What home improvement work did you do today?

Did some exterior painting today, up on the 8 ft ladder. Can't get to the second floor, just don't have the ladders anymore, besides wife would balk........gotta get someone to finish.

 

Sidewalk portion is around 2% next to the house, the Valley gutter transitions from 6 to 12 to 19 as it goes down the property line.

 

New umbrellas and solar lights.

 

Beyond jealous! I want to concrete mine in a very similar fashion but am a few years out on the budget... nicely done!

 

I have been doing misc cleanup and tree removal with my time off of work, preparing for the upcoming hurricane season....

Today I tried using a pump sprayer to spray the "safe" ground clear of vinegar, dish soap and salt...

Holy shit it stinks... I hate vinegar with a passion, and 30% is no joke!!!!! Tomorrow I will see results and take some pics.

 

Building, dirt, and concrete is done. Next week be electrical.
Truck pics included for reference.

 

Nicely done! Super jealous here!

 

I inventoried my existing PVC piping and adapters for an upcoming sprinkler project. Almost have everything that I need.

 

no need to be jealous. with lots of hard work and time, you can be in debt like me too

 

That's a great setup. Really well done!

 

Started "remodeling" our basement laundry room.

I cleaned everything out and hung some sheetrock, which the old owners never bothered to finish, in preparation for a new safe and new shelving which will hopefully get done tomorrow.

Mowed the lawn too.

 

So... the stench of vinegar is repulsive... however, this mixed concoction really did work! now to see how long it holds up.

the rock was almost all covered up in green


this isnt 100% but it is a lot better, going to see what it does the next couple of days



clear example

 

I've been using that potion for weeds for a while now. Always have good results.

 

My first time and damn, it's efficient. Only issue is I used 30% and it still smells like vinegar out there. Stuff is nasty but damn does it work!

 

replacing the Ring doorbell and camera w/ a Eufy doorbell, and new Eufy smart locks.

 

Helped my mom out today; she really likes those under sink insta hot water heaters. The old ones push button had gone bad so she just got an entirely new setup. Old one had 1/4” copper inlet line, new one had 1/4” plastic inlet and I don’t really like using the insert and ferrel on soft plastic, so I went and got a 1/2” mip x 1/4” John guest fitting, everything went smooth and I found a brand new 2.5 gal homies bucket on the road on the way to homies for the fitting!
I also cawlked the sink while I was there

 

You are a good Son.

 

I poured vinegar all over my trash two nights ago because the dump wasn't going to be open for a few days and bears have been annoying. Sounds like natural repellant!

I hate our Rings. I have looked at Eufy a little and didn't see a big difference. This was a year or more ago. What was the motivation/benefits of the switch that convinced you to shell out for the new stuff.

 

My annual Ring subscription was coming up. $99/yr

The main motivator however was recent news on Ring terms of service w/ police- sliding back to allowing warrantless access to Ring footage w/out camera owners consent. Kind of a privacy deal breaker for me.

The Eufy systems use local storage vs cloud, and do not require a subscription to use. I replaced an older Ring doorbell with a Eufy doorbell, and replacing a wired Ring cam with a solocam (arriving today) for the driveway. I also replaced my "dumb" Kwikset keypad deadbolts with smart Eufy deadbolts. It was going to be better for the upcoming stages of family life and a few needs where we want limited/temporary access for a guest.

 

I did not know that about police access. I also would prefer to have it stored on site. I'll look back at it. Thanks!!

 

Their products have either 8gb onboard memory (not a lot), a slot for a microSD card (up to 128gb?), and a homebase device that you can install SSDs in for more storage. Right now I'm just going to try it all out w/ the onboard memory and go from there.

 

I would only add, if you move into the UniFi ecosystem, not only does it have great firewall/wifi potential, it also open the door for VOIP and access control, and their CCTV system, with a huge selection of high-quality cameras, also uses on-site storage, and everything can be powered with a basic network cable. On-prem storage, I think there's a cloud mirror option. Super intuitive interface, better than most NVRs on the market. And zero residual cost, no licensing, etc.

 

This is what we have at our business for indoor and outdoor cameras. I should ask my friend who does it about home styled stuff. Our issue was quality of their video. Our new interior cameras are really neat and do a great job, maybe their outdoor stuff has caught up. We got their new at the time AI updated supposed night vision 4k etc.. put in a couple years ago and weren't really impressed. The night video is bad, you can't read a licnese plate (during the day) even with the AI detecting its a car and supposed to focus on it. We also had issues with their motion sensor stuff, it basically missed 70% of the activity at our business. We had to turn it on 24/7. So their exterior products have disappointed us for 8 years now, through 2 generations of cameras.

