Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Home Improvement

EGO Mower Review

After replacing most of my yard equipment with EGO tools, I had hoped to wait a while to replace my push mower, but that hope didn’t pan out. After 14 years, the deck was finally rusting through and eventually it fell apart while I was mowing.

But after having so many surprise/extra bills this year, I thought this would be a good opportunity to be responsible and also teach Elijah that we can fix stuff instead of throwing it away. I ordered a new deck for about $120. That eventually arrived and Elijah and I headed to the garage for what should have been a simple replacement except… there were a few bolts that were complete unrecognizable lumps of rust. I messed around for a long time trying to figure out how to get them out, etc and by the time I started adding more replacement parts to the bill, it just didn’t make sense anymore.

Thankfully I was smart enough to order the replacement deck from WalMart so the return was very easy. And doubly thankfully, EGO was having a huge sale on exactly the push mower that I had picked out. I ended up with the LM2130SP. It normally ships with a 7.5Ah battery and a rapid charger and costs $749. But with the sale, I got it for $599 and that included a free 5Ah battery.

I brought it home to mow for the first time and see how many batteries I really needed. I went through the whole routine: edging, string trimming, mowing, and blowing. I did that all with a single 5Ah battery! At this point I had a 2.5, two 5’s, and a 7.5. So I headed back to the store and returned my free 5Ah battery (on the receipt it prorated the savings across the multiple items) and in the end, I got that $749 mower for $386. (All prices are without tax.) A new version of the cheapo gas mower that I was replacing was $350 so I felt like this was a fantastic deal!

I’ve only mowed a couple times with the new mower but I’m happy with it. It is self-propelled though my yard isn’t big enough for that to matter. Plus, this mower is so light! It’s also incredibly quiet to the point where you can easily carry on a conversation with somebody while it’s running. An added benefit that I hadn’t considered was how it doesn’t care what orientation it’s in. With a gas mower, you have to be carefully which way you tip it, but with this one, I just finish mowing, flip it over and blow out the grass. I even saw some people who would fold it up and store it on end in their shed!

I picked this model because theoretically it has more torque than my old mower did. I currently have no concerns about having enough battery power to easily get all my work done on my small yard, but we’ll see how it goes when the grass is really growing quickly and I’m a few days late in mowing.

I’m now at the point where the only gas engines I own are the pressure washer, generator, and truck.

And as for that old gas mower? Elijah and I took the engine as far apart as we could so I could explain the four strokes of the engine, let him feel the valves moving as the crankshaft turned, etc so we did get some education out of it.

benmartens August 7, 2025 Home Improvement

EGO Equipment Review

When we bought this house, I purchased a simple push mower and a multi-head motor with string trimmer, edger, and blower attachments. That setup has served me well for 14 years and while they were showing their age, I didn’t have a strong reason to upgrade, and yet, here I am with new electric tools.

It all started when a friend who sells this stuff helped me get started with the EGO multi-head system. I ended up with the string trimmer, edger, and hedge trimmer attachments as well as a blower and an extra 5Ah battery to go with the 2.5 Ah battery that came with the multi-head unit. The gas mower remains for now, but I will eventually replace it with an EGO push mower.

The switchover to battery had been imminent anyway. My old motor was leaking more gas than it consumed and I knew I wouldn’t put the time into fixing it when I wanted to switch to battery powered tools anyway. As an added bonus, the blower is now easy enough for Elijah to use and he thinks it is fun so things stay much cleaner! I admit that these tools are also more fun for me to use too so I’m doing a better job of keeping up with all the edging and trimming around our yard.

It took a little thinking about where I was going to fit these tools in my limited shed space since they hang a bit differently than my previous tools. I was happy to find a robust 3D printing community around the EGO tools so I was able to print a holder for the main unit along with holders for the batteries and blower.

