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

Generator

We lose power at our house once or twice a year. In the last nine years, there have been a couple multi-day outages, but in general, our power is pretty reliable. But… we bought a generator. When we came back from vacation to a house with no power, food going bad in the fridge and an overtired kid who was thrown even more out of his routine, I snapped and clicked BUY IT NOW on Amazon.

Generators can get really expensive. I think I kept it fairly simple by making some compromises. I didn’t get a name brand, I didn’t get a super quiet model, I got gas instead of diesel, and I didn’t get one that is wired into my house. What I DID get is a DuroMax XP440E. It’s rated for a sustained 3500 watts, has an electric starter and it cost less than $400. I figure that if we use it even a few times, I’ll feel like it was worth the money.

My main goal during an outage would be to run the fridge along with some lights and cell phone chargers. That will be easily accomplished by placing the generator on the back patio and running extension cords into the house. Simple, but effective.

At some point I want to have a bunch of upgrades done on my electrical panel (per circuit usage monitoring, whole-house surge protection, etc) and at that point I might have them wire in a transfer switch. Then I could just plug the generator right into the panel and (carefully) power the whole house. Obviously we wouldn’t fire up the dryer, the microwave, etc, but it would be really nice to use light switches. Plus, our water heater requires electricity because it’s tankless so this would give us hot water. Brent, our HVAC guy, said we could power our furnace with the generator too. So there are lots of possibilities but I don’t plan to go down that route soon (or maybe ever.) In an emergency, I’m pretty sure I could hack up a solution to get the furnace powered by the generator so I feel like I’m covered. Plus it rarely gets THAT cold here.

Once it arrived, setup was simple. There are a few steps to follow to get it ready to run the first time, but now it should start up very easily via either the electric starter or the pull cord. We live less than a mile from the gas station so assuming they have generators, we should be able to get gas from them as needed if my small local cache runs out.

That all being said, I feel somewhat ridiculous for buying a generator. I grew up in a house that seemed to lose power all the time and we never had a generator. This was definitely a luxury purchase, but for I’m happy with getting this backup plan for only $400.

benmartens October 8, 2015 Home Improvement

OpenSprinkler With Power BI

I’ve been happily using OpenSprinkler to control my irrigation system this year. One of its many features is logging how long each zone is on, but I haven’t done much with those logs yet. Last weekend, I decided to dig in to the data.

The first thing I did was write a little app that runs every morning, checks the latest logs, and uploads the new data to a SQL database in Azure.

Then I stood out by the water meter and figured out how much water each zone used. That included the startup usage (since water drains out of some heads when the zone is off) and the usage per minute. That let me calculate how much water I’ve been using over the past few months.

I fired up Power Query for Excel and brought in all the data so I could get some nice Power View charts and graphs going. (Note that I could also have used the new Power BI Designer instead of Excel, Power Query and Power View.) I saved that workbook to OneDrive and imported it into PowerBI.com. I set up PowerBI.com to automatically refresh the workbook every morning and show me the charts on a dashboard.

It might sound complicated but it only took me about an hour of work and that included standing out by my water meter for 15 minutes. Now I can fire up the PowerBI.com website every day and analyze my water usage. Since this isn’t based on an actual water flow meter, it won’t help me find leaks, but it does help me get an idea of how much money I’m spending to keep my yard green. I’m also working on some new features that will keep track of the high and low temperatures each day along with the precipitation.

You can get a long way in Power BI before you need to pay for anything so go give it a shot if this sparks some ideas in your head.

pbiopensprinkler

benmartens June 23, 2015 Gadgets, Geek, Home Improvement

Basketball Hoop

When we bought this house, there was a broken basketball hoop on the property back in the cul-de-sac. It seemed like a great location to play, but the hoop was unusable. When we tore up the yard, we took out the hoop and threw it away.

Once it was gone, I noticed that more people were driving through the yard there as they turned around in the cul-de-sac. I decided to put a new poll back in roughly the same place.