 

I'm actually really surprised by that feedback, I'd love to know which model cameras you've got installed outside that were bad (so I can keep a look out if I'm on anyone's site). Their products are at the core of my business, I almost exclusively install their stuff. Quite a few of us on here are running UniFi in our homes/businesses.

I've found everything, at least from the G3 onward, has been really killer, great bang vs. buck, good quality, easy install, good longevity (haven't had a cam go bad in 8 years of installing). I don't have a ton of experience with G2 or anything prior, and I haven't used any of the LPR cams.

I think there's a general misconception that all cameras are engineered to easily read license plates the way a human eye can. You really need an LPR-specific cam for that stuff, you need at least 20-25FPS to capture a license plate on a vehicle that's moving at a slow clip in broad daylight, 30-60 FPS will almost guarantee at least a couple of good captures during the day, and likely at night, with the right conditions. Can some of the $300+ cameras out there pick up a LP? I've seen some, yes, but they always lack sorely in other areas.

Whether or not you'll have decent night vision is highly dependent on whether you buy product that has iR blasters on it (some UniFi cams didn't/don't). But even the cheap shit, like this much older, tiny G3 Flex I keep in my pitch black under-stairs data closet ... has great low-light (I mean, no-light, really) coverage. This snapshot has been automatically reduced in size and quality due to the forum software, but this is from a camera ~2" tall and 1" wide, total size, a little cylinder, stuffed in between two studs in a closet.

The "AI" detection stuff has seen a ton of improvements in the last 3-4 years. Motion sensitivity is easily set. It can detect animals, humans, vehicles, etc. And filter content searching based on those event types.

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I've followed along when you guys talk about these systems, I have a very low understanding of the details just a decent general understanding. I'll snap some photos of the ones we have set up and you probably can recognize them. I will say their new interior ones we have installed are awesome. We have one of the quarter sized 360 cameras and another more traditional one and the quality is great. Once we changed to full time monitoring we don't miss things anymore on the camera, but it does alter how long we can record for. In our business though, if something goes wrong we usually can tell within a day if not right away so we don't really need a ton of storage. I'm watering now and moving sprinklers again soon, Ill snap some pics and post what we got.

 

@shifty` So the white one pictured is a Gen 5 with the lights around for night, it does okay. The black one I don't see a gen number on, but it is the AI model that doesn't do anything well at all. The gen 5 are pretty good I will admit, but the black AI one is trash.

 

Those G5 bullets are my go-to for exterior cams for doors/eaves/etc. Mostly because they're wildly flexible on aiming, and I use the G5 dome on everything else interior (wall/ceiling). The dome, not the turrets. I don't use the turrets for anything, I really don't like them at all, the way they look, the way they aim, or the output (even though many of the G5 are the same guts/lenses)

The one tip I've give you with quality on the bullets. You want to make sure there aren't any light sources in the field of vision of the camera. Posting an example below with a G5 bullet I installed at a recent job. Customer installed a light (see arrow on the left) in the camera's field of vision, and it was impacting the camera's native ability to kick into night/low-light mode. With the camera in day mode, it really sucks at picking up the darker areas of the frame that normally benefit from night mode. This failure would be true with nearly any camera brand, IME.

Beyond that, make sure your camera settings are set to always record in high quality, then configure when to drop the high quality footage to maximize storage. If you have less 8 cams or less, an 8TB disk should hold at least 30days of high quality footage if you tell the console to only keep the low-quality playback after 10 days. I try to factor in 1TB of disk space for every camera, and that'll net you anywhere from 30-90 days of stored footage, "just in case".

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And also note, when reviewing footage, the viewer normally defaults to "AUTO" quality mode (which always seems to pick 'Low Quality' for me, even if I'm directly connected to the console!!), but you can force it to high quality using the menu I'm showing here, and that will make your footage a hell of a lot higher quality for reviewing, and you can see those small details like letters and numbers!!

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This might be a big tip. My wife monitors the videos on her phone mostly, and I bet this is responsible for some of the low-quality reviews we are doing. The extra lighting is possibly an issue too. The black one looks right at the G5 I posted photos of, and that shines light at night for better visibility.

Appreciate this. I think there are some small changes we can make to help them out!!

 

Yeah, if the G5's iR LEDs are blasting at the black one, that's about the same as someone shining a flashlight in your face from the same distance in the middle of the night. Think about it from that perspective, it may help.

Something as simple as shifting that flashlight 5° off-axis from your direct line of sight and you can suddenly see 75% more than what you could when it was directly in your field of vision. With LEDs, they tend to be much more precise, so sometimes shifting off the angle by very small amounts will have huge benefits.