pad through the provided cutout in the caliper.
6. Compressed the break piston by tightening the C-clamp as much as possible. The piston should be nearly flush with the caliper housing, but it’s hard to see that with the pads in place.
7. Once we compressed the piston the caliper easily pulled up and away from the caliper bracket, leaving the brake pads sitting in the bracket. We used a piece of wire to tie the caliper up and out of the way.
8. Removed the old break pads by sliding them sideways out of the slots and marveled at how little brake material was actually left.
9. We had to compress the brake pistons a little more, we did this by placing a block of wood against the piston and again used the C-clamp to compress the piston more.
10. Installed the new brake pads and their included shims. The shims had a tendency to want to fall off so we bent the tabs slightly to hold them tight and used anti-squeak on them as well.
11. Rotated the caliper back down over the new brake pads and made sure everything fit well.
12. Replaced the two 10mm screws to secure the bracket that holds the caliper brake line.
13. Greased and replaced the slider bolt on the bottom end of the caliper and torqued it down.
14. Replace the wheel, snug the lug nets
15. Lowered the vehicle and tightened the lug nuts then Bryn went for a test drive.

He said the brakes were GREAT and he also noticed that the car seemed to have more power and accelerate more easily. This leads me to believe the seized brake piston was causing vehicle problems and may be what has been affecting his fuel milage, as mentioned above.

Rear Brakes
We ran out of daylight on Saturday to work on Bryn’s accord, all we had left to do for this weekend were the rear brakes so we decided to do them next weekend.

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I asked to look at the bill and saw that it was related to something called NewsUNeed or TheNewsUNeed and started doing some online research. Within a few minutes I found out that this service is known as an SMS cramming service. They often send out an originating text / SMS message to your phone that says ‘If you do not want this service, send STOP to ‘. This is totally the wrong way to do things and is certainly a scam.

A shortcode is a special phone number which is used for text messaging and is usually shorter than a phone number. There are shared short codes where a number of different companies or products can share the same short code, but each have different keywords and some companies have spent the extra money to get their own short code that is either memorable or relates closely to something in their business such as the product name transposed into numbers on the phones keypad.

Generally when you subscribe to a text service you have to initiate the contact yourself after seeing a call to action such as an ad or billboard. You will see a call to actions such as ‘Text to to subscribe’ then once you do that you will get a welcome message for the texting programs.

For some cell service providers such as T-Mobile a double Opt-In is required. You send the original text message to the texting service requesting a subscription, then they will send you a message back asking if you really want to subscribe.

Many text messaging programs are offered for free, in fact I would say a large majority of them. Corporations and Vendors use text programs to build a communications channel with their users and promote their products, specials and discounts. It’s a great way to communicate with people and usually it’s low hassle to boot.

What these crammers and scammers are doing is instead of you sending a message to them, they automatically subscribe you to their service without your permission and then send you a text message which says reply ‘STOP’ to unsubscribe. Most people will write this off as a spam message and not send any response to it at all. Since they do not receive the stop message they continue to bill you each month for a service, and they probably don’t even provide you that service at all or very rarely send you text messages.

The Mobile Marketing Association has set out best practices for running texting programs. Many of these best practices are based on the rules which the cell phone companies have put forward as rules for using their systems. Most text messaging programs are handled by companies which provide fully managed services, they are also known as aggregators. They take a companies business plan and the carriers they wish to support and then handle all the contractual and agreements for your program with all of the different cell service providers.  Many aggregators also provide interfaces for sending out and receiving text messages, subscriptions and provide statistics.

You should certainly look over your recent cell phone bills for any unidentified charges. If you don’t jump on this ASAP you are limiting the amount of money that you can be refunded either by the phone company or the company that is doing the cramming.  In the case of NewUNeed I have seen one article where a guy called the company and was able to get a credit directly from them. If you can’t get a hold of the company your next resort is to contact your cell phone provider and work with them.  But there’s some catches of course. How much is your time worth, how much money did you lose to these crammerscammers and how much of your own time is it worth to recover your money?

You should watch the video below.  The video is from Hamid Shojaee at AZDISRUPTORS.COM and covers his own experience in trying to resolve his unauthorized crammer subscriptions and get money refunded, as well as dealing with phone companies to try and get his money back from Jason Hope, a guy who runs a large network of text message cramming and scamming companies.

This guy is bound to become extremely hated, you should look at what he’s doing with your money. He’s building a house twice the size of Bill Gate’s house with tons of amenities, all off the backs of people who don’t even know they’re buying his products!

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Well, I don’t know if this little guy has actually caused any problems, but these are natures little gremlins, those things that get into the machinery and cause issues. Up till today my experience with gremlins was the one on the Bugs Bunny cartoon, and the Gremlins movie.  But now I’ve seen a real live one looking mischievous.  Enjoy the video

Here’s the Bugs Bunny gremlin video as well

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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.