These tools still aren’t cheap but it’s helpful that the major investment of the battery can be shared among all the tools. I’m also excited by the inverters that they sell, especially the 3000w model. I hope that some day they will come out with a 240v inverter which I could use instead of our gas generator to power our house for short bursts of time and then save the gas generator for multi-day outages.

benmartens July 17, 2025 Home Improvement

Weathering the Storm of 2024

No, this isn’t the title to my end of year post. We had a big storm come through Seattle and I wanted to document our family’s experience going through it.

The storm was a rapidly developing cyclone called a “bomb” cyclone because the rapid intensification is called “bombogensis.” Thankfully the weather models did a stellar job of predicting it and we knew it was coming. I won’t fully recap the storm because UW weather prof Cliff Mass did a great job of that:

I believe it’s the third time I’ve been through a storm like this out here. The other two were in 2006 and 2012. In 2006 around 700,000 people lost power and in 2012 the number was around 475,000. I think they’re still counting people but this storm looks like it landed at around 600,000 people without power. (It’s also unclear if all these number are people or households.) Winds in our area were gusting 40-50mph and a few factors made it extra bad:

  • There was a very high pressure system east of the mountains so that created huge winds flowing from east to west. That’s backwards of the way we normally get wind so that will always cause more damage.
  • The trees haven’t lost all their leaves yet so that adds more drag. Plus we have a lot of evergreens that never lose their needles.
  • This was the first hard blow of the season so there was a lot of dead stuff waiting to fall.

We lost power at 7:30pm on Wednesday night after having it flicker for hours leading up to that. I immediately headed out and dug the generator out because there was a lull in the rain and I didn’t expect the power to come back any time soon. I was thankful to do it during my normal waking hours instead of wondering if I should get out of bed at 2am to set it up!

We thankfully installed a 240v plug on the outside of the house that feeds directly into our panel using an interlock kit so you can’t accidentally feed power back into the grid or get fed by both sources at the same time. I keep a sheet of OSB in the shed for giving the unit a little shelter from the rain and I just screw some L brackets on the top to hold it together.

Our generator isn’t anything fancy. We bought it back in 2015. In today’s money it looks like something similar is around $530. It does have electric start but otherwise, it’s very basic. This theoretically puts out a constant 3500 watts with bursts up to 4400. The challenge is that there’s no readout which tells me how close I am to that limit. So my default behavior is to flip off all the circuits and then carefully turn on the few that I need. Thankfully most lighting is LED now so we were able to use a lot of the house lights and that in itself has a big morale boost. Beyond that I would generally pick two 15-20amp circuits to enable. We have two fridges so those got the power most of the time, but at some points I would turn those off and run the furnace. We have gas so the electricity just needs to handle the brains and the blower. Being warm and having light was a huge luxury!

Some notes for next time this happens:

  • I was able to run the indoor fridge and the furnace at the same time.
  • I was able to run the tankless water heater and the bath fans together so we could shower.
  • I ran the generator for 27 hours during our 40-hour outage and used about 5 gallons of gas.

The challenge for me was that we use this very rarely and I haven’t built up a lot of comfort with it yet. Our bedroom is on the other end of the house and I can’t really hear the generator running because there are a lot of others running too. So if something went wrong, I don’t know how I’d notice. I also didn’t have a good feeling for how long it would run on a tank of gas. All this led me to sleep on the couch both nights that our power was out waking up periodically to walk out and check the generator, etc. It wasn’t very restful but I was still thankful to have it.

We all took guesses about when the power would come back on and Elijah was only off by about 2 hours! I was just getting ready to drive to campus to do a little work and as I put the gas cans in the truck for a refill, the power came back on. It was perfect timing because our internet came back right away too and I was able to resume working from home. We felt very fortunate to get power back when hundreds of thousands were still waiting for it.

