electrical
Submitted by Steve on Wed, 01/20/2010 - 2:07am
Since moving to this house, I had gone from running one 24/7 computer server to three -- actually four if you consider a hibernating laptop. The web site you're looking at right now ran on one of them -- a FreeBSD Unix server. A Windows box ran my home automation set up. The other computer, running Ubuntu Linux, was mostly work related.
Thing is, the juice needed to run these servers and the related hardware was killing me, including the air conditioning needed to counteract the heat they produced in my small office. The three computers together drew about 700 watt/hours. Add a monitor, KVM, DSL modem, router, hub and backup and I was burning about 900 watts/hour x 24 hours x 365 days. At Con Ed's prevailing rates, it costs $1400/year just to run those three computers. That doesn't include the laptop or the A/C.
Last spring I decided that I had to simplify my hardware and by summer I had a plan: I would move everything to one computer. The problem was, the only computer capable of something like this is the one computer I didn't own: an Apple Macintosh. A Mac Pro seemed like the ideal candidate. Using software from VMware, I would be able to run my Linux and Windows software concurrent with the Mac's OSX operating system. All would share the Mac's beautiful 24" cinema display.
Could it really be that simple? Actually, yes it was. I took delivery of my 8 core, 16GB Mac Pro on the morning of Dec 8. By that evening I had Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP happily humming as virtual machines under OSX. XP even ran noticeably faster than it did on my Pentium 4 machine. I was happy.
But the devil's always in the details, and one of these demons was that the Insteon controller for my existing Windows-based home automation software required a DB9 serial jack. Macs don't have DB9 jacks. In fact, Macs don't even have serial ports, just USB and Firewire. While there are USB serial port emulators, there was a larger show-stopper preventing me from moving my existing Windows-based home automation software to an XP virtual machine on the Mac. Under VMware, virtual machines can only access the USB ports when they are the foreground application, or when it has "focus". That would defeat the purpose of running Insteon on a virtual machine because unless XP was the foreground application when an Insteon event fired, the message would never get sent.
If you're a regular reader of this irregular blog, you know that most of my home's lighting is controlled by computers, not by mechanical switches. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can read the background here. The bottom line is that I love home automation, I have a small fortune invested in it and, one way or another, it needs a central controller. And it appeared that I would have port everything over to the Mac. Short story: ka-ching!
The Insteon software I used on Windows is called HouseLinc. For Macs, the Indigo software seemed to be the way to go. As luck would have it, I already had a USB-based Insteon controller laying around from another project which would save me about eighty bucks. But as MY luck would have it, it was DOA. After spending an evening trying to get it working, I remembered. It was a victim when one of my Con Ed feeder cables shorted out in the street a couple of years ago.
I ordered a new 2414U Powerlinc controller from Smarthome.com. It arrived a week later. As soon as I opened the cover on the cardboard box I knew I was hosed. The device was in pieces -- not as in "broken during shipping" but "some bonehead didn't finish putting it together". What was just as disturbing was that Smarthome didn't sound one bit surprised by my complaint.
Note to the Insteon people: if you don't want Insteon to suffer the same Death By Obscurity as X10, you had better start producing better quality hardware. Only die-hard fan boys will overlook shoddy merchandise. I had to replace my first broken Insteon device two weeks ago: a relay wall switch. It was only three years old and cost $70. That's not acceptable.
Another week passed and I finally received a functioning 2414U. The migration was uneventful and everything worked fine. It was with a bit of sadness that I turned off my Dell Pentium 4 Windows machine, probably for the last time.
Submitted by Steve on Fri, 04/13/2007 - 9:16am
Catching up on the recent fun at BrooklynRowHouse, I've finally got my electrical back. My electrician strapped the panel so I didn't have a half-dark house but I couldn't run any 220v appliances, including my Delta table saw. That brought the woodworking in the bedroom reno to a dead stop.
Submitted by Steve on Mon, 03/19/2007 - 11:33am
I was surprised at 8:45am this morning when the Con Ed truck pulled up just as I was walking out the door with the pooches.