I bought a Lifetime 71525 hoop from Amazon (yay for free shipping with Prime) and it sat in my garage for about five months before I finally got around to installing it. That should have been a pretty straightforward process, but as soon as I started digging, I discovered that my brand new irrigation lines ran right through where I wanted the pole to go. That meant I had to dig the hole even bigger and make a detour in the pipe. After that, the concrete went pretty easy but it was tricky to keep the pole perfectly vertical while the cement set up. Assembly of the hoop was more complicated than I expected, but I finally got it worked out after a little modification to the lifting mechanism.

The hoop has been up for a couple weeks now and it works well. Elijah loves to have it lowered down to 7.5 feet so I can lift him up to dunk the ball. The cul-de-sac makes a nice playing surface except that the road slopes down to the curb a bit so shots that go through the hoop usually fall down to that part of the road and bounce back into the yard.

Hopefully this hoop provides us with years of fun! Or at the very least, it will hopefully cut down a little on people driving through the yard in that spot.

benmartens June 19, 2015 Home Improvement

Don’s Fence

Last summer at this time I was in the middle of our huge yard remodel and that included building a fence. Don and Logan put in a lot of hours on the fence at my house. This summer, we’re all working together again but this time it’s at Don’s house.

So far we’ve gotten most of the old fence removed, most of the new posts in concrete, and some of the fence up. This past weekend we made a ton of progress because Don rented an auger and a cement mixer. We knocked out 10 posts before 3pm. Not too shabby for our ragtag group.

Somehow Don seems to end most of the work days with a bleeding cut on his arm, I hurt my back on Saturday running the auger and Logan broke his thumb by shooting a nail through it. You might not want to come help with this project. Our safety record isn’t very good!

benmartens June 18, 2015 Home Improvement

Planter Box Drip Irrigation

Now that we have our wonderful irrigation system controlled by the computer or my phone, I want to hook it up to everything that needs water! Thankfully, that turned out to be pretty simple. I got it connected to the three window boxes in front of the kitchen and all the way up to the hanging basket outside the front door.

Home Depot has a lot of the stuff I needed, but to avoid buying a lot more than I needed, I ordered from http://www.irrigationdirect.com/. I only found them through a web search, but they let me order very small quantities of very cheap parts (some were just $0.07 each).

Even if you don’t have an irrigation system, this is something you can set up yourself. Look for drip irrigation kits. You can find kits that connect to your hose bib. If you want to get extra fancy, you could use a hose timer, but my faucets are so leaky that these were never a great solution for me.

There is nothing complicated about it. You just need to figure out how all the parts go together. You would connect a hose to your hose bib, run it near your planter area, use the adapter to go to a 1/2″ tube and run that along the length of your planter area. Then you poke small holes in the tub and use connectors to connect in 1/4″ tubing. There are a lot of options on how to dispense the water from basic drips to sprays to tubing with emitters every 6 or 12 inches. You can customize exactly where you want the water and how much you want.

Theoretically this setup means I’ll use less water because I will only water exactly the areas that need it, but in reality, I’ve been using it a lot more because it’s so easy to turn it on. Once all my new landscaping and potted plants get established, I should be able to reduce the watering a bit.

benmartens May 19, 2015 Home Improvement

Open Sprinkler Review

When Tim installed my irrigation system, he was kind enough to throw in a free irrigation clock that he had sitting around. It’s a standard Hunter model (probably $75-100) and it worked great, but every time I looked at it, I thought about how simple the device really was and that I should be able to control it from my computer. Standard industry offerings are hundreds or thousands of dollars with monthly fees. They’re mostly intended for commercial use.

After a little searching, I found opensprinkler.com. Somebody else had the same idea and made such a nice package that he is able to sell it. The basic model is Arduino based but there are Raspberry Pi and Beagle Bone versions too. I chose the standard model for $155.

Installation was a snap. I labeled all the wires from the existing clock and transferred them over to the Open Sprinkler unit. I also ran an Ethernet cord from the clock in the corner of my garage up into the network closet. (It is SO convenient having the network closet share a wall with the garage!) I turned the unit on and very quickly was turning the sprinklers on and off from my computer. With a little extra configuration I was able to do it from my phone.