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Choosing an HD projector was not an easy choice as there are quite a few projectors out there in this range with a wide variation of features. If you’re installation space allows you to use a DLP projector and you aren’t affected by the rainbow effect then you can get something for even less such as the Optoma HD20 1080p – (User Manuals, Quick Start Guide, Distance Calculator). I had seriously considered the HD20 as it has a lower price at around $950 but for reasons you’ll see below I went with the Epson 8350.

Why Did I Choose 3 LCD over DLP? I had two options both in affordable ranges but after doing a bit of research I found that most of the DLP projectors in my price range did not have a lens shift feature.  These are the little knobs you twist on the projector to move the picture up and down and left and right which was an important feature requirement to me.  Because the low price DLP projectors don’t have lens shift adjustment you have to be very careful about where you place them.  Low price LCD projectors on the other hand usually have at minimum up and down lens tilt. The 8350 has up / down and left / right lens tilt. Additionally the DLP projectors in this range did not have a wide zoom lens adjustment. You use the zoom lens to shrink or enlarge the image to fit your screen.  The Epson 8350 has a 2.1:1 zoom lens on it which makes it very adjustable compared to the Optoma HD20′s zoom lens which is only a 1.2:1 ratio. The major limiting factor was my 8 foot tall ceiling and the room being 12 feet front to back.  The required space and positioning of the DLP type projectors in my room just wouldn’t work out well. One other concern is that some people are sensitive to the DLP rainbow effect and I didn’t want something that’d work for some people and not for others. Who wants a guest that says ‘Just use the TV, the big screen really messes with my eyes’ or something to that effect?

The Epson PowerLite Home Theater 8350. The projector and the mount came in the mail together but the projector screen I ordered an Elite Screens Pull Down Projection Screen, 16:9 Aspect Ratio-92in (Matte White) was shipped from the factory and won’t show up until later. For the weekend I picked up an Epson Duet 80-Inch 4:3 and 16:9 Aspect Ratio Screen from Staples. They have a 14 day no questions asked return policy so this was pretty convenient for the weekend however I may decide to keep it as it’s a very nice and portable screen for a low price. If you’re interested in screens click the link to see my Installation and Review of the Elite Screens ELIM92UWH which may give you an idea of what you’re looking at to install a projector screen.

The projector installed easily to the ceiling once I used a stud finder to locate the joist in the ceiling to mount it to.  The mount, which has to be purchased separately from a third party as it does not come stock with a ceiling mount, used two 3″ long lag bolts on either side of the ceiling plate and was easy to do. I put about a third of my body weight against it to make sure it would not pull out of the joist. It’s important to center the mount left to right with where you plan to install your screen and if you are using a DLP projector you need to read the projectors manual to get the mounting height as well. With an LCD projector that has the lens tilt feature the height is less important.

One thing to keep in mind with a lens tilt feature is that if your display area is setup up properly, then a keystone correction feature is not required. This may sound totally crazy, but the front lens on the projector is heavily ‘bowed’ and moves in front of the other projection elements. If your projector is to the right, or left or above or below your projection screen, as long as the projector is set at 90 degree angles, you’ll be able to adjust the image to the screen without the need for a keystone feature.

There actually is a keystone correction feature, but it is reffered to as ‘automatic keystone correction’. The lens itself will deform and adjust the image to be square as you adjust the lens shift feature so if your projector is not centered on the screen, don’t try to point it at the screen, just make sure you have the projector and the screen at 90 degree sharp angles to each other, then use the lens shift knobs to move the image onto the screen, this will result in a square (edges are at right angles to each other) display. If the projector is off center, left/right or up/down and you work to aim it directly at the screen(a straight line from the lens to the screen), then you will cause a keystone effect.

As I mentioned the ceiling mount was not included with the Epson 8350 projector and was bought third party, a Sanus VMPR1.  There are quite a few options for projector mounts with good ratings so I would either find one that fits your budget, has good reviews and fits the looks you want. If you’re mounting to a vaulted ceiling, make sure the mount that states it can be installed on vaulted ceilings, not all of them can. Below are a few photos of the projector mounted to the ceiling. Note (8/21/2011): A reader asked via the contact form if the Sanus VMPR1 reached the mounting holes in the 8350. The 8350 had 5 mounting holes spaced relatively far apart. There’s 4 on the corners and 1 front and center. The Sanus mount has four arms but using the included extension it is connected to the 2 corner mount points at the rear of the projector. The front arms are then crossed over each other and attached to the front center mount point.