If you read my last post, I lost one leg of power to my house yesterday. The electrician I called pronounced one of the feed cables from the street DOA. He called Con Ed to report it. He also left me with a number to call if I didn't hear from Con Ed soon "in the next two weeks".
But did I hear him correctly? Did he say "two weeks" or the contactor unit of flex-time called t'weeks? Yeah, I know they sound the same but that will only lead to false expectations. "Two weeks" is exactly 14 days; "t'weeks" is, well, Klingon for something. It doesn't literally translate to anything meaningful, let alone time.
T'weeks lives in a different temporal reality from that of terrestrial time. Let's use it in a sentence.
"When will that part arrive?"
"T'weeks."
"When can your guys get started?"
"T'weeks."
See how easy it is to say?
As effortless a word as it may be, it encapsulates surprisingly complex temporal concepts. T'weeks is based on quantum mechanics. It's like those sub-atomic particles that behave differently depending on whether or not they're being observed. For instance, the lumber delivery you ordered for tomorrow will show up today because you weren't paying attention, and neither was the crew of reluctant friends you'd roped into helping offload the truck. But the plumber you called to fix the clogged house trap won't be here until next Tuesday because you made the mistake of observing your backed-up toilets.
A sharp reader might wonder if there's a similar arbitrary time unit called t'day. Yes! But it's usually used in the context of returning a phone call or cutting a check.
Anyway, at the risk of speaking of the devil, props to Con Ed for showing up so quickly. The Con Ed guys chopped the ice off the man hole cover, jumped in and found the wire break. It was in an old (1930s, they said) #6 lead-sheathed wire that apparently shorted against the underground steel conduit because of snow melt.
The bad news is that they couldn't fix it today. There wasn't enough good wire to splice and the other two wires were in terrible shape too. In fact, I wonder if this was the cause of my X10/Insteon home automation problems. An arcing feeder could generate lots of noise in the powerline.
They're going to have to pull three new wires to my breaker box. They offered to run a temporary wire through my garage to get my 220v working again. I thought about it and decided that, no, that would probably give Con Ed an excuse to drop the priority for the permanent repair.
The good news is that I have an appointment for 9am, April 2 when they will pull three new #2/0 wires to my panel junction. Guess what that is? Exactly t'weeks!
So why is this good news? Because that's the most expensive part of converting a house to 200 amp service and Con Ed will be doing it for free! My neighbor paid three grand to have those wires pulled to power his central A/C. And he waited three months for it.
I don't actually need more than the 100A service I've currently got. But looking at my ever-increasing gas bill and what I think will inevitably be a shift towards all-electric homes in the next 15 years I want to have 200A service available here.
Submitted by Steve on Sun, 03/18/2007 - 7:40pm
I was checking my email today when my computers and monitor suddenly shut down. The music went quiet in the living room downstairs as well. But I could hear the radio playing in the shop downstairs. It took me five seconds to figure out what happened. People a block away probably heard me yell, "NOOOOoooo!!"
This has happened to other houses on the block. The underground feeder cables into these houses are old. Add a bunch of melting snow and road salt like we've had the past couple of weeks, throw in some leaky manhole covers and these cables can fry.
A typical home has two legs of power coming into the breaker box, 180 degrees out of phase. If you lose one of them you typically lose power to half the breakers.
Submitted by Steve on Sat, 01/20/2007 - 12:21pm
(Or "Why A Duct?", with a tip o' the hat to the Marx Bros)
This house has ancient, single-pipe steam heating. From what I've been able to determine from digging in these walls over the past seven years is that it's always had steam heating. Nothing interesting there.
What's baffling is why the house also has ancient metal air ducting buried inside the walls. I discovered this shortly after I moved here when I ripped down the basement ceiling and found three vertical ducts to nowhere. Over the past hundred years, various plumbers and electricians had used them for service pulls. So did I when I ran 3/4" copper to the second floor bath, the central vac piping and various electrical branches from the basement panel.
I moved the renovation activity into the upstairs hall two weeks ago. After ripping off an old baseboard for replacement, you can see one of those ducts here.
Here's a closer look.
