Home Improvement

Power Over Ethernet

I dare you to try and buy just one security camera. That’s how it started for me. Now I have six. I might need an intervention.

The last one I put up was an “extra” that we had lying around after we upgraded one of the cameras to a newer 1080p. This old one is only 640×480 but hey, why not use it? I decided to stick it on the back corner of the house, but that meant a long cable run from my network closet and there’s also no power nearby. Power over Ethernet (PoE) to the rescue!

In your standard ethernet cable, half of the wires are unused. The PoE specification defines a common way of transmitting power over those extra wires. This means that instead of running a network cable to the camera along with installing a new outlet nearby, I just had to run a network cable.

You also need something to combine the network signal and the power on one end and deconstruct it on the other end. For the injection side, you can either get a standalone plug/ethernet jack combo thing or you can purchase a switch with PoE built in. I chose the latter since I’ll be using this more in the future. My WiFi access points are already PoE so I can get rid of the two injector plugs and switch them over to this unit. And while it’s possible to buy PoE versions of these cameras, I don’t have those yet so I had to buy a splitter for the camera end.

The hardest part was running the wire 40 or 50 feet under my house and even that wasn’t hard, just dirty and cramped. Elijah loves it when I go down there and always asks if he can poke his head in there too.

The end result is a really nice view of either the cul-de-sac or our back yard depending on which way the camera is rotated. It’s not going to do much for security, but it’s fun to see Elijah playing during the day while I’m at work or just get a little extra assurance that everything is ok while we are away.

P.S. If you are interested in setting up something like this at your house, I have a post detailing my basic setup. You can get more posts by searching my site for “foscam“.

benmartens August 9, 2016 Geek, Home Improvement

Skylight Cover

We have two skylights in our house. One faces is over the stairs and the other is in the master bathroom. The extra light is nice, but the one over the stairs faces south, and, on a hot day, it turns the top of the stairs into an oven. Even with our AC running and the fan circulating air 24/7, upstairs will be 6-7 degrees warmer than downstairs.

I looked into adding a shade to the interior of the window but that looked like it was going to be pretty pricey. And since the skylight is so far overhead, the pole contraption would be pretty long and we’d have to store it somewhere.

I stumbled across skylightsolarshades.com. I was wary of the site because it just feels like a bit of a scam site, but I finally decided to just go for it. I crawled up on the roof and carefully measured out the dimensions of my skylight. It required a custom order, but the total with shipping was under $100.

It arrived a few weeks later and the installation took only a few minutes. It stretches to fit over the skylight and is held on with friction. So far it hasn’t blown off and I think it would take a lot for that to happen.

Our model blocks 90% of the light coming through and wow does it make a difference! The top of the stairs is now the same temperature as everywhere else upstairs. We had a couple warm, sunny days and with the air conditioner running, it was only 3-4 degrees warmer upstairs instead of the previous 6-7. That seems like a huge impact for a $100 purchase so I want to see some more data on hot days, but so far, the results are very promising.

We’ll take it off at the end of summer to benefit from the free heat that we get from the sun in the winter (though there’s not a lot of sun in the winter around here anyway.)

benmartens June 16, 2016 Home Improvement

Ecobee3 Data

I’m still enjoying this Ecobee thermostat. Now that the weather is warmer, the house is “coasting” a lot more meaning that we don’t run either the furnace or the air conditioner. It’s interesting to watch how the house warms and cools throughout the day based on the outdoor temperature and the sunshine. For example, here is data for a 4 day period. It was very cloudy the first two days and the second two days were sunny and much warmer.

You can also see roughly in the middle of the graph where the indoor temps jump up quickly. That’s when we returned from being gone for a while and turned the thermostat back on. The rest of the time, the HVAC wasn’t running.

The next step is to measure how much power our furnace blower motor and air conditioner use so I can start to get an idea of how much it costs to run them. I’ll have to figure out how to measure the gas usage too.

benmartens June 2, 2016 Gadgets, Home Improvement

Shed

Our house came with a small Rubbermaid shed in the backyard. It’s a handy place to keep stuff like the lawn mower, but it rapdily gathered so much stuff that it was hard to even pull the lawnmower out.