A reader, GregC, emailed me about the mount I was using and I gave him some details, he decided to go with another type of mount and says he is very happy with it as well. The mount he purchased was the Sanus VP1-B1 for around $229.99 from Best Buy. He said the arms all reached the mounting holes on the projector and that it feels very secure although it cost a bit more. He’s been using his 8350 on a 92″ Stewart screen with the projector mounted 14 feet away from the screen and seems happy watching sports and movies on it.

The remote control for the Epson 8350 is pretty squarish and clean cut, it’s not very stylish but it gives you access to all the settings that you’ll need to adjust the projector and for selecting your source inputs. The back light on the remote is orange and subdued so it won’t be blinding you while trying to watch a move and adjust things.

The package I bought came with a 25 foot HDMI cable which I’ve been using to watch TV and Blu-Ray movies but I think it may come up a little short and I’m not sure if it is C2 (in wall) rated.  I’m going to use this cable to connect my PC to the projector and I ordered a 35 foot heavy gauge C2 rated cable to run from the back wall, under the floor boards and up behind the entertainment center to the 4 input, 2 output (or 2×4) HDMI matrix switch I purchased but that’s for another post.

I set up the Epson Duet screen in the front of the room before the 92-inch Elite Screens pull down arrived. The Duet barely fits in that spot but I do get about 76 of the full 80-inches out of it.  The 92-inch Elite pull down screen I ordered is wider but since it does not require a floor stand it will be further back in the room and pull down directly in front of the TV so there should be no issues with the available space for the screen.

I’ve taken some photos of the screen while watching TV, Movies and Blu-Rays and the quality has impressed me for being a ‘entry level’ projector as other reviewers mentioned it’s pretty good.  The blacks could be blacker but that’s the only thing I really notice.  The Epson 8350 is bright, sharp and very clear. I’ve tried the setup for video games, particularly Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (PC) , and Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit (PC) and most recently Portal 2 (PC). The games are great on this projector! I am very satisfied with the performance and quality there as well though it’s a bit weird to play a game on such a huge screen at first and the detail is amazing.

The rest of the photos below were taken of the Epson 8350 projector on the temporary Epson Duet screen.  You can see the pictures I took with the 92″ Elite Screens screen installed on my Elite Screens ELIM92UWG Pull Down Projector Screen Review.  The pictures were shot with my 8.1 megapixel point and shoot Sony DSC-H10 camera. The Blu-Ray photos are the ones with a higher aspect ratio and are in 1080p the ones which look taller are shot from TV at 1080i with terrible compression from our cable provider.

The photo below was taken of a TV commercial with the camera flash enabled. I wanted to see how bright the projector really was and I was surprised that the picture was still this visible even when saturated with a camera flash.

Overall I’m very happy with this projector so far and I think I’ll be using it for a long time. The quality is stunning compared to the older projectors I’m used to. The brightness of the Epson 8350 is great and even during the daytime, if I have my shades closed the screen is still bright.

The lamp is rated for 4000 hours in economy or standard mode which works out to be 166 days of watching your TV non-stop 24 hours a day 7 days a week. The projector doesn’t support 3D and for the most part you’ll need a more expensive projector if you want to do that. I’m personally not sold on the whole 3D effect as it doesn’t really look natural to me and while I ‘see 3D’ it’s really annoying 3D, so this wasn’t a feature I really wanted. Perhaps in the future new 3D technologies and as film directors gain more experience shooting in 3D things will improve, but I will buy a 3D projector when and if that happens.

The projector makes a great home theatre TV for the price, compared to buying a normal 1080P HD TV.  While prices on LCD TV’s have been dropping rapidly a home theater projector and screen is certainly worth a look and your consideration. It may not be for everyone but I wouldn’t dismiss the thought right away because you could be missing out on something great. The news looks great, TV shows look great, movies are incredible and gaming is a blast, especially with friends over.

In the next week or two I’ll be running the HDMI cables in the walls, installing a 4×2 HDMI matrix switch and taking care of a few other supplemental things which I will be documenting on my site as well.

Update 8/13/2011: I’ve rolled the hour meter on the projector over 1500 hours. I’m surprised that I’ve had it on that long already, but it’s still putting out a great picture and reliable as ever. I’ve not run into any glitches or weirdities with this projector, it just works very quietly and in the background you don’t even really notice other than to turn it on or off.

If you have any questions about my setup please let me know by commenting below this post.

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Last year the Bottini oil guys came to adjust the air vent on my oil tank because it had settled into a downward slope vent-side and oil was blowing out of the tank when they were trying to fill it.  As I was watching the guy work in the basement (I didn’t want him stealing none of my precious basement rocks but mostly just like to see people who know how to do their jobs, do their jobs.) a little mouse skittered by on the stone foundation.

