What home improvement work did you do today?

Not my house but had a old neighbor call me about having a path to the side of there house put in.

 

Yesterday...cut the grass, chipped a bunch of collected brush and branches into mulch and spread it, and did a couple of cuts for a furniture project...trying my hand at a wall bed! Today, painted trim in the guest room getting the new bed. Tired.

 

Swapped out cabinets and cupboard for large locking cabinets

 

….. and solar is done. 18 panels of pure goodness!!!

 

Added an automatic coffee machine to my counter. That count?

 

I read the first few words of that and thought you put an espresso machine in your Tundra !!!!!! .... but then I got to the word counter !!!!!!

I may or may not have thought about doing a passenger seat delete to accommodate a coffee bar!!!!

 

That WOULD be a good idea….

 

I think I flooded a condo downstairs.

 

Fantastic! I take it you don't have a landline anywhere close? I've been using mobile hotspot from 4g Verizon phone and it's been a humbling experience. About 4 weeks ago, everything changed. The power of next generation human race is here and I'm tagging along! 455mbps. Spectrum 400mbps service. (20upload)



My dog is obese.

 

Canceled tonight, for twice the price as AT&T and $600 up front getting about the exact same speed and only a few days left for full refund. Very disappointed I wasn't getting the speeds I was seeing on youtube. Ran almost two weeks got as low as 10-15 mbps.

 

@TomC843, gang I believe starlink is for people without alternative means of internet. If you have a landline going near your house, starlink wouldn't make sense. If you are......


...then that kind of speed is fantastic bombastic. Funny fact: I have a green sweater with the same insignia, hence the reason for me to search the internet for that phrase.

Literally the same picture is on my green sweater. I wear it to work when it's cold.

 

That's understood, from someone that had Huges Net before AT&T and still has no cell service at home I was hoping for better like I seen countless times on Youtube and here. This is my one choice and wanted better.

 

We’ve lived here for 16 years. There is only one phone company that serves our rural area, and they are running on 1960’s copper that they’ll never bother to upgrade when they’ve got a captive audience. 6mpbs up and 0.5mpbs down was the absolute best I could ever see, and that was doing a 3am speed test when I knew the rest of the people on our private road were asleep. And that’s when we weren’t dealing with issues related to rain in a nearby vault or a faulty port in their main building downtown (has happened three times while we’ve lived here).

Cable will never come out this far (9 miles from town). Fiber might some day…but I’m not holding my breath.

I get 1 bar of 3G cell reception at the house, if I stand on my porch or stand in a certain window in my dining room. If I walk up to the north corner of my property (~50 yards from the house), I can watch that 3G symbol turn into 4G, but no more bars. Actually doing antenna db readings is so low it’s a wonder that the phone actually shows a “bar” of signal at all. Doesn’t matter the carrier - we’re currently VZW and have had friends on just about every other carrier come up and they typically lose signal about half mile from our house and don’t have anything while they are here. And that is AFTER I set up a WeBoost house antenna and wired the whole thing in.

We were so desparate last year we actually broke down and called ViaSat. They came out, and did their little walk around, and told me that the only place I could get a line of site to their system was to put my dish up in that north corner of the property and then ask my neighbor if I could drop two fir trees and a maple on his property. Estimate was $2k for install with equipment needed to get power and network run out to the dish location…That was more than I was willing to spend for what I knew wouldn’t really be any better than what I had.

Is SL expensive? Yes - roughly 2.5x my current bill (for internet) with the extra cost of the RV package while I wait for them to actually finally release my pre-ordered home system. And I hate giving that pompous ass any money. But my experience for a week now has been an average of 5 to 10x what I was getting before for download and 10 to 20x for upload speeds. I actually worked from home today - through a 6 hour video conference call while RDP’d into three different computers and moving a significant number files between my local machine and our network over VPN - and it was performing only slightly slower than if I was in the office (obviously file transfers don’t hold a candle to our internal network, but the rest of the workload was same-same). In 16 years, I’ve never been able to do that from my house…I’ve been lucky to RDP into a desktop in our office to be able to do production work from that machine while at home, and still have had to be patienty while I waited for the keystrokes to catch up over the internet when I was typing, or watch my mouse lag behind as I move across the monitor.

If I could get VZW or TMobile 5G home internet to work, which would be closer to what I was paying for DSL, I’d be jumping on that. But when left to choose 5/0.5 DSL, Hughes or ViaSat, or StarLink RV…There’s currently a clear winner right now.

 

It’s amazing how technology has transformed how we live. I kinda feel your pain, we were going to buy a very nice home (signed papers and deposit done) on 5 acres but the internet was non existent and no phone lines. Cell service was maybe 2 bars on the driveway. Forecast for 5G by any major carrier was not going to happen. After my wife found out that doing FaceTime with granddaughter would most likely not work, that killed the deal. We would have to do satellite internet. Anyways, cancelling that led us to a more expensive home and more landscaping. And it delayed our move by a year.

 

Looks good. We’re seriously thinking about solar panels. How many KW are your panels and do you have a battery backed up system?

 

Thanks! No battery backup. I will need to look up the exact KW. But I do know I can literally run everything in our house 24/7 and still be under what we are producing. There is even a buffer for when we add AC. When we were doing the planning, I told the guy….. I do overkill

 

Don't you worry, electric company will still charge you a minimum feesaw it on the news for Duke and FPL. I wonder if California caught up to it yet?
----
@WAtundra4x4 , Morse Code!!

 

Were in the process of getting a new roof and solar as well. The previous owner put the asphalt shingles on top of the original wood shake So we have 2 roofs to remove and have to have the whole roof sheeted...

 

I think SCE's minimum charge is ~$10-$15.

 

Gee, how the heck do you even put asphalt shingles over a shake roof?

 

Once they start the demo I'll follow back up as to what underlayment they used, if any.....f'n cheap ass-bastards

 

WTH????? Good luck and keep us posted

 

Ya….. We still need to pay a small fee once a year. But nothing compared to what they charge monthly when not on solar.

 

Yea, pretty crazy. But we've been in this house for 22 years and the roof still looks fine. Going solar is the only reason I'm replacing the roof. If not I don't know how long it would last.

 

Yep, the minimum charge per day according to one article quadruples in a few years.

 

Found the story I mentioned..
https://youtu.be/harSOdBPaK8

 

I just signed off on getting a solar panel system, with Battery back up and 50 amp fast charge for future electric vehicle. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to get a November install date.

 

We talked about it, but I tried the math three different ways (I’m an engineer) and couldn’t pencil it out.

 

The the big business wants your money one way or another. Another tidbit of information is that the number of people who can sell back electricity is capped also. There is a godfather clause, so if you can do it now you can do it in the future. My solar guy says some communities have already met their quota and no more credit for excess electricity. Also the credit you get does expire in the spring, so if you don’t use it over the winter it goes away. Balance is reset to zero.

 

Fantastic incentives to go solar!