Last week I decided it was time to build some organization. Thankfully, that turned out to be a very quick and relatively cheap project. The whole thing was built with about 25 2x4s and a bunch of scrap plywood that I already had.

I started out with Sketchup to figure out how I would get all the big items to fit in there. I measured the interior dimensions of the shed and also the dimensions of the mower, the wheelbarrow, etc. It was very helpful to figure this all out on the computer instead of doing it on the fly.

The plan was to build an “attic” and two shelves as well as some places to hang tools along the wall. Floor space is really valuable and I can pretty much fill it up with the mower, generator, wheelbarrow, ladder and cornhole boards. Everything else needs to be off the ground.

I moved all of the contents out onto the patio and covered them with a tarp (which Elijah thought was very interesting.) Then it only took about 4 hours of work to build everything inside. After doing a bunch of nicer woodworking projects, it was kind of relaxing to frame the project out with 2x4s. I covered the shelves with scrap pieces of plywood and before I knew it, the project was done.

Everything fits in there very nicely now and I no longer dread opening the doors to get something out. I still have plenty of empty space that I can use now too.

benmartens May 25, 2016 Home Improvement, Woodworking

Security Camera

I’ve written a few posts in the past about our security camera setup. It continues to work very well, but as the years have gone on, I’ve been itching to upgrade our 480p cameras to the new 1080p models. When Tyla asked to put a camera in Elijah’s room, I took that as a request for me to upgrade to a new camera.

I moved a camera from our front door into his room and bought a new 1080p Foscam model for the front door. I think I paid about $70/camera when I bought the old ones and this new one was under $100. Prices have really come down for the higher end models. The difference is incredible. Not only is the picture more crisp but the field of view is much wider and perfectly fits the installation spot on the front door. Below you can see a comparison between the old and the new. Click on the pictures to see them in full size and really compare the difference.

The only problem I have now is wanting to get more of them to replace the rest of the old cameras we have around!

benmartens May 18, 2016 Home Improvement

Blackout Shades

Elijah’s room gets a lot of sun. It faces the south and has a bay window that extends out past the wall of the house. This is a nice feature except that his room gets extra hot. It can easily be 5 degrees warmer than our room right across the hall. We have the pull-down, solid shades but a lot of light still gets in around the edges.

To try and help with this and also to help make it darker at bedtime, I came up with a quick project to block more light. I purchased painters drop cloths and a grommet kit from Home Depot. I cut the cloth to be about 3″ wider and taller than each window and then inserted some grommets around each piece. I put nails into the wall around the window where each grommet was and voila, we have an easy way to quickly add additional covers over the windows. You can’t see it from the outside because the normal shade hides it and you can’t see it from the inside when the curtains are pulled.

It was a very cheap solution and it’s easy to store. The only problem is that my material isn’t as solid as I thought it would be. Light still shines through. We’ll see how it helps with the heat but I might try this again with some actual light blocking fabric.

benmartens May 17, 2016 Home Improvement

Ecobee3 Thermostat Review

For years I’ve had a thermostat project sitting on the back burner. The key features I wanted to build into it were:

Ability to set the thermostat from our phones
Support for remote sensors so the thermostat can use temperatures from around the house
Logging of all the temperature sensors as well as the runtimes for the furnace, air conditioner and fan.
Advanced programming capabilities such as: in the summer if it’s hot upstairs but cool downstairs, just run the fan more to circulate the air.

I’ve seen some Arduino-based custom thermostat projects and figured it was doable, but it never bubbled to the top of my list.

Procrastination paid off because now there are some great thermostats on the market and one of them hits almost all of my required features: the ecobee3.

The biggest thing that held me back from installing something like this before was the wiring to our thermostat. All of these new wifi models require a common (“C”) wire which provides power. There are some hacks you can do to make one of the wires perform double duty and the ecobee3 even comes with the kit, but I really wanted it done “correctly.” So when Dad and Mom were visiting last week, I descended into the crawl space while Dad helped from on top and we fished a new line through the walls. We left the old wire bundle in place so I now have 11 wires running to my thermostat (4 in the old bundle plus 7 in the new.) I’ll never need more than 5 but whatever, I’m future proof.