Now, I don’t particularly mind mice. They eat bugs and if they live in the basement that’s cool. I’ve never seen evidence of them in the house.  After hearing them climbing up through the uninsulated walls though I decided I need to get a handle on the situation before it got out of control.  I bought some mouse traps and decided to give them a whirl. The traps were the “Ortho® Home Defense® Max Kill and Contain Mouse Trap (0320110)”.  That sounded suitable for a mouse trap. It kills the poor little bugger and I don’t have to see it’s corpse.

Here’s a picture of the packaging for the Ortho Home Defense Max Mouse Trap:

Well I set two of these traps in the house with peanut butter. One by the base of the fridge where crumbs and other things might settle, and one in the back project room where there’s plenty of places for mice to run around and play.  I left them there for about a month but no success.   I had considered setting them up outdoors but I figured that’d be a bit unfair to the mice.

Finally I spread a little honey over the original peanut butter bait which was untouched and stuck the traps on the top of the basement stairs.  Nothing for the first couple of days and then this evening I checked again and presto, both of the traps had been tripped.  No legs or tails hanging out, so I though all was good.  Unfortunately I heard a soft scratching noise in one of the traps. I poked at one of them and nothing. I then poked at the other one and it wiggled back at me! I was pretty sure that at least one trap had a severely mangled live mouse in it that I’d have to put out of it’s misery.

I opened up the non-moving trap and there was obviously a dead mouse inside of it.  My heart kind of sunk at that.  More so because there were a lot of plastic shreds all over showing the mouse didn’t die quickly but was scratching away trying to get out. At least this model has good springs on the door, I guess.

I didn’t really want to kill the mice it wasn’t a vengeance thing or a hate for mice. I just didn’t want them in the basement or in the walls eating the wiring and burning my house down.  I threw the trap with the dead mouse in the trash can outside.  In the other trap, though, I knew the mouse was alive so I took it outside and under the ultra-high-power LED yard light slowly pried the trap open. I haven’t dealt with ‘wild’ mice before so I wasn’t sure if the thing was going to jump out at me in a rage of self defense or what.

As I opened the trap nothing came out so I peered in and there looking back at me was this tiny, cute mouse with little beady black eyes staring back at me. I blew into the trap to see if it would respond and didn’t do anything but breath.  I turned the trap over and shook it just above the ground to try and release the mouse but it didn’t come out. I set the trap down on the ground and pressed the door open, thinking the mouse could climb out.  But of course the trap closed back up on it again.  I bet that was traumatic for the mouse, too, when it tripped again. I probably spent 5 minutes gently shaking and knocking on the trap to get the little thing to bail out.  I did manage to knock a spider out, but not the mouse.  I looked into the trap a few times and the little guy was cowering and clinging for dear life inside the trap.  FINALLY the mouse shook out of the trap and hopped a couple times atop the snow then ran into the woods.

These traps suck.  They aren’t completely successful at killing the mice so you might end up with a live mouse slowly starving to death in the trap if you don’t check it often.  That’s not cool. At my most basic instincts I don’t want to slowly starve to death inside a small plastic box, and I suspect a mouse doesn’t either. I don’t think that’s appropriate, but it really depends on your point of view. Of course I don’t want my guts picked out of me by a falcon while I’m still alive either, but I can only control myself

My next traps are going to be live catch traps or I’ll make a mouse trap myself and I’ll just let the little things go out at the R/C flying field or somewhere where they can live their natural mouse life cycle of eventually being something’s dinner.  At least I’ll be leaving it to nature to continue the cycle.

I’ve added some product links to live / no-kill / humane mouse traps on Amazon below if you want to see what’s out there and available. If you want to kill your mice there’s plenty of those inhumane mouse traps on there as well ranging from simple crush types to poisons to mini-mice-electric chair mouse electrocution devices as well and sticky traps. I think the sticky traps are particularly terrible.

Updated 3/13/2011: Here’s a cute little mouse I caught in a no-kill trap. I actually caught two mice, one in each of two traps.  The pic is blurry as I was trying to get a photo before the mouse bailed out of the open trap. I did get a picture of the other one as it ran away but it’s just a blur of brown. The traps worked pretty efficiently at keeping the mouse inside until I got to them. I just checked the traps in the morning before going to work every day. This was a victor trap but the mice are gnawing on the doors and I don’t think they’ll last long.

There’s another mouse trap design I’ve been reading about as I was looking at various mouse trap designs and that’s the simple gravity door mouse trap. the ‘Mice Cube’ traps seem to work pretty good, aren’t very advanced mouse traps (less to go wrong) but are super simple and don’t seem extremely prone to failure or chewing. I ordered a four pack of Mice Cubes for $8 from Amazon.

