On the road again

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by herr_oberst

Funny thing about those snap-toggles. Personally, I absolutely love 'em. I never have a problem using them and they are so much better than the molly bolts of yore, In my humble opinion..

This wall has fiberglass batting in it. I think what was happening is the square corners on the toggle were getting bound up in the fiberglass. Those old steel toggle bolts will power through anything. Yes, this was not a job for Molly bolts. I like them for lighter duty applications.

[wdfifteen]

A couple of days after I finished the laundry room, the boring company showed up to run the conduit for cable between the solar panels on the barn and the inverter in the house. I'm biting my nails here. They have six days to get this system up and running, and they haven't pulled the cable yet.



They only had 350 feet of boring pipe and the distance from the barn to the house is 490 feet, so they had to bore from the center out toward the barn, pull the conduit through to the center, then move the machine to the house and run a bore to meet up with the conduit.



They hand dug a hole halfway between the house where the bores would meet up.



They moved the boring machine around to the house and ran the bore from the house to the end of the first run, hooked on to the conduit, and pulled it through.
This technology is amazing. From 250 feet away, they shot a pipe through the ground and got the end of it within an inch of the end of the first run. The whole process took less than 4 hours and cost less than having a backhoe dig a trench.

[Scott Douglas]

We had our water pipe from the meter at the street up to the house done the same way. Cost a bunch but we didn't have a torn up yard to deal with afterwards, just two holes, one down by the meter at the street and the other in the flower bed by the house.

[wdfifteen]

After a lot of calling and badgering, the solar company said they would be here to finish up on Dec. 31. It has to be finished by Midnight Dec. 31 to get the tax credit. I'm not happy with these clowns.

Tried to get a few things done in the shop amid all the cookie making and other Holiday cheer stuff. I needed a clock, so I made one. One worthy of a shop.







I made it out of an old saw blade, the movement out of a 2nd hand battery clock I got at Goodwill, and some numerals that I had to buy. I had to scratch my head a while to come up with a way to hang it. I finally settled on cutting a piece of plastic tubing appropriately and gluing it to the saw blade.

[oldE]

Excellent!. I like it!

[wdfifteen]

I've been working on the house, trying to make it more livable - the kind of work I hate. At the same time I've been trying to put a workshop together, which is like building an airplane while flying it at 30,000 feet. I can never find anything. I remodeled the laundry room a couple of weeks ago. This week it was the "master" bath. "Master," is kind of a joke. It's smaller than the smallest bathroom in our old place.

The bathroom door arrangement was intolerable. Just stupid.



This is as far as the bathroom door would open.



The reason was, it crashed into this closet door.



The interior of the closet was just four 24x27 open shelves and it was all painted dark green. I looked into various ways of installing drawers and finally settled on shoving a 24" kitchen base cabinet in it and painting it all white (I still have to paint the trim). I took the closet door off so I could get the entry door open.



I put the old door on Facebook Marketing for $15 instead of hauling it to the dump. I thought that would be easier. It wasn't. I got 6 or 8 "Is this still available" responses that I responded to with "Yes, I still have it," and never heard from them again. One person thoroughly pissed me off.

them - "Is this still available"
me - "Yes, I still have it."
them - "address."
them -"address."
me - "I assume you want me to send you my address. If so, why be so rude? What ever happened to 'please' and 'thank you' and writing in complete sentences?
them - "address."
Them - "address."

I ignored them after that. One nice person was finally polite and no nonsense about it.

[wdfifteen]

My grandson came over to help Vicki and I roped him into helping me put this fan/light up. The arthritis in my hands makes this kind of work really painful, which always puts me in a bad mood. Plus, I thought it would be a good learning experience for him, though it turned out he knew more than I suspected. I walked him through wiring up the unit and hanging it, while I replaced the switch, which spiked the pain in my hands and made me grumpy, to put it mildly.
When it was time to "let the smoke out." I flipped the switch and - nothing. This destroyed my last nerve and I lost it.

"xod Damn it! We're going to have to take the damn thing down and figure out what the hell is wrong with it. Cheap Chinese junk probably put together wrong at the factory, damnit!"
"Grandpa?"
"WHAT??"
"Maybe we should turn the breaker on."

Smartass kids.

[911 Rod]

Being in a bad mood and putting up lights go hand in hand.
Especially when she says "I think I like the old one better"

[Zeke]

@911 rod, good one. We've all been there.

[Crowbob]

Did you toss that rusty old toy Speedster?

If not, take a pic of it set up in such a way as to appear as a ‘before’ picture next to an ‘after’ picture of the good one.

Like as a joke. I’m sure you have enough spare time to mess around with jokes.

[wdfifteen]

In my spare time, I've been familiarizing myself with the operation of the solar power system. It's either easy or complicated - your choice. So far I've been taking the easy route because I've been so busy. Everything is just "ON" all the time.

But there is an app on my phone that I can use to monitor the power flow and turn circuits in the Smart Panel on or off as needed to save power. As you might expect, there is a learning curve. It shows me the real-time current flow through each breaker on my phone. I can program a circuit to turn on or off temporarily, during certain hours, or certain days. The first thing I want to do is program it to turn the circuits to the water heaters and the car charger off at night. I'll probably turn the circuit to the clothes dryer off at night too, although that will depend on the wrath of Vicki if she decides she wants to do laundry at 4:00 AM. After that I'll watch circuits and see what I need to do to save power.




This is a screen shot of the phone app. There is a bar for every circuit in the Smart Panel showing how much power is being used by that breaker.




This is the battery. Expensive little box.



The Smart Panel is on the left, and the inverter is on the right. Real Space Age stuff sitting next to a derlict, land line phone panel.