Studio711.com – Ben Martens

We started off the year having very little idea of what our garden would actually end up growing. Turns out, it worked pretty well! The box by the street has some strawberries and two zucchini plants. We did get some strawberries but that will ramp up quite a bit over the next two years as the plants mature. The zucchini have been producing like crazy. I think we might just do one next year.

The box closer to the house has a few more strawberry plants and six sun gold tomato plants. Having six of the same plant is overkill. I started a few different varieties in the house, took careful notes about which seeds were which, and then ignored all the notes when I picked the six healthiest plants to move outside. Oops.

Here are some changes that we’ll consider for next year:

• Two zucchini plants is a lot. Maybe do one zucchini and one rhubarb?
• I think it makes sense to put all the strawberries in one box. They are going to overrun whatever container they are in.
• The drip tubing worked great, but maybe instead of carefully placing each emitter, I could use the small area sprayers.
• Don’t try to start plants. It sounds like a great idea, but I did a terrible job guessing when we’d be ready to move plants outside. Warm weather came much later than expected and it was tricky to manage the big plants inside the house.
• Tyla wanted to plant flowers but I think we waited too long for the seeds to take hold (too hot and too much shade from bigger plants.)

But all in all I call this year a success!

(This post will probably make more sense if you read part 1 from yesterday.)

Before I start talking about our new system, let me back up and explain what I want out of our home security system in order from most important to least important.

1. If there’s a fire, get the fire department there as soon as possible whether I’m home or not.
2. If someone tries to get in while we are home, I want to know immediately to have a little extra time to react and get the police headed in our direction. (In my dreams, the police pull up just as I’m throwing the bad guy onto the lawn and holding him there with a shotgun to the back of the head.)
3. If someone breaks in while we are gone, at least we’ll know about it. This is probably the most common reason people buy a system, and while I like the feature, it’s not a huge selling point for me. Frankly, we live in a very undesirable theft target. If you’re crazy/smart enough to break into our house, you’re going to do whatever you want regardless of whether I have an alarm system installed.

Ok so back to my quest to dump my landline ($55/month) and replace my landline monitoring ($10/month) with cellular monitoring…

I chose SimpliSafe. They’ve target my exact scenario and they’ve been around for long enough that I trust them to provide me with a good product.

The setup process is extremely simple:

1. Create your system by figuring out how many of each type of sensor you want. I recommend that you start small because it’s really easy to add more later and the only additional cost is that you pay shipping each time you make an order.
2. SimpliSafe will configure your new base station for the sensors you ordered and ship you a box.
3. They say that setup takes 30 minutes and they’re right (depending on how many sensors you bought.) Setup is SOOOOO easy compared to what I went through before! Basically, you plug the base station into the wall, activate your account online and stick your keypad on the wall. For each sensor, remove the tag to connect the included battery and stick it on the wall.

You’re done!

Unfortunately, my case wasn’t quite that simple. My base station came with a T-Mobile SIM card in it and the T-Mobile signal was so bad that I could only rarely get a connection from a single point in my house. After a lot of trial and error, SimpliSafe agreed to send me a replacement board for the base station that uses Verizon’s network instead of T-Mobile. That worked a lot better.

Our monitoring is now $15/month but we dropped $55/month for the home phone and $10/month for our old monitoring company. So we are saving $50/month! We’ll recoup the ~$400 hardware cost in 8 months.

I love these projects that cut out huge monthly bills! It’s much more fun to spend money when you know that you’re going to save that much in a short amount of time.

I also feel good using an alarm system that is easy to expand and modify whenever I want. I suppose there’s a chance that it’s less secure than my old system, but remember my priority list. I’m ok with that. I also don’t have any evidence that it IS less secure. My old system had plenty of wireless sensors and the landline was very easy to cut. A determined and intelligent burgler is going to know how to get through most consumer grade alarm systems anyway. The trick is to just be a more uninviting target than other people in your neighborhood. It’s kind of like hiking in bear country with somebody that runs more slowly than you.

There is one major home improvement project that I’ve written very little about. Soon after we moved in, I went down a month long rabbit hole of learning about DIY alarm systems. The idea is basically to install the same level of hardware that a company like ADT would install, but skip the middleman. You install the hardware and you connect it to a monitoring company. We paid about $500 for the hardware and then $10/month for the monitoring. I wasn’t comfortable sharing the details of it in the beginning because I wasn’t sure how secure it was. That concern was probably unwarranted.

