Watcha doing?

[Cloudwalker]

The people in Central Florida are preparing for another hurricane. This one looks to be a repeat of Charlie.  Making landfall in Tampa on Wednesday as a category 3.

[tango]

Fun With Soundproofing.

I hauled two more rolls of soundproofing from the garage up into my workroom. I wasn't sure whether a third roll was needed but since two rolls combined weigh almost as much as I do I decided to stick at two, and haul the third if I found I needed it.

Fitting the material at ground level is easy, I can more or less stand up a roll and unroll it, screwing it to the wall studs as I go. The next level up is trickier because it's heavy material and has to be held in a fairly precise location so I can screw it into place, but I can't let go of it or the weight will pull it off the screws. So I rigged up a bit of a botch on one of my ladders to hold it at the right height, and then my wife steadies the roll so it doesn't fall off the ladder while I climb the ladder and screw it into place.

It makes an enormous difference having her help me, even if all she is doing is steadying the material. In the course of a couple of hours we pretty much finished the workroom's soundproofing and got a chunk of the adjacent room done too. I have a few strips to fill in (the material is 48" wide and the ceiling varies from about 97" - 99"), and aside from that this room is all but ready for drywalling.

In other rooms I have a little more electrical work to do that I can press on with now, and I need to frame a section of wall and have a couple of windows replaced. But the way thing are going we might just have a chunk of space finished before the end of the year. That will be nice.

[Cloudwalker]

At my sister's waiting for the hurricane to come through. 

[tango]

At my sister's waiting for the hurricane to come through.

Hoping you're safe from it. Please let us know.

[Cloudwalker]

We're fine.  We didn't even loose power.  Had something pull down the box and meter off the wall but no other damage.  Lots of branches down.

[Cloudwalker]

Can I get a "HALLUAJAH?  A day that started out as a "day from hell," ended up great.  To start with I had an EGD (esophageal gastric dilation) scheduled.  Not fun but not really a big deal.  I've had several of them and I thought I had everything set up.   Or so I thought.  I can't drive from the hospital, so I arranged transportation through my insurance.  I need someone to wait with me, so I had a friend that would wait with me.  Redone this before.  Then the hurricane comes.  I go up and shelter with my sister in Orlando.  First snag.  My house doesn't have power because the power pole that brings power to the power box has come off from the wall.  After some work, I find an electrician to fix it.  It takes longer than I had hoped.  I drive down from Orlando to catch my ride and find out my had landed in the emergency room and he can't do it.  So, after many calls I finally find someone to wait with me.  The procedure goes fine.  I go home and my electrician is there.  He agrees to wait for the power crew so he can sign the waiver.  And the crew gets my power back on.  So I am now sitting here at home watching TV I have to clean out the refrigerator, which can wait for now.  And I have to go back to my sister's to get the rest of my things.  But the horrible day has been redeemed.

[tango]

Fun With Electrics.

A back box that was already a bit on the tight side is now even tighter, since I put a wifi-enabled relay in it. It took a bit of fiddling to get everything to go back into the box, but it's there now and I can control my lights (that will be a light/fan combo soon enough) from my phone from anywhere in the world that has internet access.

Now I know everything works as expected the next job is to take another overly tight back box and put two of these things in it. That job is going to involve pulling everything out and putting a bigger back box in place, as there's no way I can fit it all in there.

[tango]

My wifi relays are now due to arrive tomorrow, so I can press on with fitting them to a new box over the weekend.

Today my wife and I went out for dinner and discovered a very pleasing limited edition sour beer at one of our local(ish) breweries.

Then because I couldn't make enough progress on my lighting to make it worth bothering I decided to.... work on some lighting. I've got a lamp I bought because it didn't work. I'd previously taken the wiring apart and it was ugly, so I stripped most of it out and replaced it, and now it works very nicely. It's a pretty lamp, so it's good to have it working.

Getting it working was frustrating, because I had to not only feed more wires through the threaded rod down the middle than I've had to deal with before but I also found that a shield was positioned such that I couldn't get the key into the new lamp holder. Thankfully a tungsten carbide bit in my Dremel opened the hole up so I can get at it.

I still need to find a tap/die combination so I can make my own brass extenders. Some lampholders come with them and some don't, and it would be handy to be able to make them as needed.

[RabbiKnife]

I picked up a great set of tap/die at an antique store a few years ago

[tango]

I picked up a great set of tap/die at an antique store a few years ago

I have a few sets but nothing that's quite the right size for this. I've got a metric and an imperial set for regular bolts, and a precision set for much smaller things, but none of them quite match what I need for lamp holders. Lamps themselves seem to be the kind of thing that live in antique stores too - the size I need is somewhere slightly bigger than my precision set but smaller than most other sets, and so far I haven't managed to find anything suitable anywhere.

[tango]

I got my two two-channel wifi relays installed. I needed to fit a bigger back box and it was still a big snug in there, but they are installed and they are working so that's good.

Lately I've been trying to figure out how to finish the soundproofing job in two rooms, while conflicting aims of minimising material wastage and minimising the number of joins in the material. It's awkward because nothing in the room is quite square, the ceiling height is slightly more than twice the width of the rolls of material, and the presence of windows and doors invites wastage and/or joins. So far I've got most of it done, and I'm slowly working my way around it all, and then I can make sure the ceiling is more or less level before getting the drywalling done.

My plan is to get one room finished, then drywall that room, then move stuff from the next room so I can get that room done. Trying to finish two rooms at once leaves me stuck dealing with a lack of space. Much of the stuff is easy enough to move but cast iron radiators are anything but trivial to transport. Two smaller ones are relatively easy but the larger one probably weighs about twice as much as I do, which makes moving it interesting.

[RabbiKnife]

Shopping for upgrades to my home security camera system….

Ouch.

[tango]

Shopping for upgrades to my home security camera system….

Ouch.

Do you use wired cameras or wifi-enabled ones?

Wifi cameras seem pretty easy - you just stick them in place and replace the battery as needed - but I can't help thinking that something wired (preferably with PoE) is harder to circumvent.

[RabbiKnife]

Wired.

[tango]

Wired.

Since I have some parts of my house pulled apart at the moment I'd be interested if you'd be willing to share some thoughts on different systems. I live in a rural area so no real concerns about crime - I don't want the kind of thing that looks like the house is bristling with cameras (and advertising to every criminal scumbag in the area that my house is worth raiding).

Obviously I understand if you don't want to post details in a public forum like this one....