We’ve gotten great use out of this generator a half dozen times over the last 9 years which makes me feel like it’s ok to upgrade. The main features I want are some way to know how hard I’m pushing the generator and a good inverter that produces a clean power signal. (Read up on Total Harmonic Distortion in generators if you want to geek out.) But the quick summary is that our battery backups freak out if I try to charge them on the generator so I’m too nervous to hook up any sensitive electronics and I’m nervous that it’s going to fry one of our appliances. It’s hard to justify that much money when we already have something that works and we need it so rarely.

Even though we don’t need it very often, I was thankful for our twice yearly Survival Sunday routine. One of my tasks on that list is to change the generator oil when needed and fire it up to make sure it’s running smoothly. I had just done that in September so when I needed it during this storm, I turned the key and it fired right up.

I realize that we are privileged to have had such a relatively easy path through this storm and our prayers go out for those still waiting for power or dealing with much greater impacts from the storm.

benmartens November 25, 2024 Home Improvement

Kitchen Backsplash

Our kitchen backsplash was in need of repair. It had the original 90’s wood backsplash which didn’t bother us a ton aesthetically, but having wood right behind the sink wasn’t a great design choice. It was difficult to keep the wood from getting rotten and moldy. We have long talked about a large remodeling project for the downstairs so that always got lumped in, but finally I decided that I should just fix the backsplash even if we end up ripping it out later.

While I’ve seen tile projects done before, I’ve never actually done one myself. Thanks to YouTube, I felt like I could figure it out. After some searching, I found a mosaic tile that would fit in the 4″ gap between the counter and our windows, greatly simplifying the project. I was also able to use pre-mixed adhesive and pre-mixed grout which simplified the project more. And even though I only needed to make about a dozen cuts, I rented a wet tile saw for a day.

The whole project went pretty smoothly. There was definitely a learning curve and I would do better if I was repeating the process, but nothing in the final result made me want to rip it out and start over. The hardest parts were the 45 degree angles in the bump out around our sink.

A day or two before I started working, I realized I didn’t have any tile spacers. While the mosaic tile came on a mat, I figured there would be spots where I’d need the spacers and I also needed spacers to hold the tile off the counter top at a consistent height. Rather than try to find spacers that exactly matched the tile layout, I pulled out my calipers, got the measurements, and 3d printed a huge number of the spaces. Each one cost less than a penny and only took about 3 minutes to print.

During the project, I missed some adhesive that dried onto the wall outside of where it was needed. I had also nicked the wall with a knife in that spot. Whenever we do paint projects in the house, I buy a small sample jar of the same color and keep that, but after ~12 years, would it still match? I was surprised to see that, yes, it matched perfectly!

So now I’ve got a tile project under my belt and I feel more confident to try something bigger. That’s good because our upstairs guest bathroom could use a makeover. Maybe I’ll have a bigger tile project in my future.

benmartens June 20, 2024 Home Improvement

Flume Smart Home Water Monitor Review

A few weeks ago, I watched an Ask This Old House video about laundry room leaks. A few days later, a coworker had to rush home because one of his washer water supply hoses had sprung a leak. This is something I already think about from time to time and I was finally prompted to take action.

The first step was replacing my rubber hoses with some nice braided hoses. I made sure to get specific high efficiency hoses that could supply water quickly enough to our washer. Our existing hoses were ~10 years old so it felt good to replace them.

But that only helped the washer. What about the ice maker supply line? Or the various toilets? I thought about getting a bunch of water sensors and having them around the house, but Tim mentioned the smart meter from Flume Water. After a little research, I was hooked and thanks to the magic of Amazon Prime, it was on my doorstep when I woke up the next morning.

The box strapped on to my meter. It just sits next to the meter. No plumbing is required. Most meters work with a magnet that spins as the water flows so this device can read that magnetic field and understand how much water is flowing through. That connects to a WiFi bridge in the house and from there the data gets sent to Flume where it feeds the app on my phone. I can now get minute by minute water usage reports and I can set up rules for alerting me to water leaks. For example, any water that runs for more than 2 hours will send me an alert, or if I have water flowing at more than 6 gallons per minute for 15 minutes, I’ll get an alert. It’s not as nice as the systems that will automatically shut off the water, but it’s considerably cheaper and I have enough neighbors that I could call to have them shut off my water if I wasn’t home.

