It’s been a while since the last update, where we had started to demolish the next room, but it is not for lack of activity. The concrete floor has been ground using the same machine from Home Depot that we used in the previous room. This floor was in better shape in that it’s not …
In the previous post I talked about making the antenna for the weather station. Now, what’s that antenna connected to? An XBee-only solution? The initial iteration, that I talked about in the first post, was to just hook up analog humidity and temperature sensors to the XBee’s analog inputs. However, I had trouble getting the …
Once things happen, they happen quickly! After getting the county permits, it took ProVision 3 days to get here to start work, and 1.5 days to finish the install. The first day they pulled the wires from the meter to the new subpanel in the garage in a long, snaking conduit going under the eaves …
Continue reading ‘Going solar #3 – in business, just in time’ »
As I mentioned in the previous post, we are getting solar. There is a substantial amount of paperwork associated with this. Net metering agreement First you need to be approved by HELCO, the utility, for net metering. As I mentioned in the first post, this can be a bit iffy since, depending on where you …
It’s now been almost 4 months since the last episode of the basement “un-finishing”. We didn’t finish with coating the floor in the room that flooded because I wanted to finish the drainage first. Since that’s now functional, it was time to finish that up. After one more can of the EpoxyShield, the west room …
Continue reading ‘Basement “un-finishing” #4 – one down, two to go’ »
This may be going about it backwards, but the first thing I built for the weatherstation was the antenna for the Xbee radio that would send the data to our server. I had been reading about various antenna designs in connection with the one I built for the ADS-B receiver, and one design was a …
It’s been a while since the last update, but not for lack of things happening. As I alluded to in an earlier post, we are going solar! Power here in Hawaii is so expensive that even with the high installation costs of PV panels, they payoff time is only about 6 years when you include …
Today, the final stretch of pipe was covered with gravel and separator fabric! A few days ago it looked like this, when the pipe had been glued together but not yet covered with gravel: The rest of the house now looks like this: Once the pipe is solidly covered with gravel, I’m going to test …
Continue reading ‘Drainage improvements #8 – Seeing the end’ »
As some of you may remember (yeah, right, who am I kidding) I used the Epoxy hotbox Arduino to read 1-wire temperature probes and make plots of the temperature. In LA, that’s pretty much the only interesting thing to plot, but given that the weather here is, ahem, a bit more variable, I’ve decided to …
Today, I hooked up the downspout to the drainage pipe: Now we’ll see what happens at the bottom when it rains. I still want to make the pipe end in a “dry well” gravel pit (maybe a good use for all the rocks I’ve dug up) and maybe make a drain hole in the lava …