Update 3/18/2011: My Mice Cube mouse traps came in yesterday so I set one up to try it out. I didn’t catch anything in the evening but when I checked it in the morning before work I found one trapped mouse. I had seen in the reviews that there’s sometimes a lot of condensation in these traps and that maybe they should have ventilation. As you can see in the photo below there was quite a bit of condensation and a somewhat damp mouse in the trap. I drilled 5 small holes on the top of the 4 Mice Cubes so that should make it a less drenching experience for the mice.

I let the mouse outside since I didn’t have time to drive out to a remote place to drop it off. I just set out four mouse traps this evening and with any luck they’ll be full by the morning. I’ll just throw the caught mice in a 5 gallon bucket and drive them out to the middle of nowhere miles from any human population and let them go.

Well this evening has been somewhat productive. I put out the four no-kill mousetraps, the Mice Cubes, by Pied Piper Inc or some-such and have picked up some adolescent mice in the traps. I put the mice in the 5 gallon pail with some bedding made from shredded paper towels and since mouse #1 decided to tip over the water dish I just put a really wet piece of paper towel in there and some cracker bits in there for them.  I’ve been checking the traps every couple of hours and caught the first 2 mice in the first four hours but nothing on the last check. The mice seem to do okay in the 5 gallon pail together and everytime I check they’re just cuddled up next to each other as you can see in the picture below.

The mouse in the back is a little scared so its ears are back. When I opened the lid the mice were snuggled together and then the one in front got scared and started running around and the one in the back just hunkered back. The one in the front eventually ran back to the other one and I took a quick picture.

Mice Cube Success!

So for the record, that’s 8 lucky live mice trapped and 1 unfortunate dead mouse.

The best bait for mouse traps that I’ve found so far is the honey and peanut butter combined. I tried the peanut butter by itself , the creamy Jiff brand, first but with no response at all but when I switched to peanut butter with honey in the various traps that really seemed to get the mice’s attention. Hmm now -I- have a craving for a peanut butter and honey sandwich, those are pretty tasty.

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We’re still in the midst of the latest Winter storm which is hitting a lot of the country right now, but managed to get a couple of pictures of the weather. I’m just going to post them below. There’s also a couple pictures of the Ariens snow blower doing it’s job. I love how far this thing throws the snow. It’d probably be able to throw it all the way across the highway but I haven’t tried that yet!

Click the pictures to enlarge them.

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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.

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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!

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

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Here’s my beloved snowblower on it’s actual birthday (year 0) doing a bit of work on the driveway.  It looks so happy. (Click to imbiggenate)

So I’m sitting here, listening to the poor beast wailing in it’s own beastly way in the barn (It’s probably a mental thing but I don’t think work insurance covers psychologists… at least I don’t hear psychologists in my mind!) The barn doors are taking a bit of a beating as it bucks against them. But no.. It’s November 23rd and can you believe it was almost 60 degrees today!?

Then I start getting a gmail photo flood from the family out in Washington.. “oooh look snow! check out all the snow! OMG it’s a lot of snow!”.  It’s about 6 inches, and if you’re from the west coast you’ll know that’s a LOT of snow for people without plows and who are prohibited to save human lives by using salt because they may hurt a bunch of nasty tasting fish(unless it’s wood smoked, then yum).  BUT.. I digress.  Check out the photos below and see what they’re torturing me with!

This is one of the photo’s my Mom sent me as the snow started coming down and covering the lawn.  Washington State does get snow but normally they don’t get a lot in the sea level areas. The last big storm I remember was maybe about a foot and it shut down traffic, closed the highway and people were parking on the side of the road as they ran out of gas. Crazy stuff!  What a mess, I imagine this was pretty bad as well!

This is another picture from my mom.  Don’t they know copper conducts cold!!!  I’d stay far away from that vehicle!

This is a picture of my sisters front yard after more of the snow fell. Yeah there’s the sun. Typical Washington State. Freezing blizzard of doom one moment and sunny the next, then hail, then rain which melts all the snow, floods out the farmers, then freezes then melts, then 90 degree temps before misting for 6 months.

Here’s another pic of the snow storm in Washington State. It’s all dark and dreary too, like snow weather is supposed to be!

Thanks for sharing the pics family, it’s good to see you get some of the winter cheer as well!

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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!

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Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

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I have added two new domains http://www.jonslasers.com/ which contains the content from /laserblog and http://www.jonshobbies.com/ which contains the electronic and radio controlled hobbies I’m into.  The home blog will continue to contain articles about stuff about projects on the house, seasonal projects and other things primarily concerned with ‘home & living’.

The site http://www.thaltech.com/laserblog has always been it’s own segregated content so moving that to jonslasers.com was almost no problem. I say almost because I created a robots.txt to block search engines until I had finished making the changes.  Once I had made the changes I went to Google Webmaster Tools to update the sitemap.xml file and added the domain, but I forgot to change the robots.txt file to allow search engines.  This blocked Google and Adsense from crawling the page, but fortunately Google rescanned the robots.txt in around 24 hours, some people have had to way 10+ days for that.

