My house is green

Starting this year, 100% of the electricity consumed by my house is coming from renewable sources, via Puget Sound Energy’s Green Power program. I truly believe in renewable energy sources, so I figure I’d be a bit hypocritical if I didn’t use green power myself when PSE makes it so easy. Of course, it does come at a slight premium over that ugly black power that most people settle for: I expect my electricity bill to be around 14% more. That’s reasonable for now, though it might not be too long before fossil fuels surpass that cost anyway. (And I do trust that I’m actually getting what I pay for.)

Curiously, hydro is not included in the list of green power sources. In case you didn’t know, nearly half of everyone’s electricity in this area already comes from hydro. While I would consider hydro to be renewable as long as it keeps raining here, I guess there has been a lot of backlash in recent decades about the environmental impact of damming up rivers.

The only thing in my house not powered by electricity is the central heating, so in the winter months I’m still burning dead dinos. While efficient electric heat pumps are pretty suitable for the mild climate here, it isn’t practical to replace my furnace now since it’s only a few years old.

Oh, and while my car still runs on gas too, there’s not much I can do about that until my Tesla arrives.

Banishing the garage door poltergeist

Those of you who visited my house during the first year I lived here may recall that my garage door would occasionally open and close for no reason at all. Sometimes I would even come home to see my garage door wide open, inviting anyone to freely walk into my house. I wasn’t too worried given that I’m in a very quiet cul-de-sac with only my one neighbor ever driving by, but still it was a little disconcerting. Finally that stopped happening about a year ago, around the same time the button on the wall in my garage stopped working. I didn’t really need that button though as I usually use the remote in my car, so I didn’t worry about fixing it at the time.

Then about a week ago my garage door stopped responding to any commands to open or close. Finally this weekend I got out my handy multimeter to investigate. I found one of the safety sensors at the bottom of the door wasn’t getting any power, causing the garage door opener to think there was constantly something in the way, so it would refuse to move the door. The switch on the wall wasn’t getting any power either, though the voltages all looked good at the connections to the opener unit. Most likely a loose connection in the switch wiring had been the cause of those random door movements, then that loose connection eventually disconnected altogether.

I actually know how things got into this state. When selling the house, the previous owner had new drywall installed in the garage — one of the cheapest, sloppiest drywall jobs I’ve ever seen. I guess the quality normally wouldn’t matter much in a garage, except that here they hid the garage door opener wiring behind the drywall, then managed to drive a screw through the wiring or something else to nearly break it, in two places no less.

Fortunately, rewiring things is something of a hobby of mine! This morning I ran new wire to the switch and safety sensors, and now it’s all working fine. It’s very satisfying that a little bit of effort, along with some tools and and trivial applied knowledge of electronics, allowed me to cheaply fix a problem that has been annoying me for two and a half years.

Hacking light fixtures for fun and carbon reduction

When I first moved into this house just over two years ago, the great room in the basement had some really dim and dingy light fixtures. So I replaced them with some simple round incandescent fixtures. But I was never really satisfied with those, for several reasons:

1. They stuck out too much from a ceiling which is already slightly lower than normal.
2. They directed too much light to the sides, impacting the projection picture too much.
3. They were not individually controllable — all six were on the same dimmer switch. I often want to leave the front two lights off to avoid washing out the projection screen, while still lighting the rest of the room.
4. They used too much energy. 6 x 100 = 600 watts just to light that room. Ouch!

With the latest upgrade, I’ve managed to solve all of these problems!

• I had to go with fully recessed fixtures to solve problems 1 and 2. The challenge there is that the original holes were in an odd size (10" square) that nobody uses anymore. (The house was built in 1952, and I’m pretty sure the fixtures I removed two years ago dated from that era.) Recessed florescent fixtures come in certain standard sizes, from which I chose 1′ x 4′.
• The original fixtures were all wired to the same switch, but I wanted to control them separately. Insteon let me do that, by directly hooking up hidden Insteon switches to each new light fixture, and hard-wiring the original switched wires to ON.
• For efficiency I considered both florescent and LED lighting. LED is much more efficient even than florescent, but the problem is household LED lighting costs a lot if you want something bright (though it is slowly getting cheaper). Florescent is cheap and moderately efficient, but it’s not dimmable which makes it unsuitable for a theater room. I ended up going with a hybrid solution.

Of course, you can’t just buy a hybrid florescent-LED recessed fixture with integrated Insteon switches off the shelf. So I built my own by cutting up, drilling, rewiring, and generally hacking a standard recessed florescent fixture. I’m very pleased with the result, which is why I’m showing it off. Here’s a photo of one in my basement ceiling, with the cover open and hanging down.

(No, it’s not actually warped, that’s just distortion from the camera.)

On the two ends, you can see the two integrated Insteon switches which are easily accessible with the cover open, but invisible with it closed. The one on the right controls the two small dimmable LED floodlights (currently on), and the one on the left controls the florescent tubes. The custom wiring, extra bulb sockets, and florescent ballast are hidden underneath the raised bulge that goes down the middle.