The ducts are a fairly heavy gauge steel wrapped in another layer of corrugated steel, which functions as plaster lathing. It's real nasty to work with. It takes quite a bit of effort to knock a hole in this stuff. Because the ducts aren't anchored to anything, you can't use a saw on them. They just flap around, loosening the surrounding plaster. And after you succeed with tin snips you're left with metal edges as lethal as a machete blade.
There used to be an old baseboard outlet here. I hate baseboard outlets. They're inconvenient and a trip hazard when anything is plugged into them. My intent was to move that outlet up the wall. But once I removed the baseboard and saw the ducting (which I'd forgotten about) I decided I liked my unlacerated flesh more than I hated baseboard outlets.
Submitted by Steve on Mon, 11/13/2006 - 10:09am
A few days ago, Jeannie from House In Progress referred a woman from a new ABC reality show to me. From the email it sounded like she was looking for folks who had gone way over their heads on a home improvement project and needed 911 from the professionals to bail them out.
I told her that this was my fourth major construction project in 25 years and that I wasn't (*harumph*) a rookie at this stuff. I politely declined. But the next day I wondered if I wasn't exactly the sort of Al Bundy cartoon character she wanted. After all, I was three weeks behind where I wanted to be on the master bedroom renovation. That's a Bundy point right there: unrealistic expectations.
Submitted by Steve on Mon, 09/04/2006 - 12:11am
This was the first Labor Day weekend since I got this place that I wasn't knee deep in some h/i project. Last year I was in the middle of the guest room renovation. Now, I'm waiting for lumber estimates so I can start on the master bedroom rehab. I took the opportunity to hack on my Drupal software here and to play with the Categories and Views modules on a private Drupal instance. Nice software but, man, does it need a coherent manual.
We got some of Ernesto on Friday/Saturday. The wind down here on NY Harbor was pretty fierce so there was clean up to do, which is about as clumsy a segue as I can make to my house topic o' the day: compressors.
I've got a 20-gallon compressor. It's one of my favorite tools in the shop -- not just for what it typically does but for some of the oddball uses you can put it to, like drying off a washed car and blowing out the shop after a sanding marathon. It can even take out a mosquito at six feet. Today it was my broom.
Submitted by Steve on Sun, 09/03/2006 - 1:09am
Just when I think I've got this electrical stuff all figured out, something tosses me in the weeds. This morning I noticed that the clock on my four-year old Frigidaire stove wasn't working. Neither were the buttons. Great, the computer's shot. Of course, it's got an electronic starter that depends on the computer so the oven's not working either.
Well, I guess it's about time. The Frigidaire microwave I bought at the same time had to be replaced last fall. Nice quality control, guys. I remember when companies like Frigidaire and Maytag had good reputations for durability.
But that wasn't the end of it.
Those of you who have followed my X10 home automation articles know that I have a love/hate thing going for these devices. Or rather, like Frigidaire, I'm annoyed by the sub-standard quality of X10 hardware in general.
The bathroom project started in May 2004, five years after I bought the place. This is Stage One in the second floor renovation. That's how long it's taken me to finish more pressing projects elsewhere in the house.
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It's a 1950s bathroom, but demolition revealed that it was probably its third renovation. Fifty years was long enough. Time for a facelift.
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Lovely color scheme, eh?
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I was originally going to tackle this job myself but I had several reasons for bringing in my favorite general contractor, Frank O'Donnell, for the demolition and rough-in work. Mainly, I couldn't live without a functioning upstairs bath for the probably four or five months it would have taken me to get it functional again. My other bathroom is two stories down.
It's also one those "a man's gotta know his limitations" things. The job required moving a potential load-bearing wall. There were tons of debris and materials to be moved in and out over newly finished floors. The bathroom sits over the heavy oak ceiling I built two years ago, on a concrete floor that needed to be broken up with a sledge hammer. It involved breaking/repairing the roofline for a new vent and exhaust and tapping into old, brittle cast iron plumbing. The second floor needed an electrical subpanel and, while I'm pretty good with electrical, I shy away from heavy amperage. Frank has also installed dozens of Jacuzzis and steam rooms, and any DIYer who's installed a Jacuzzi knows what I'm talking about.