Creating jonhobbies.com took a bit more work since I had to parse out a lot of the posts and other information by hand. I exported The Home Blog WordPress database to a file and imported it into the MySQL database on the new host. I replaced all internal references on the new database to this URL with the new URL using a couple of MySQL replace query. After verifying that all took effect, I then I went through and weeded out all the non-rc and non-electronic posts.

Once that was done I installed a re-director plug-in and manually edited about 50 posts to redirect to http://www.jonshobbies.com/ If you click on a link, on this page, for an Electronics or Radio Controlled related post you will automatically be redirected to that post at it’s new location http://www.jonshobbies.com/ this made possible by the WordPress plug-in Quick Page/Post Redirect. All of those pages have a 301 Redirect which is a permanent redirect. Google should pick up the redirection soon and index them sometime soon at their new location.  For now I’ll just leave the post previews and stuff on this site so any bookmarks will take people to the right place.

The final step now is to work through the jonhobbies.com posts and clean up some of the perma-links in the posts. I was originally using (like on this blog) the ../year/month/date/title structure but it makes for very long URLS.  On the jonslasers.com and jonshobbies.com sites I’ve switch to the /%postname%.html format for a more readable URL format.

If you like to follow my posts the best thing to do is to subscribe with an RSS reader at each site using your web browser or mobile phone (The pages have a ‘Rss Feed’ link button on the upper right hand corner of the screen’) or on your mobile click the RSS link or put it into your favorite reader. This way despite where I may post some information you can keep up to date. If you are only interested in certain topics then you only should subscribe to the sites which you are interested in.

If you’re not sure how to use RSS feeds, you can search on google, for example if you have an Android phone, just do a search on ‘Android RSS’ there should be something built into the phone that can read RSS feeds, but you can also get more advanced apps for your phone as well.  The newsreaders will let you know when anything has changed and give your portions of the posts as well.

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I purchased 2 feet of green and blue LED strip lighting from a vendor at the 2010 NEAT Fair while purchasing a Blade mSR and some extra batteries for it.  The LED strips can be cut down to sections consisting of 3 LEDs and require a 12 volt power supply. These strips can also be found that require a 5 volt supply.  The 12 volt powered strips work great on radio controlled models which use 3S Lithium Polymer battery packs. Because LEDs are low power draw, even a lot of LEDs won’t make for a huge impact in your flight times if you run them off of your main flight pack.  In my setup I use a male JST style connector on the canopy which makes connecting and disconnecting the LEDs for the canopy a simple and quick matter.  The female JST connector’s wires run to and tie in with the power lines which run the helicopter tail boom lighting.  These are connected to the power connector for the brushless motor speed controller.

The LED strips come with an adhesive 3M tape backing which will pretty much stick to anything. To prep the Mini-Titan canopy I scrubbed it down with 90 percent rubbing alcohol, then i scrubbed it down again and wiped it down, then one more time for good measure.  I spent a little bit of time placing strips on different locations of the canopy and finally decided on a layout for the LED strip lights.  Once set I cut the strips down to length for each location, removed the paper tape from the adhesive backing and then pressed the strips onto the helicopter canopy.

Once all the strips were down I soldered on all the wiring to connect the LED strips to each other. Soldering LED strips isn’t that hard to do with the right equipment and experience but if you haven’t soldered before I’d recommend practicing your soldering skills a lot before attempting this. There are exposed solder pads at each end of every set of 3 LEDs on the strip which allows you to solder the strips in parallel to each other.  I was a bit concerned that soldering the tape while it was stuck to the canopy would melt the canopy at points, but it is a thermoplastic and did not have any problems with the short soldering times required. I used a 45 watt soldering iron to first prime the pads with a blob of solder, and tin the ends of the bridging leads, I then placed the tinned wire atop the hemisphere shaped blob on the soldering pad, heating both till they fused then let the joint cool normally.  The last step of the soldering process takes about 2 seconds. You can see the pads in detail in the pictures below, and also how I routed the wires around and took advantage of solder pads being everywhere on the LED strip lighting.  Just mind your polarity and you will be good!

That’s all there was too it.  It took me about 3 hours last night to do all the work, but that was while watching TV and occasionally plugging the strips in after each addition to make sure everything was still working good and that I had not created any solder shorts which would cause unfortunate problems on the electrical system and batteries for the helicopter.