Why? Well yes, it’s a toy, but it also makes it very easy to walk around the yard testing zones or turning them on to blow out the line. Also, last summer I’d wake up to hear the rain and realize that my irrigation was scheduled to run in the morning. To avoid wasting water, I had to turn off the house alarm, go out in the garage, turn the program off, come back in, turn the alarm back on, and go back to bed. Now I can just reach for my phone and adjust it… if I even need to (more on that below.)

Aside form the convenience factor, here are some other features that I love:

I can completely manage the system from the comfort of my couch instead of standing in the garage.
Programs can be set to start based on sunrise or sunset. General recommendations for lawn watering are to do it a little bit before the sun comes up to avoid the hot sun burning off the water but also not let give moss a wet, dark place to thrive. This setting makes that super easy.
By checking the weather online, the system can automatically adjust the programs based on the humidity, temperature and precipitation from the previous days. This either means skipping an entire program or just running it for fewer minutes.
Programs can be set to run every N days instead of on specific days of the week.
You can view a log of when each zone was on. This will be nice when I try to track water usage and also to evaluate how well the Open Sprinkler system is performing.
As the software gets updated and perfected, I can update my unit with the click of a button.

All in all, I highly recommend this product so far. As long as it actually does the job of controlling the irrigation system without ever crashing, I’ll be very happy!

benmartens April 6, 2015 Gadgets, Geek, Home Improvement

Bark

Last weekend I spread seven cubic yards of bark around my house. Thanks to Logan for helping! It took a lot of wheelbarrow loads, but it looks great now. The bark lays nicely over the drip irrigation that I put in place (under Tim’s tutelage) to water each plant. It will help hold in the moisture from the drip irrigation, and, in conjunction with the pre-emergent I put down, it should keep weeds from growing. And oh yeah, it looks really nice too!

benmartens April 1, 2015 Home Improvement

Plants

The final step in the back yard and front yard makeover was putting in new plants. We held off last year to spread out the bills and because I was more comfortable installing the new plants at the beginning of the growing season.

Picking plants for the entire yard would normally be a pretty daunting task, but it only took Tim a couple hours to figure out what would look good and walk me through it. He showed up with all the plants and we got them planted in less than three hours. Thank you (again) Tim!

The grass in the back yard heading down to the gate under the magnolia tree never had a chance. The constant wet weather in the winter left a steady stream of water flowing down an area that rarely got sun and it just turned to mud. I gave up on that and decided to bark it over as a walkway down to the gate. I also took the opportunity to make a planter along the fence out to the corner to add a little life to the back yard. You can see that new planter area in the last picture. We had planned ahead for this possibility and there was a drip line stubbed out in the corner.

This week I’ve been working on finishing off the drip irrigation lines and then this weekend I’ll be putting down six yards of bark over the top of all the planter areas. It will look nice and help slow down the weeds.

benmartens March 27, 2015 Home Improvement

Guest Room Makeover

We have four bedrooms in this house so two of them were relatively unused. One was Tyla’s craft room/workout room and the other was the guest room. We decided to flip flop the rooms and while we were doing that, we might as well paint it. Those are two of the last rooms in the house that have original paint on them (one other is the formal dining room.)

Tyla did a bunch of research and came up with a color scheme. I did the grunt work of painting the room, painting the door (it was a weird off white color), and installing shelving in the closet. And then Tyla got the room all put together. Teamwork! We finished the project pretty quickly by working in the evenings after Elijah went to bed and it was done in time for my parents when they came to visit.

I’ll skip the before pictures since they basically just show white walls, no curtains, and no shelves. Here’s what it looks like now!

This project is done enough for now but we have lots more that we would like to do. The room could use a mirror and some wall hangings. I also want to build a nightstand, a dresser and maybe even a bed. This would be a good room for me to practice my woodworking skills since it’s not generally in use and we can get by with it the way it is now.

benmartens March 23, 2015 Home Improvement

Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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