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Day #2: Most of the demolition was completed and the debris carted away, including removal of the rear wall separating the old bath from a walk-through closet. A new wall will be constructed to make the bath about two feet deeper to accomodate the oversized Jacuzzi tub.
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It looks like, many decades ago, there was another sink on the second floor. But the old branch was just crimped closed, not sealed. That explains the occasional sewer smells in the old bathroom on hot days.
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Very scary, old aluminum wiring. Well, it's gone. A new 50-amp subpanel will be installed next week to accomodate the second floor rewiring.
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Day #3: The old wiring has been removed. The subpanel was installed and #6 BX cable pulled from the basement. A couple of ceiling can lights and sconces are in place.
I have to make the decision today on whether or not to go ahead with the installation of central air-conditioning. It will be far cheaper to do the second floor at this stage while the walls are still open. I want to use a
ductless system. These units are quieter and more efficient than window units but don't require expensive, ugly a/c ducts. Frank says he can get the second floor installed, with heads but minus the outside condensor unit, for $2600. I wanted to push this expense off till next summer but i think i'm going to do it as it will save me lots of installation headaches later.
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Day #5: The new back wall is framed. And we ran into a problem.
The 36-inch wide Jacuzzi was going to move the toilet to a position that would have required cutting through two floor joists to accomodate its 4-inch drain. Frank recommended against it. Karen found the solution. The tub will lay flat against the new back wall, vanity on the left wall, toilet to the right of the entrance door. That makes the plumbing a lot easier and her plan incorporates cabinets that make use of dead space in the old design.
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Tenement shot. Maybe the old bathroom wasn't so bad after all.
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Drains and vents are almost done. If I was doing this by myself I would have used PVC for all of it but Frank is old school about cast iron/no hub drains. On the other hand, cast iron is quieter and did I really want to be eating in the dining room and hear a toilet flushing over my head?
That's Chopper inspecting what he thinks might be his new litter pan.
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The interesting thing in this shot is the new run for the upstairs central air conditioning, inside those black rubber insulators. It runs two stories down to the basement, across the ceiling soffet and out to the back yard under the deck. I couldn't believe how fast Dimitri's crew worked. All were native Russians and none spoke a word of English so we communicated with hand signals. Come to think of it, all the workers are either Russian or first-generation Irish.
That big box with all the wires in it is the switch panel for three of the four lighting circuits and the exhaust fan. I definitely have to clean up that rat's nest before close in.
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In the photo are the new copper runs from the basement as well as the PVC vent and GFCI outlet for the vanity. Frank's contract stops at hanging the drywall and laying the mud floor, which is when I take over. I'll be doing the taping too because I will probably need to remove drywall to make adjustments for sconces and outlets. In fact, I know I will.
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Day Six: There was lots of visible progress today and, as always, it's with mixed impressions. On the one hand, drywall hides all the internal funk and begins to show what the finished room will look like. On the other, it always looks a lot smaller than you thought it would. This is no different.
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Rocking done. That dangling wire is the low-voltage power switch for the steam unit.
About that tub: arrrrgh!! And here I am trying to get rid of a pink bathroom. This tub was supposed to be deep red, like a burgundy!
Let this be a lesson to online buyers. I'm a professional web developer so I have no excuse. I already know that web colors can't be trusted and I should have paid more attention to the site's color samples. If I had I would have noticed that they were GIFs, not JPEGs, which are very unreliable indicators of real-world colors.
There was a $400 restocking fee and eight week turnaround on returns so I'm stuck with it. I'm going to have to find some way to de-pinkify this bathroom, possibly by using grey-scale natural stone in the tile surround.
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The digital camera's aperture got confused by the brightness of that skylight. During the day, that skylight brings in enough sun that you don't even need artificial lighting in here. It still needs a glass panel to seal off the shaft though because the skylight is vented.
Frank's job is done. Finishing up the bath is on me from here on.
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Shower surround tiling and grouting completed. I need to wait another day for the grout to cure before scrubbing off the last of the grout residue. The marble medallion is something I found on Ebay for ~$200. I wanted a greyish, natural stone field tile to offset the unexpectedly pink tub.