Our GE Concord 4 system worked flawlessly, but it was one of the hardest projects I’ve done. The hardware itself is relatively simple. All the sensors have two wires and they are either normally open or normally closed. The wireless sensors are easier to setup and just need to be paired with the base station. The catch is that the main circuit boards for these units are 1980s-90s technology. Forget connecting your computer to it and configure it. Instead you have to type incredibly long series of numbers into the keypad to change settings. For example, if you want to change a setting, you press 8, your four digit master system code, 0, 0, and the four digit code to select the right program setting. Then you actually get to make the setting which is usually a one digit number (on/off, number of seconds, etc.) The installation manual is 113 pages long. It’s intense.

But you know what? I’m still glad I did it, partially because I learned something that was really complex and because it saved us a LOT of money both on the initial hardware purchase and on the monthly monitoring. We have easily saved thousands of dollars compared to using a standard consumer alarm system.

But.

I’m getting tired of having a landline just for the alarm system. It wasn’t so bad when we moved in because our cell phones would regularly drop calls. Coverage and phones have improved and that’s no longer a problem. So the phone line really is just for the alarm. And no, you can’t use a VOIP line (like Comcast phone service) for an alarm. It has to be the old-fashioned POTS phone line.

Well the good news is that since I custom installed my own hardware, I’m free to switch over to cellular monitoring and switch to a different monitoring company if I want to. The problem is that I REALLY don’t want to go down that rabbit hole again. I started looking into it and it’s pretty complex and the technology is frustratingly ancient. I’m sure it would work, but I don’t have the patience.

Thankfully, a number of companies have stepped up to offer DIY home security products. You get the benefits of cutting out the middleman without the headache. This post is getting long so I’ll keep you in suspense until tomorrow about what we’re using now and how we like it.

The garden box project is done and ready for sunshine. Elijah and I got a load half dirt, half compost) from Pacific Topsoils and filled the boxes. It took about 1.3 yards to fill the beds and thankfully they are generous with their loads there so my 1 yard purchase was perfect.

I made a timelapse of the build and filling the beds. It’s fun to watch the truck rise up as we unloaded. The unloading was very easy since I could back right up to the boxes. Elijah was having a BLAST helping with that part. It’s so nice to have my own truck to get these kinds of jobs done!

Our house was built in 1990, and when we bought it, it still had the original combination microwave/oven unit. They worked fairly well so we just left them alone and marveled at how nice it will be some day to have cool new features like a spinning tray inside the microwave.

The unit slowly degraded over time and the biggest annoyance was that sometimes the microwave would look like it was running, but when you took your food out after 2 or 3 minutes, you found out that it hadn’t actually been heating. It seemed like a problem with the door sensor so we each had our own routines of how to close the door to avoid that problem.

We decided it was finally time to upgrade. Unfortunately there aren’t a ton of options for these combination units. I looked into buying two separate units and trying to work it into the existing cabinet space but I gave up on that* and handed over the credit card to buy a KitchenAid KOCE500ESS. Kudos to the Rick at Judd and Black for another great purchasing experience and what seemed like a fair deal to me.

The new unit was a few inches shorter than the old one. That extra space generally is less noticeable at the bottom of the unit than at the top, but that means building a little shelf inside the cabinet space. Since the unit is hardwired into the 220v circuit, Judd and Black have to hire that out to a contractor. Couple that with the shelf building and the install fee was going to be around $250. For that price, I was willing to try it myself and I’m glad I did. And when I say “myself”, I mean with help of some cheap labor from Logan.

Logan and I wrestled the old unit out of the cabinet and tossed it in the truck. Judd and Black took that one back at no cost and we picked up the new unit. It took us about 2 hours to install it, but that was largely due to my mistakes building the little shelf. It’s an extremely simple build with the tools I had in the garage, but there isn’t a lot of room for error between having a gap above the top of the unit and making the hole too short so that you can’t slide it in.

The actual appliance is really nice. It has three racks in the lower oven, one of which extends fully out for easy access. The top oven is some goofy combination of a microwave, convection over and broiling unit. I don’t understand how it works, but in addition to using it like a regular microwave, you can do some combinations like using the microwave in conjunction with the broiling element to make crispy hot sandwiches or french fries. You can even put most metals in there. It works out pretty well and really speeds things up. For example, if you want to make a frozen pizza, you can bake one perfectly from start to finish in about 8 minutes. Compare that to the 10 minutes of pre-heat time and 10 minutes of cook time with a standard oven.

But in general, it’s just nice to have a microwave that heats every time and an oven that heats evenly even with multiple racks full. Hopefully this unit provides us with a lot of delicious food for many years to come!

* After we removed the old unit, I discovered that there was an extra 110 line coming into that cabinet. One of my hangups with doing separate units was that I’d have to run another line over there to power the microwave. Looks like the home builders already thought of that. If this new unit ever dies, I’ll probably give more thought to buying two separate units because it’s so much cheaper.