Setup was a breeze and it even told me that I had one wire connected incorrectly. The touchscreen on the thermostat walked me through connecting to the wifi and basic setup. I also connected the remote sensor and placed it upstairs in our bedroom.

I jumped onto the web interface and looked at the myriad of ways that I could customize the scheduling and also added the apps to our phones. (There is a beautiful Windows Phone app available and I’m sure they have Android and iOS too.) It’s so nice to program a thermostat by clicking around in a browser window instead of punching buttons on a little device. The default software has lots of nice features such as “use the upstairs thermometer to control things at night” and “run the fan extra when the difference between the two thermometers is greater than normal”.

Another big reason for buying this specific unit is that it has a nice API. I spent some of my free time in the next few days writing a program to download all of the data from the thermostat and upload it to my SQL Azure database. That database now has information about furnace, air conditioner, and fan runtimes as well as individual sensor temperature and humidity values. It’s all recorded every 5 minutes so I will have tons of data to play with. The API also means that I could theoretically do fancier things like write a program to text message us if we should open the windows in the house or turn the furnace back up when we drive within 15 minutes of the house after being gone.

At $240, it’s a chunk of money to pay for a thermostat but if you’re at all interested in tinkering with this stuff, it’s a great product. I think it will shave some money off our bills too so we’ll recoup some of that cost, but mostly it’s just fun!

benmartens April 4, 2016 Geek, Home Improvement

Power Outage Debrief 2

After our previous multi-day power outage, I wrote a post talking about what I learned from my first real test with the generator and gave myself a B-. Unfortunately, I had another test recently when the third windstorm of March knocked out power for 175,000 people. Thankfully, this outage only lasted 11 hours so it was easier to deal with, but I’d still bump us up to a B+. Here’s a breakdown of what I learned this time around:

We need to have a plan of what to do when there is nasty weather coming. This time around, I remembered to set the fridge to Max Cool (dropping the fridge and freezer temps to 33 and -6), I moved ice from the freezer to the fridge and had it refill the ice in the freezer, and bumped the furnace thermostat up a couple degrees. That was all great but I forgot that I should also have been keeping our phones charged up.
After the power went out, I remembered that I never got around to building a better shelter for the generator. Fail. The last time I tried to use the pop up tent but it was difficult to deal with in the wind and it took a lot of time to set up. So I headed off to Home Depot, but because I only had my little Subaru, I had to plan something that was quick to build and could fit into my car. I had them cut a sheet of 3/4″ OSB into two 40×48 pieces and I bought a couple of metal 90 degree straps. I made a quick “tent” out of those two pieces and it worked really well. It was heavy enough that it wasn’t going to blow away and it provided shelter for the generator while giving the exhaust an easy way to exit. It will also be easy to unscrew and along the wall in the shed.
Last time I was nervous about the dirty power from the generator ruining the fridge so I would only run the fridge every ~2.5 hours and then unplug everything. That was a lot of work and I was exhausted after a couple nights of that. This time I just let it run and everything was fine. Much easier.
We used VERY little gas. The generator ran for a total of 7 hours and we used well under two gallons. The supply I had on was sufficient for a full day so that was a win.

Given that we’ve had three outages in the last nine months, we are ready to look into a manual transfer switch so that the generator could run right into our electrical panel. Depending on the, cost we might go ahead with that. A neighbor put one in and within 10 minutes of the power going out, he had his generator and started and plugged into his house.

benmartens March 21, 2016 Home Improvement

Power Outage Debrief

After coming home from vacation in August in the middle of a power outage, Tyla and I decided to buy a generator. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it would be a big help. I figured we’d never lose power again since we finally shelled out money for a generator. Wrong!

On Nov 17, we had a really big windstorm and it knocked out power for around 300,000 homes. We lost power at 2:15pm. After waiting an hour to make sure it wasn’t a short term outage, I headed home to fire up the generator. We ended up getting power again at 12:15pm the next day, but even with the 22 hour outage, we succeeded in keeping the fridge running, using a space heater to keep the eating area warm, and running some lights. It’s amazing how much better it feels just having lights on in an outage like that!