This was the hardest tiling job I've done, mainly because of that <expletive> slate tile. Actually, it's a 3/8" ceramic floor tile that I got cheap as a contractors return. But I've never encountered anything as indestructible as this stuff. I wanted to keep the grout lines evenly spaced around the surround but the tile was impervious to a carbide tile bit. I moved the vertical grout line so I could use my diamond wet saw to cut for the fixtures.
Frank dropped by to check my progress and turned me on to a way I could have done this without moving that grout line: with a hand grinder loaded with a diamond blade. You do a plunge cut from the back. I tried it on the vanity tile later and it worked great.
The Jacuzzi works fine but the steam unit only pumps a stream of warm water out the nozzle. Jacuzzi's sending me a new PC board.
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Shower doors and trim installed. Here's a good example of scrounging on the cheap. It's typical for a Jacuzzi like this to be installed with a marble ledge under the front lip of the tub. It has to be waterproof so it can't be wood. But I didn't want to introduce another texure/color to the bath or pay $150 for something I didn't want. Solution: Trex decking. After a little cutting and planing, it looks like it's part of the removable beadboard panel underneath. Cost: $12.
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I found Kohler fixtures to match the Jacuzzi. I added a slate counter top to match the floor and shower surround. There are four separate lighting circuits in this small room. To do: raised panel cabinet doors.
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Beadboard paneling. I went back/forth on what style to use and settled on this, mainly because it was the only solid one-by stock I could find locally. I whitewashed it, adding a tube of burnt umber stain per quart to get the grey I wanted, followed by four coats of water-based poly. I capped it with a poplar shelf which has a low-voltage light strip for up lighting through those decanters filled with colored water. Looks excellent at night.
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Post Mortem
The loo almost became my Waterloo. It's a lesson in project planning, or lack thereof, and in false economy.
There were a few derailments during the initial construction, like the last-minute bathroom fixture rearrangment. In the heat of battle I made a decision which I didn't think through and it had implications on things like the entry door, which now swings into the vanity. That also required a change in the vanity design to something more compact (I had already started on a nice cabinet with carved Queen Anne legs). It also resulted in a smaller bathroom than I wanted.
In retrospect, I think the original fixture layout would have worked fine if the toilet were placed on a six-inch platform and the drain wrapped around the wall behind the tub. I think it would have looked pretty cool too. A real throne! If I hadn't been on a contractor's clock I would have done it that way.
Another problem was the tile I chose for the shower wall. I got a bargain because it was a contractor return at a liquidators. But when I later decided to use the same tile on the floor I found that I'd bought the last Zirconia Radica Negro in NYC. That meant a day searching tile stores for an acceptable substitute, which cost 3x as much and didn't come in 14x14. And it had to be special ordered. Add another week and another red star to the budget.
But the biggest derailment was that ugly tub color. To make matters worse, Jacuzzi stopped carrying the color last year which is why I got it cheap. I'd assumed that Jacuzzi sold matching lavs and toilets so I pushed off ordering them. I was wrong. Another couple of days turned up an acceptably matching color from Kohler called Wild Rose. But, you guessed it: very expensive and special order, almost wiping out the money I saved by buying that close-out tub. It cost a six-week delay in completion too.
My bathroom wasn't completed until mid-August. That's how ten-minute decisions postponed can swell to two month delays.
Then there are those glass shower doors. I way under-budgeted for those. I'd assumed $700 or so, without doing any actual homework of course. They wound up costing more than twice that, with some estimates double even that! Because it's a steam shower the doors had to be custom fabricated with special seals.
Overall, I'm not happy with how the bathroom turned out, or rather it fell short of my expectations. The final irony is that I'd never even tried a Jacuzzi tub before I bought one. It really wasn't worth the expense and effort.
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Renovation By The Numbers
A few House page viewers asked me to walk them through a typical room renovation. This room already had a lightweight renovation when I moved in and needed to set up my office quickly. Now it will undergo a complete refab for a guest room.
Generally speaking, I have a few fixed strategies for renovation, at least in this house:
- Preserve the plaster whenever possible. Some people do drywall rehabs, then spend a bundle paying someone to skim coat blue board so it looks like plaster. Plaster is superior to drywall for sound and durability so it makes sense to save it.
