Sean’s Mental Walkabout

While our new woodstove insert is really great, and is definitely reducing our oil usage, it causes a bit of an issue when it comes to distributing the heat through the house.  When running on wood heat we get warmth right up the center of the house.  The office at the end of the upstairs hallway ends up being the warmest room in the house.  It is far too easy to make the upstairs unlivably warm, while the rest of the house is quite cool still.

Fortunately, we have a central air HVAC system, so the solution is to just turn on the furnace fan to redistribute the heat through the house.  This works pretty well, and at least mellows out the hot spots.  Ideally we wouldn’t run the fan all the time, but would duty cycle it on for some portion of an hour.  Honeywell makes a thermostat that has a cyrc fan mode, which runs the fan 35% of each hour, which was an option, but something else caught my eye.

The Proliphix Internet Thermostat NT20e is quite a nifty device.  It has a bit more programing than our current thermostat and has the advantage of having a web interface.  You plug the device into your ethernet network and get a web interface for all the controls and programming for the device.  What’s even better is that Proliphix designed this with further customization in mind by publishing an HTTP API to the device as well.  This makes is very easy to have a computer create further logic for the device, like forcing the fan on for certain hours of the day, while leaving the defaults for programming in the device itself.

I’ve now ordered mine, and it is on it’s way.  I can’t wait to get this thing hooked up.

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We’ve been running this all weekend, heating the whole house.  What a wonderful thing a woodstove is.

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Just installed in our living room.  Here’s to a winter of wood fires.

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From our vacation last month.  Something about the juxtaposition of muscle car vs. self propelled boat amuses me.

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It’s Monarch season.  No, not the dreaded form of government, but those butterflies that manage to migrate from the north east to Mexico every year.  Because Susan has both milkweed and butterfly bushes in or garden, we’ve managed to attract a few this year, including one that is currently pupating.

And that left me with a question.  I saw the caterpillar hanging from under the leaf when I went to work on Friday, and I saw the pupa when I got home, and the pupa is smaller.  After a bit of searching on the internet I found a video which actually shows that transformation in time lapse, and it is definitely weird.  I might have to rig up something to get my own time lapse of them next year.

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For the past six months, Verizon has been spending a lot of time in our neighborhood. I was as likely to spot little tented trucks with big spools of cable spilling out, as deer on my way to work. Every day this last week there were Verizon trucks working on poles. And, as I suspected, it was because they were bringing in fiber.

Yesterday morning the Fios Internet flier went up on every mailbox in the neighborhood. The offer for our area is the enhanced deal, so 10 Mbs down / 2 Mbs up for the lowest level of service, and 20 Mbs down / 5 Mbs up for the next level. Given how often the cable modem falls over, and how while they increased the downstream recently, they decreased the upstream, which is annoying for things like NX sessions to work, photo uploads, and a host of other bits.

I’m still trying to figure out what the phone quality is like, before I make the plunge, but I’ll probably look at switching some time this summer.

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Things you’d rather not hear your wife say first thing in the morning:

We don’t have any water in the house. None of the faucets work.

2 hours later, we have a new well pump, and we have water again, as the old one was burnt out. Not cheap, but given all the other issues that it might have been, at least it was relatively quick and straightforward to fix.

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Man, it’s amazing what you can find on youtube now adays.

The production quality isn’t great, and the script wanders a bit, but overall not bad.

Update: Seems that the embed gets lost in many readers. The direct link is here.

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We finished the deck last night, by doing the last 16 ballisters for the stair way. It’s an odd sense of both accomplishment and loss at the same time. Since sometime in February I’ve been focussed on the deck as a project. I had to come up with a plan, and make sure that plan was executed smoothly, especially as I had family come in from out of town to help out on it, and didn’t want to waste their time. Part of my brain has been devoted to the deck for the last 3 months, always making sure the next part of it was lined up to go. Now, it’s done, and I need to call the inspector today to come out and clear it.

But at the same time, building something like that from nothing has been very satifying, and I think I’ll miss not building every weekend. Most of the time I’m building virtual widgets, so producing a physical widget from time to time is quite a nice change of pace. I’ve got a set of corner shelves, and a potting bench for Susan that I need to build this summer, both of which will be fun, but not quite on the same scale.

Anyway, for now, I can have a lot of fun relaxing on the deck, before the bugs show up (a couple more weeks). I can also feel very accomplished for having a big summer project done before the summer even officially starts.

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I realize that I’ve been rather silent about the deck since before concrete pouring weekend. The deck is nearly done, with only 16 ballisters left on the stairs to go. That will hopefully be completed on Tuesday night, so I can get our inspection scheduled RSN. I’ve got a bunch of pictures from various stages of building, though I’m going to wait until after our memorial day party to put them up, as I’d rather let people see it in person for the first time, instead of by pictures.

I will have to say the deck project has gotten me to buy a couple of really awesome new tools. The first of which is a hammer drill, with which I can put a 3/4 inch hole, 6 inches deep in our cinder blocks in about 10 seconds. Just awesome. I also now have a proper cutting table for my mitre saw, which gives me 3 1/2 foot extenders on either side with rollers and guides.

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