The two LED floodlights use only 3W each, but together they put out about as much light as a 45W incandescent bulb! That’s certainly not enough to brightly light the room – the florescent bulbs serve that purpose — but it’s some nice moonlight for when the projector is on. Actually I’ll leave at least a pair of the LED lights on all the time to prevent the basement from being a dark cave. I used to leave a 45W bulb on down there all the time, but now this will save me a continuous 39W. At that rate, the LEDs will pay for themselves in… about 2 1/2 years. Since LEDs last halfway to forever, in this case they’re easily worth it without even counting the green factor.

The biggest problem with this whole design is the amount of time it takes to do the custom modifications. Did I mention I’ve only done one out of six so far? Now that I know exactly what I’m doing it should go a little faster, but still, it will probably be a while before I get all six of them done.

For the one, the scary part was cutting the big hole in my basement ceiling. I used a powered reciprocating saw, and got the hole pretty close to correct. There are some very small gaps and chips in the plaster on one side which aren’t very noticeable and can be touched up with spackle.

The really hard part was getting the thing mounted up into the ceiling… by myself! Saeed wasn’t around, and I was impatient to get the job done. It’s not terribly heavy, but I just didn’t have enough hands to hold and screw at the same time. But I somehow managed it, without doing anything stupid or dangerous.

Gated community?

I live in what could be considered a small cul-de-sac with three houses. Except I guess it’s not really a cul-de-sac since it isn’t a city street, but a shared private driveway.

My two neighbors now want to put up a gate at the entrance to the driveway. You know, one of those pretentious motorized gates you might see guarding an expensive estate or "gated community". With connections to the fences on either side of the entrance, the entirety of our three properties and driveway would then be enclosed.

Of course they’re not going to do anything unless I agree. (I technically own the whole driveway anyway.) But I feel a little bit pressured into going along with it, and I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of a having a gate there.

Their primary motivations are safety and privacy. I think the main reason this idea came about is we actually had a stolen car abandoned in our driveway a few months ago. It took a little while before we realized it was abandoned, since we each assumed it belonged to one of the other houses. And, there are a few lower-income apartment complexes around, which I suppose may make some people uneasy. But still, I consider this area a relatively safe neighborhood, as good or better than most parts of Bellevue. Anyway I don’t think there are any ‘bad’ parts of Bellevue; it’s nearly all yuppie suburbanites from end to end.

I’m not sure exactly why I’m uncomfortable with the idea of having a gate. It shouldn’t be inconvenient for me, since I’ll have a remote control in my car — just another button to press in addition to my garage door control. But it might be a little inconvenient for friends who come to visit. There would have to be a button or call-box or something to let visitors in.

A gate, if done well, could probably increase my property value by quite a bit. With the three neighbors splitting the cost, I’d probably get out more than I put into it. That is the biggest positive factor for me, since there’s a good chance I’ll want to sell my house after another 2 to 7 years.

So, if you come to visit my house, what would you think about a gate there? Too pretentious? Any factors I haven’t considered?

Soggy city

I had an irrigation system installed around my house a couple weeks ago. Now mother nature is mocking me with perpetual rain.

 

The perpetual rain actually does almost stop for a few months out of the year, so despite my sincere but inconsistent efforts at watering, too many of my shrubs died last summer. I’ll be planting some replacements soon. The automatic sprinklers will be a great help when the less-soggy sunny season gets here — I can’t wait.

Insteon Lighting

The last two weekends I’ve spent a bit of time updating most of the light fixtures in my house. Some of them were as old as the house, and they were really showing their age, besides being not my style. Below are pictures of some of the new lighting: dining room chandelier, mantle decorative lights, and basement lighting. Also I haven’t yet posted a picture of the theater setup in my basement, so there it is in all its before-and-after glory. (Pay no attention to the pathetic beanbag seating — I have some cool reclining theather chairs being delivered next month. As for the big ugly fireplace, I’m planning to have it rebuilt in a year or so.)

 

All the new lights are dimmable and fully computer-controllable. They run on Insteon wired/wireless mesh technology (a faster and more reliable successor to the old X10 home automation protocol). You can see the controller modules where the lamps are plugged in on the mantle, but for overhead lighting I have replaced some of the old wall switches with these nice Insteon dimmer switches. Eventually everything in the house will be controllable via the computer (and a TV remote control interface through a custom Windows Media Center addon when I get around to coding it — see here for the concept, but I could do better). Why? Because I can. Because it’s neat! And because it gives me something to tinker with during my copious lack of free time.

There is an 8 foot deep hole in my backyard

I’m having Bodine Construction do some work on the drainage system for my house. I knew when I bought the place that the basement had flooded sometime in the past (water stains on the bottom of the walls). But if I’m going to spend time and money to fix up the basement, then I don’t want that to ever happen again.

 

There are two things being fixed. First, the gutters, which currently just dump the roof water onto the ground next to the house, will be connected to some new pipes which route the water into the storm drain. And second, the footing drain is being unclogged. The footing drain runs around the outside of the house at the level of the basement floor, about eight feet below ground level in most places. So they dug a DEEP hole at one corner of the house to get into the pipe, flush it out, and inspect it with a pipe camera.

 

When this is done, I’ll finally be rid of that unsightly growing ravine and orange cones at the gutter by my front entry.