The results of this work are pretty good and can be seen in the photos below.  You’ll also see I have some red and white LED’s in the back. I am planning to replace these with longer strips of alternating colors (red/white or purple/white) perhaps helical wound around the tail boom so I did not detail the installation of these, though it’s pretty much the same; Clean, place and solder. I also have a 1 Watt green Luxeon Star in the front mounted inside of the canopy.  The Mini-Titan’s battery tray almost perfectly fits an old square style Luxeon Star board and with the LED right in front of a canopy vent it gets plenty of fresh moving air which means I didn’t have to add any additional heatsinking for the LED.

The setup is very bright, we took some video of it tonight and it over drove the video camera. I didn’t mess around with the video recorders settings too much but I’m sure it could have been adjusted to better tone down the lights.  While the lights are extremely bright in person as well, they are also well defined and don’t turn into a ‘glowing glob’. Here’s the short video I made of this setup.

Please let me know what you think of the canopy setup for this helicopter, or share some info on your own setup by commenting below or using the contact form to send me a personal message.

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There were a lot of great pilots at the NEAT fair and some really fun events as well.  The helicopter section was a bit quiet but there Kyle Stacey and someone from Team Just Go Fly were putting on demos throughout the day, and there were some neat R/C Helicopter models flown there from time to time as well.

By far the majority of the aircraft at the NEAT Fair 2010 were airplanes, everything from flat foamies to large highly detail scale models.  Everyone looked good flying out there, and while there were some crashes and planes lost in the hills I would have to say most flights were successful and enjoyable to watch.

I didn’t take any models to fly at NEAT, I’m don’t fly well in crowds as they make me nervous, maybe one day I’ll get over that but I’m pretty happy flying my RC aircraft with a few friends and not an audience.

One of the coolest planes to see for me was one pilots hotliner which just ripped up the air.  The plane accelerated from a gentle glide to high speeds in no time flat, and actually cavitated in the air when accelerating from a low speed, which sounded pretty cool. I did see some other hotliners, but nothing like that kind of acceleration. It might just be because I’ve not had a lot of exposure to hotliners, but it was a lot of fun and I might have to get into that!  Here’s a quick photo and a video.

There were also some neat helicopters, tri-copters, octacopters and all sorts of stuff.  The guys from Heli Flight Center were there and seemed to have a lot of people moving through.  They were one of the few heli specific booths at the show and they got a lot of interest from passing pilots, lots of questions and over all their booth looked good.

Bryn picked up a Blade MSR for $120 (BNF), he’s never flown a real R/C helicopter before and he tried it out this evening.  He got that thing right up and hovering after about 4 attempts, I think he’ll pick it up pretty good in time and might move into more advanced helis.   That Blade MSR is a great little RC helicopter.

I picked up some LED lighting strips to add more lighting to my Mini-Titan RC Helicopter. I bought 2 feet of blue LEDs and 2 feet of green LEDs. for $5 per foot.  The lighting on the Mini-Titan is great for flying at dusk when there’s not enough light from the sun to make out the position of the helicopter very well.  At some point I may even try flying it at night.

The videos will take a little bit of time to process but will be here soon so please bookmark the page and check back for new videos, there are some great shots and views of the demos and events.  Some of the events were the NEAT Fair Multiplex EasyStar Combat competition with about 8 Multiplex Easy Stars and one or two collisions and a crash (video further down).  Then there was the NEAT Fair Warplane Mass Launch with what looked like 30+ models in the sky at one time.

One flier at the event had a 4 bladed Trex-450, this model was a standard T-Rex but the head had been replaced with this 4 bladed version.  Each individual blade grip was pivoted for up and down movement (a flapping head) and the rotor blades were made of an extremely flexible material. At one point the guy bent the blade up almost to 90 degrees while he was showing it off, pretty cool! Here’s some photos and a video.

The pilot with the above heli also had a nice twin-rotor Chinook helicopter (Might be the wrong revision I’m thinking of) It’s based off of some T-Rex mechanics for the heads, and they’re linked internally via a torque tube drive. He described a bit about this helicopter but I only caught a small part of the description on video so I did not upload the description part.  It’s pretty weird to watch it fly in some maneuvers, but fun to watch.

Also in the helicopter area was a younger guy flying a Tri-Copter setup for FPV. He was not flying it FPV at the show because AMA requires that you have a co-pilot on a buddy box when flying FPV at an AMA venue.  He picked up the information on how to build the model from rcexplorer.se and said that it felt a lot like flying a co-axial helicopter, but performed very well in forward flight.

The basic design of the Tri-Copter is 3 ‘rotors’ which are airplane props, on brushless motors, each with it’s own ESC. One motor is on a pivoting joint to allow it to be tilted left or right by a servo and provide rotational maneuverability.  3 rate gyros are used to stabilize power to the 3 brushless motors, and one heading hold gyro is used to stabilize the rotation of the aircraft via the servo-controlled tail motor angle.

