What home improvement work did you do today?

It’s there in case you or @Outbound ever visit and need to reach the light switch.

 

It's better than you picking me up and throwing me at it.

 

This is a picture from a while back. It’s the place we left behind in Arizona

 

Quick and dirty sofa table for the missus’ xmas. Trestle has through tenons with wedges, legs attached to the top with splined tenons. Threw in a power dock for charging stuff.

 

This is a work of art! Well done!

 

Thanks! I used cheapo doug fir, but it’s behind the couch and I needed some woodworking practice.

 

This is nice. I love those kinda joints; simple, solid and artistic!

 

Thank you. It’s my absolute favorite joint. I have them all over the house.

 

Very cool

 

Solid work.

 

Thank you

 

Spent the day building a work table for the garage. Just need to sheet the lower shelf tomorrow.

It's overbuilt like I build everything and it's sized to be the right height to use as a run off for my tablesaw.

 

A few things:

1. I've wondered why our bedroom was noticeably cooler than other rooms (we're talking 4-5 degrees cooler). I do remember uninstalling a few baseboard heating units last year, and began snooping around yesterday and immediately facepalmed. When we removed them...I sort of never bothered to plug the holes (leading to our unheated basement) the electrical wires went through. Had son fill them with some insulation foam, and now the bedroom is fine. LOL

2. Not the same as actual house stuff, but still...it's an improvement. (You might find this of interest, @shifty` ). I've been running the house internet off the UCI (UniFi Cable Internet) modem and the UX (UniFi Express). After having to wait like 30 seconds to adjust ONE setting...I had enough. Finally settled in to set up the Dream Machine SE and the U6 In-Wall AP...and the whole process took *maybe* 15 minutes - that's new setup, not migrating. TONS faster and far more stable. The only thing I do not like is that the U6 In-Wall AP is warm on the back - and by warm I don't mean warm. I mean *warm* - enough that I'm wondering if this temperature is normal. It has to be at least 120-130F on the back. Thoughts?

 

I am not sure about those temps, but I am running a slightly different setup. But congrats on the upgrade:

 

I contacted UniFi support, and of course they say "We test these things extensively, not to worry my good friend, etc."



With that said, to be honest, while it is quite warm...the U6 IW AP is meant to mount to the wall with a fairly substantial aluminum backing plate between itself and the wall. I would bet money that once I attach said backing plate, it'll dissipate much of the heat and bring it down to merely 'warm.' Long as that's the case, I'm not worried. Otherwise, I'll simply buy a regular AP for my system and call it good.

And yeah, this thing is fantastic. Put another way....the UniFi Express is NOT. LOL. With the UDM SE, if I click on an icon, it switches to it instantaneously. With the UX...it might take 20-30 seconds. It was struggling.

PLUS I can install this in the basement, run a few network lines to different rooms (one to the living room, a second to my wife's office, and a third to my son's room), and offload some of the WiFi stuff. Plus I get to set up QoS and other fun stuff if I want.

 

I’m running one of the U6 in wall in one spot of our three floors to fill a coverage gap and provide a few extra LAN ports. I don’t remember it putting off a ceapload of heat, I’ll hafta check. Here’s the model etc I’m running.

 

Work table is done. Vises are mount and I drilled some holes for dog clamps.

 

What a day!

The single wide is unhooked and staged for removal tomorrow and the nerd room has an expanded storage wall with additional uses bring printed now:









Tomorrow will be a clean up day, hopefully

 

Printer was running all day non stop... finally on the fun part of the wall... The single wide is gone and the tree guys called to confirm they will be here next weekend. Tractor is coming back tomorrow and we saw some new neighbors... damn, what a day:









Maybe tomorrow we will get a break from these nado warnings and I can get some outdoor stuff done.

 

That's the same one I'm running. I did notice that it comes with a fairly thick aluminum backplate, so I put it on and basically downloaded like 200Gb of PS5 games, and had my son use the crap out of his computer.

It does get fairly warm...but nowhere near enough to cause any issues, and in any event it'll be screwed into the box where the current coax line to my living room (which is being removed) is, and that box is metal itself = further heatsink. It'll be fine.

 

Dec 23, hanging out with family - everyone agrees its cold in the house. Look at smart thermostat and it says "waiting on unit" but nothings happening out at the heat pump or indoor air handler and indoor temp was 2F lower than set point.

Fast forward to 3 hours of troubleshooting later, with weird inconsistent voltage measurements across different wires while testing for calls for heat/AC/fan/compressor. Confirmed the 24V transformer was good, swapped to old dumb thermostat, no change, gave up and swapped back to smart thermostat and ran it in emergency heat mode all night.

Next morning, woke up early fearing the electric bill of running emergency heat only and bill of paying an expert to troubleshoot it, I kicked it back over to normal heat mode in the app. 5 minutes later I hear the outdoor unit fan and compressor kick on! Monitoring it's performance since then and it hasn't skipped a beat. Properly defrosting and keeping up with temp demand.

The only other possibly weird thing was a thick build up of ice on whatever the big cylinder is plumbed into the compressor? Accumulator? Not the smaller dryer cylinder. Possibly a stuck switching valve and all of our dicking around with switching to AC and back to heat and tapping on the solenoid freed it up unknowingly? Or a fluke that caused the accumulator to ice over and letting it sit overnight defrosted it? Temps were just above freezing. Or this is an early sign of a leak in this 13 year old system and I'm on borrowed time.

 

Printer ran some more organization and I started prepping the ground for the new addition. Tomorrow is some medical follow up BS... and then more on Wednesday... So I will take today as a victory:





Allegedly, some trees are being removed from the neighbors property to ensure nothing falls on the new building:

 

I prepared to give $4600 to the well guy to replace

- well pump
- wiring
- 200' of galvanized pipe

 

I replaced mine myself last year. Used pex to tie it all in. Unless that pipe is underground you can do it. If I recall I was under $1000 all parts included. I did need to buy a few new tools for the pex though.

edit: had my trusted hvac guy quote me $13k for a new pressure tank, switch, new tankless water heater, and all the trimmings. Started looking at parts online so pulled the trigger on a diy once I figured what he was charging me in labor.

 

Any of you guys ever install a smart water monitor/shut off valve? Any issues?

Picked up one of these and plan on installing this weekend on existing pex-a.

 

It's all underground - we're talking about the galvanized pipe in the well itself.

With that said, the $4600 is to replace the well pipe, the pump, the wiring, as well as the labor itself, and a few other odds and ends...so they're not exactly getting away with highway robbery.

If it were inside the house, yeah, a bunch of buddies and I would be having a Pex party. LOL All of our piping inside the house (not counting our kitchen) is copper, though, so we are good there.

 

Swapped out our 2 couches and chairs for a large sectional for all 7 of us.
Should work out well for movie nights since they always wanna crowd around us in a single chair or couch.
Before:

After:

 

Are you able to buy more sections, for, when uh, you know, the uh “family grows”? Again?

 

We ordered originally with 1 extra piece. When it got home, we saw the layout and called to order 1 more.

So yea....I can add onto it



This one is about 17.5' wide with it 11' against the wall.....it fits quite a bit now haha

 

I like that color a lot! We did the same earlier this year. Then waited for the company to correct the mistakes, hard to believe this was paid for roughly 7 months ago but we took delivery mid Nov.