Tyla and I have really ramped up our disaster prep in the past couple months and I’d give us a B- on this event. Here are some of the things I learned:

It never occurred to me that when I need a generator, there’s a good chance that it’s raining. The generator shouldn’t sit in the rain so it needs protection. I used our pop up tent but that was a little sketchy given the high winds. I thought it was going to blow away. I think I’ll try to fashion some kind of plywood that just sits on top and latches on to provide a rain shelter. It will be a lot faster to set up, and if I make it correctly, it will be easy enough to store along a wall in the shed.
It also never occurred to me that because we were running an extension cord inside, we’d have to leave a door or window cracked open which lets heat escape. I got around this by jamming a large towel in the crack and that helped.
We have a bunch of small battery backups around the house basically wherever we have fancy electronics (computer closet, desktop computer, theater setup, and downstairs TV). Those are really handy in power outages because you just move them wherever you want power and plug in a lamp, etc. They’ll run LED bulbs and charge phones for quite a while. Unfortunately, I was not able to charge them back up with the generator. While the generator provides a pretty clean voltage signal, the frequency fluctuated about +/- 1Hz from 60Hz. That was enough to make the battery backups freak out and keep switching back to battery mode. My initial plan had been to run the generator into various battery backups and then run equipment off of those batteries to keep the signal really clean. That failed so I had to hook things up without that battery in the middle and I was a little nervous about the dirty power running to stuff like the fridge which has lots of electronics in it. Everything worked ok so maybe I was worried about nothing. It would still be nice to find a cheap way to clean up the power signal a bit so we could use the batteries more effectively.
I was shocked at how little power the fridge used! I don’t know what the startup surge was, but once running, it only used 150 watts! If you put it in “Max Cool” it would ramp up to 500 watts once it pushed below 0 degrees in the freezer, but 150 watts? I could probably have been running this off my battery backups all along! Sure it wouldn’t have lasted indefinitely but I could have at least gotten one or two cooling cycles in the fridge.
The next time we think that the power might go out, we should set our fridge to Max Cool. It drops the temps by about 5 degrees in the fridge and freezer for the next 24 hours. If the power does go out, that gives us more runway before we have to use the generator.
I had no idea how quickly the generator would use gas. It was dependent on our usage and it turns out that we used very little of the available capacity. I never really saw the gas gauge move. Unfortunately I topped the tank off a couple times so I can’t get an accurate measurement of the gas we used when I drain the tank, but still, it would easily have run for many hours.
Because of the concern about running out of gas (which can damage connected devices) and because I didn’t necessarily trust the generator to run trouble-free, I didn’t let it run overnight to keep the fridge cool. That meant setting an alarm every ~2.5 hours to wake up, turn on the generator, and run the fridge for 30-45 minutes to cool it back down. It was a very restless night for me.
The overnight temp dropped into the mid 30’s. We keep the house at 69 degrees and by morning it was down to 59. If it was just Tyla and me, we could survive but it’s hard with a toddler who likes to throw off blankets while he sleeps. I was prepared to use our 1400 watt space heater in the bedroom periodically the next night, but then I chatted with our HVAC guru and he approved my plan to hook the furnace up to the generator. When he installed it, he put a switch in the line so my plan was to take the switch apart, wire in a male extension cord plug and then connect it to the generator with an extension cord. I don’t know how much wattage it would draw, but it’s a gas furnace so I just have to run the blower so I should have plenty of juice. It would have been awesome to get the house warmed up, but doing that also meant that when the power came back on, I’d have to undo my change to have the furnace running on the power grid again. In the future I think I’d probably wait until the house got really cold to do this, but it’s awesome to know that I CAN do it in a pinch.
We had already been considering adding wiring to our panel so that we can transfer over to the generator. I’m still interested in that and it would have made our experience a lot nicer, but I’m still not sure it’s worth the money. I’m batching up some other panel work that I want to have done (whole house surge protector and per-circuit usage monitoring/logging) so maybe it will make more economic sense to do them all at the same time. Now that I know how much work is involved manually hooking things up, I have a better feeling for how valuable it is to have it wired into the panel.
Food and water were never a concern. We have a big bin of food stored in the pantry that is our “emergency stash.” As long as we have some kind of fire, there’s lots of food that we can eat and the food will keep for at least a year in that bin. We didn’t even have to break into that bin though.
Our gas supply was inadequate. Now that I know how much gas the generator uses, I will keep more on hand. Previously I had 2 gallons in the garage, but I’m bumping that up to 8. I’ll keep rotating it every few months to make sure that it doesn’t go bad.