- Replace old electrical with new BX and boxes. Plastic sheathed cable (NMS)is legal here but I don't like pulling it through nail-strewn walls. NMS also means another wire hookup inside the box.
- New floors.
- New woodwork. See www.interiordoors.com for great deals on architectural hardwood doors.
Step One: Demolition
Before I decide what I want to do with the room, I take a prybar, hammer and Sawzall and lay waste to everything that's not going to be rehabilitated. Then you have an empty canvas with which to visualize the new space.
This should of course be done on an empty room with the doors closed and sealed around the threshhold. Otherwise you'll find plaster dust in your corn flakes the next morning. It helps to use a powerful window fan set to exhaust mode to create negative pressure inside the room. While Doc Karen complains that I'm too casual about this, wear a dust mask! The ancient grime, mold spores and possible asbestos dust waiting for you behind mouldings, especially over door and window headers, is really nasty stuff. Vacuum often and vent its exhaust out an open window.
Step Two: Wall Preparation
Scrape all the walls and ceiling, and I mean every square inch of it. I use a thin-bladed 2-inch scraper for this because a wider blade will skip over slight depressions in the wall. It's tedious work but the results will pay off next year when your paint isn't falling off.
Use a side light to look for raised or uneven areas in the plaster which could indicate finish coat separation from the base coat.
Use the pointy edge of a five-in-one painter's tool (or an old-style beer can opener) to dig a small trench in plaster cracks. This will increase the bonding area for your repair. It will also uncover possibly larger cracks in the base plaster, which will need to be repaired first. Remove all loose debris.
If you encounter large sections of loose plaster you have two options: tear it out and replaster or use plaster washers to pull it back in contact with the wood lathing. I only do the latter if demolition might endanger plaster details like corner mouldings or medallions. Plaster washer repairs often lead to more cracks later, especially on ceilings.
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Like those walls? This is what happens to five year-old white primer. It's also the answer to the question, "why can't I use primer for finish paint?"
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The old radiator was removed and relocated to a cast iron baseboard unit under the windows. I completed demolition and spent the next week patching cracks and loose plaster. The ceiling was a mess due to a roof leak, thanks to a botched satellite dish installation.
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The next job was routing the electrical. The wall outlets are being fed by a new circuit, which I pulled upstairs a couple of years ago. The old aluminum BX in the ceiling fixture was disabled, which required knocking a fair-sized hole in the plaster. A new medallion covered up that mess.
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The walls were too damaged to repair conventionally so I taped and skimcoated them.
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Installation of the "window seat". This was built in my shop as three cabinets and screwed together. The tops, which slide off to give access to the radiator, were a bitch to get right.
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Constructing the crown moulding for the window pediments. You know, I've done so much of this style of trim over the past five years that I've got it down to a formula now. That has its good and bad points.
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I ran into an issue with the wiring, or rather how to hide it. I had BX for electrical, phone and DSL wiring for the office, the main feed for my satellite dish, the second floor security alarm wiring and two coax cables for the room itself which I had to somehow disguise along this wall. But the wall is plaster over brick. What to do? I decided to build a bump-out with 2x3s and drywall and cap it with an oak shelf.
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Trim work completed. The room is starting to get a bit crowded. Here's a construction tip: keep your work space clean. My productivity seems to drop at the inverse square to the number of trip hazards in the room.
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The ceiling fan was installed. The floor was roughed up for the cement leveler in preparation for the new floor.
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Fifteen pound builders felt is stapled to the floor to reduce squeaks.
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A Mannington engineered oak floor is laid down using a Spotnails stapler and 1-3/8" staples.
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The floor and shoe moulding is done and the wallpaper is up. The wallpaper was problematic, or rather the original stuff was. I picked up the latter at a seedy wallpaper store in Boro Park, hung it that night and three hours later it was peeling off the walls. The pool of rain water inside the store should have been a free clue to the quality of what I was buying. The stuff in the photo is Home Depot standard issue and it went up, and stayed up, without a hitch.
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