One of the heli guys also had a Parrot AR.Drone, which means ‘augmented reality’ drone.  This is a pretty cool new product that runs about $300.  It’s controlled by an iPod or iPhone through the Wi-Fi and it sends video back to the iDevice and shows it on the screen. If you have multiple Parrot AR.Drones in flight, you can actually shoot at each other virtually and blow knock each other down.  I see one(or two!) of these Parrot AR.Drones in my future just to play with! I posted an article about these earlier in my ‘AR.Drone New Augmented Reality + FPV Combat Product‘ article if you want more details. The one in the picture below looks a bit different because the foam fan shrouds and canopy is off.  Yay technology!

There was also a great Multiplex Easy Star combat round where people put their Easy Stars into a fight to the death battle to be the top.  There was only one mid-air collision that I saw and recorded and I’ve put the video below. I cut out most of the combat where no contact happens because I know folks like to get right to the combat.  The overall battle lasted about 8 1/2 minutes for that round. I’m not sure if there were more rounds, but by then we were pretty well sunburned, sore and tired and decided to call it a night.

Speaking of Mid-Airs, Bryn managed to record a midair crash between two smaller high wing airplanes during a non-combat event, which means they weren’t trying to hit each other. The video is short but pretty good, and as always it’s available in High-Def if you want to watch full screen and burn up some bandwidth.

Another thing that was pretty neat was that I shot a video towards the end of the day when they had a bunch of big electric warbirds in the air. I was trying to shoot the B17 and this little flying wing came into the scene and I was like ‘what!? aww c’mon’ but a few minutes later I found out it was an FPV pilot who had been filming the warbirds from the air and then, of course since it was for the cause of FPV I was then all cool with it.  Yesterday the FPV pilot (FPVFLIGHTSCHOOL)  subscribed to my YouTube channel and I saw he had posted his FPV view of the B17 so I posted my video of the B17 and his FPV plane from the ground. Both are below.  Again the FPV video was shot by YouTube user FPVFLIGHTSCHOOL and the ground video was shot by myself.  His video is first, check it out! If you like the videos, make sure to click on the YouTube icon in the video windows and thumb up or leave a comment to the creators.

And my video from the ground (sorry no audio, it’s mostly just me complaining )

I want to say thanks to the folks who let me photograph their aircraft, video their flights and ask a bunch of questions. There were truly many friendly and helpful folks at this event. Also thanks to the folks who setup and run the NEAT Fair, without them this weekend would have been a lot less interesting.  They did a great job keeping the place cleaned up and looking good, and they kept a good flow of flying and events throughout the day. I wish I could have stayed up through the night/dusk slow flying events that they had planned, there were quite a few planes to be seen with LED lighting strips on them. Hopefully someone else will post up some good video of that.

I will upload more videos to this post tomorrow, so be sure to check back.

Please enjoy the photo gallery below, and feel free to comment below if you know more about the airplanes or models shown or their pilots. I wasn’t able to get a lot of names as we moved pretty quick and some of the name tags were pretty blurry in the photos.

If you desire more NEAT 2010 Photographs, check out RC Groups – Neat Fair 2010 at http://www.rcgroups.com/neat-fair-2010-698/

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1. Heli-Max Novus CP R/C Helicopter
2. AR.Drone New Augmented Reality + FPV Combat Product
3. First Inverted Hover Attempts on My Mini-Titan Heli

My inverted hovering skills have been honed over a few flights.  The majority of it was done during one evening where I attempted it for the first time and then flew 3 more battery packs over the evening.  You can see this in the video of my first inverted hover attempts below.

So I’ve been working on those but I’ve also just been screwing around.  The log chart below is based on a flight where I was flying fast forward and then did a hard breaking maneuver by the following: Fast forward flight, rotate the heli 90 degrees(nose to the sky) and then applying high collective.  This spiked the power readings on the ice as you can see, pulling out a large amount of current. Just click on it to see a full size version.

When I did that I pulled the current up to around 50 amps on the ESC, which is within it’s >peak< rating by quite a bit. I have another flight on which I screwed up and I did a recovery, highly loading the rotor disc and you can see that chart below.  Again, just click it for a larger version

You can see in the above graph that I pulled nearly 60.3 amps,, again well within the limits.

Basically by analyzing the information from my speed controller I have a better idea of how my flying is affecting my system, and as well I know I’m well within the systems limits.  Chance of an electrical failure due to my flying abilities is pretty low!  Carry on!

Related Posts

1. First Inverted Hover Attempts on My Mini-Titan Heli
2. Upgraded Mini-Titan RC Helicopter and Eagle Tree Flight Data Recorder Results
3. FPV Plane Test 1 – Radio Controlled Catalina by Guan Li