Most people would stop there, but Tim also mentioned that some irrigation systems will integrate with Flume to detect abnormal usage. I realized I could set that up myself because I’m already pull data from my OpenSprinkler irrigation controller and the Flume device has an API as well. Before too long, I had a program written that would know what zones were watered at each period of the night, look at the total amount of water they consumed, and alert me if there are any oddities. Last year I had a broken irrigation head right near the drain in the curb so I didn’t notice the water dumping down the drain until I got a higher than normal bill. With this setup, I would have known the first morning after that happened.

Even without the geeky add-on, it’s still a pretty neat device. It’s one of those things that probably isn’t worth it if you never have a leak, but if you do, it will pay for itself a thousand times over and the peace of mind is worth something too. Also, I now know that it costs about 2.5 cents to flush a toilet.

benmartens June 22, 2021 Gadgets, Home Improvement

Utility History

I like to collect data. It’s rarely interesting at a single point in time, but over the years, it can provide insights or show trends that I didn’t know existed.

For example, my irrigation controller is based on a Raspberry Pi. There’s a webpage for it and it has an API so I can download the actual runtime of each zone. I’ve measured the amount of water used for a minute in each zone (by watching my water meter) so I can get a rough estimate of how much water I’m using through the system overall. Some of the variability is due to the weather, but I’ve also been tweaking the algorithm to automatically adjust the watering schedules based on the forecast.

I have a similar logging system for my HVAC. I haven’t been successful in reducing these costs much as I think I had it pretty optimized to begin with.

So yes, this is geeky, but it’s also frugal. Two things that are super attractive, right?

benmartens January 25, 2021 Geek, Home Improvement

Yard Watering

My sprinkler controller is an Open Sprinkler model and I wrote a program which periodically pulls the logs off it and stores them in a database. I was checking out my yearly irrigation water usage and noticed that I’m generally getting better every year about keeping the yard alive with less water. Obviously this is heavily weather dependent, but generally our summers are exceedingly dry so the main variation is in the start and stop of the watering season.

The y-axis roughly equates to the number of gallons used but this is far from accurate. The year to year comparisons are completely valid though.

I have similar data showing my HVAC (furnace, AC and fan) usage over the years but I’ll save that for another time. I don’t want to pack too much excitement into a single post.

benmartens November 11, 2020 Geek, Home Improvement

Saving Money Is Cool

I’m very thankful that we added air conditioning to this house. This last Sunday it was in the mid-90s and we burned that sucker all day long. But I’m also a cheapskate at heart. I haven’t yet figured out exactly how much energy it consumes, but it’s far from free to run so I try to use it as little as possible. Here’s our basic strategy if it’s going to be warm:

  • Leave windows open the night before to cool the house down as much as possible.
  • In the morning, leave the windows open until it’s the same temperature inside as it is outside. Then close every window and close all of the blinds on the south side of the house. Turn on the AC.
  • In the evening, once the outside temp is the same as the inside temp, turn off the AC and open everything up to get free cooling from outside.
  • Run the house fan to keep the air circulating. Our vents pump more air downstairs than upstairs (they were designed for heating) so even just running the fan can cool it off upstairs.

We are PacNW wimps so we run the AC if it’s 80 or higher and we have it set to keep upstairs at 76 degrees. Our EcoBee thermostat supports multiple thermostats which is really handy in situations like this. It also has an API so I can connect to it and pull data off. I have logs of the indoor temp from each sensor along with the outdoor temp so I wrote a quick program that helps us remember when we should close the windows or open them back up. Now we get a text reminder when we need to make changes to the windows/blinds.