Overall I’m very happy we bought the generator. At less than $500, I feel like we’ve already come a long way towards feeling like we got enough value out of it to make it a good purchase. The next time this happens, I will have a lot better idea what to expect and will hopefully be able to relax a little more. This time felt pretty hectic and I didn’t get much sleep.

benmartens November 20, 2015 Home Improvement

DIY Home Security

Some of you know that I installed a security system at our house instead of contracting it out to ADT or one of the other popular companies. I never blogged about the project, but it was a major project for me. The physical installation wasn’t very hard, but it took a ton of time to research what I needed to buy. I’m not going to go into specifics on this public site, but here is some of the basic info in case you’re interested in this for your own home.

The main reason you would probably want to consider this is that you can save a lot of money on your monthly bill. I think ADT is currently charging $37/month for their basic package. By doing it yourself, you can get the same monitoring coverage for $10/month. You don’t have to be a math whiz to know that saving $27/month adds up quickly.

Our house was previously serviced by ADT but there was no active service when we moved in. The panels that ADT uses are locked down. While they are standard models, they are tweaked so that you can only use them with ADT. The sensors that are already on your doors and windows are probably reusable. In our case, all of the sensors were hardwired and those are extremely simple to reuse. The “only” thing I had to do was replace the main control panel and the keypad.

In retrospect, I could have saved myself some time if I had just bought the exact same panel that was there before. It would have been obvious how to wire it up! But I went with a new panel mostly because I didn’t think of that option, and also because I wanted to be able to support wireless sensors. I’m glad the wired sensors were there, but I wanted to quickly and easily expand the coverage of the system.

Once I had the panel in hand, I carefully labelled all the wires on the old panel, disconnected the wires, and then reconnected everything. Programming is all done via the keypad and you’re interacting with 90s technology. Everything is done via long strings of numbers and you better have a firm grasp on the manual so you don’t get loss. It’s ridiculous, but it works.

I was able to confirm that the alarm worked locally so then it was just a matter of hooking it up to the phone line. You cannot use a VOIP telephone line (like the one you get from Comcast.) It must be an actual old-fashioned telephone line (POTS) or you can use a cellular monitoring system for a little extra money per month.

So is this a good DIY project? Ehhh… if you’re a geek and you’re willing to spend a lot of time reading manuals, you can figure it out. You’d also have the advantage of being able to call me up and learn from my mistakes. I’m thankful we have it but I spent a TON of time getting it going. I think a lot of that delay was because I was so nervous about dropping a few hundred bucks and then screwing it all up.

Our system has been rock solid and we use it regularly. We’ve only had one false alarm and that was attributed to a helium balloon slowly floating in front of a sensor. I love our custom solution because when I decide to add some more sensors, I can do it for $20-40/sensor. There’s no service call from a tech, crazy prices for installation, or additional monthly fees. And if I want to control it from my phone or hook it into a home automation system, it’s just some more research and purchases on my end. We’ve already added fire and carbon monoxide monitoring for a grand total of $0/month.

Is the system safe? Sure. I’m already using the layout that the “professionals” recommended for the house and then I’ve added more sensors on top of that. I can tell you that the fire sensors we got are exactly the same as the system that we put in at church for tens of thousands of dollars. A smart burgler could get through our system, but they could get through your ADT system at least as easily. I could spend more money to tighten up some of those holes, but at some point you just have to let it go. Having the sign out front is probably more important than the layout of our system.

I enjoy this kind of thing so it’s worth my time to save the money. Obviously the math is different for most people because companies like ADT are very successful!

benmartens November 9, 2015 Gadgets, Home Improvement

Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Just trying to get through life without looking stupid, so far it's not going very well.