Here’s an example of what it looks like on a day that got up to 84 degrees. The night before, it got down to 59 degrees outside and inside it got down to 69. Around 10:30, the outside temperature got up to the same as the inside temp so we shut the windows, closed the blinds and turned on the AC. The house coasted until 5pm before the AC finally kicked on a few times until 8:30 when we shut it off and opened the windows.

Here’s a comparison to show how much of a difference this strategy can make: On Sunday, it got up to 96. By cooling the house down a lot the night before, the AC didn’t kick on until 2:35.

That night it stayed very warm so I never opened the windows until 6:30am when I got up. The house barely cooled off at all before I had to shut things up again. Monday only got up to 87 but the AC ran almost exactly the same* amount of time as the day before!

This works really well around here because even on hot days, we get a “marine push” that brings cool winds in the evenings. Another key is that we have low humidity so I only remember one or two days where we ran the AC more than normal because of high humidity.

* On Monday, I shut the AC off at 8:40pm. So to compare the two days, I took all of the AC usage up until 8:40pm on both days. Sunday’s usage was only 20 minutes less than Monday’s usage even though it was 10 degrees warmer.

benmartens August 18, 2020 Geek, Home Improvement

Siding, Windows and Paint

Our house was built in 1990 and had the dreaded Louisiana Pacific siding. (Detailed explanation from a home inspector site.) The siding was only warrantied for 25 years and when you throw in the major defects in the design, we had large areas of our house that were really bad. We also needed new paint so it seemed like a good time to bite the bullet. Some of our neighbors have done partial replacements of the bad areas, but we’re hoping to be in this house for quite a while and I don’t like future problems looming over me, so we decided to do it all at once. We ended up going all out and adding full window replacement to the job as well. It really increased the total price, but it’s cheaper to do it at the same time as the siding versus doing it later. The windows were original too and we had a tough time even opening some of them, not to mention dealing with mold from all the moisture that accumulated inside, etc.

It’s hard to even get a contractor to call you back, but I got two bids and chose the lower priced one because multiple neighbors had a good experience with him. The job was supposed to start the first week of April and finish mid-May. The actual job started in early May and finished in … August. Ouch. We had a dumpster and port-a-potty in our driveway for a very long time. They say a job has three levers: quality, schedule and price. You get to pick two. Price and quality were our top concerns and that’s what we got. I’m very thankful to the contractor for not cutting corners when our job took way longer than expected.

If you drive past, you probably don’t notice much different about the siding (except that it’s clean!) However, I smile now as I walk around the house because I don’t see swollen, rotting siding. And it’s wonderful having windows that open with just a finger or two. But possibly my favorite thing is knowing that we don’t have this huge bill looming in our future. It was something that had to be done before we sold the house (or take a big hit on the sale price).

Now that the contractors are gone, I have a huge work list to complete to rehab the yard, but I’m excited to dig into that (pun intended). Much of it has been going well and I’m surprised at how quickly the trampled grass and bushes have been recovering.

benmartens September 5, 2018 Home Improvement

Yard Watering Recap

We’re coming out of the dry season, and what a dry season it was. We tied the warmest summer ever (1967) and got the record for the driest summer ever (1910). Even with all that, I’m happy to say that our yard stayed green and I think I used about the minimum amount of water possible to make that happen. Here’s the data from our sprinkler system showing the cumulative gallons used by year:

The 2015 line is especially interesting. It was very hot and dry that summer too, and even with all that water, my yard died. I had the settings really dialed in this year. The key was getting the runtime for each zone set properly and then trusting the Zimmerman algorithm inside OpenSprinkler to automatically adjust those runtimes based on the previous day’s humidity, temp precipitation and the forecasted precipitation. I only overrode it once when we had a streak of weather in the mid-high 90s.

The rain came a little earlier than it has the past two years so I’ve already shut it off, at least for now. The yard looks healthy enough and the weather is wet enough that I doubt I’ll need to run it again.

benmartens September 28, 2017 Home Improvement