BG Homeowner and DIY Thread - Out of the Basement Edition

[Julian]

I had no batteries and no commitment to any ecosystem, so I went all in on Ego. Chain saw, edger, weed eater, pole saw, leaf blower, and even a tiller that's gotten some good use. Love it, no regrets.

(Might maybe go with an electric lawnmower in the future... not there yet I don't think.)

[Tyche]

All my battery powered stuff is Milwaukee M18. But I do use a fair bit of gas powered yard tools. I live on a pretty large lot right up against a large state park/forest. My gas stuff is Echo, except the mower, which is a Ferris.

[Boyiee]

All I can say from friends that have had them is they only cause problems and become a money pit very quick. Like that basement bar you swear will bring everyone over and then you use it once a year, they just functionally dont get all much use. I dont have any input on getting one, only that out of the 3 sets of friends that have had them all 3 were so happy to get rid of them and free up backyard space.

Since im here, going in halfsies with the father in law on a battery powered chainsaw. Any feelings on Stihl vs Husqvarna vs Dewalt? Was looking at the Stihl line, but have existing batteries for Dewalt.

I have a battery powered dewalt chain saw... it's okay. It's nothing like gas powered and its smaller. Fine for smaller jobs but it takes a lot longer.

My drill/driver/saw are dewalt. Everything else battery is and will be Makita. They are just the shit. So much so that I swapped my battery dewalt system to it. Wait for a big sale like memorial day, vets, black friday, and get the 2pack battery with dual charger included. 18v+.

I get by with a black and decker weed trimmer with 2 batteries. It does half acre without issue. I'm waiting for electric zero turn mowers to come down in price and become more mainstream, right now my riding is gas as well as my blower. Trying to convert everything to electric, the idea is any new purchases will be electric. Snowblower will probably be my next purchase as my electric power washer is the tits.

[Tyche]

I spent last week and this week building up another server rack separate from the server I built for the home theater, which is essentially a 30TB NAS with some media related dockers. None of my house was wired for Ethernet and I plan to put 8 cameras around the outside of the house. I dropped Cat6 cable from a closet on the top level to the first floor and the basement. Those cables are used as Ethernet backhaul for the mesh wifi. Debating switching to Unifi APs now that I have the PoE switch to do it. The basement has an additional switch for all the home theater stuff.

Ended up getting an excellent deal on an Aruba S2500 switch. 48-port, all PoE. It also has 4 10gb SFP+ ports for if I decided to run 10gb through the house. $100 for that switch. Bought a refurb Acer with an 11th gen i5 to run my security camera system. Going to run Blue Iris with Deepstack AI, so it's going to be processor heavy. Put in a 10TB HD, as I plan to record 24h/day on all 8 cameras and hold around 2 weeks of rolling footage. Haven't ran any camera cable yet and I'm dreading it. My finger tips are already killing me from stripping, punching, and crimping all the damn cables I've made.

[Byrthnoth]

Alright, hot water heater ate it (gracefully). I have gas / tankful and gas seems simple/cheap. My wife is interested in an Electric Tankful one. What say BG?

[archibaldcrane]

Alright, hot water heater ate it (gracefully). I have gas / tankful and gas seems simple/cheap. My wife is interested in an Electric Tankful one. What say BG?

heat pump

heat pump

Heat Pump

Heat Pump

HEAT PUMP

HEAT PUMP

*pounding table, etc*

They're WAY cheaper to operate than gas or resistance electric despite the higher upfront cost. Too bad you probably can't survive til 2023 to get the big rebate or tax credit from the feds.

[Tyche]

Here's the usage data for the whole month of August for my 2 50-gallon heat pump water heaters in a house with 2 adults and 4 children. An electric would use this much in under a week. The savings cannot be overstated. Bite the bullet, get a heat pump water heater.

[Byrthnoth]

Alright, my wife is on board and brought it up too. The DoE site says you need them to be in a 1000 ft^3 room for some reason. The room my water heater is in is probably closer to 600 ft^3. I can't find a rationale for 1000 ft^3.

If I have concerns about it, they are:
1. We spend like $240/yr on gas for the hot water heater at the moment.
2. Costs more (+$400 for a comparable model)
3. Going back with a gas hot water heater would mean we don't have to move pipes or anything. (+$400?)
4. It is substantially more complicated than a gas hot water heater, which means it may be more likely to break and I expect it to not last as long.

If you assume it cuts our bill by 2/3 and lasts for 10 years vs. a gas one's 12, you're looking at ($4000 + 80*10)/10 vs. ($3200 + 240*12)/12, so $480/yr with the heat pump vs. $500/yr with the gas. It's not actually that significant of a difference in terms of savings. It is probably better for the environment to use 1/3 as much $ in electricity compared to 3x as much gas, because even if electricity is dirtier per joule than gas where I am, it is much less energy.

I'm probably going to do it anyway because my wife wants it, but left to my own devices I would just go back with another power vent gas model and have it installed tomorrow.


My last question is, are they loud? I'm unexcited about bringing another compressor into my house and a quick google reveals a lot of noise complaints about the more recent generations.

[Tyche]

10 years is the warranty, not the expected lifespan. You should get far more than 10 years out of it.

And $4,000 seems expensive. I got my 2 50-gallon rheems for under $2500.

They are not super complicated. You can have it in a small space with conditions. You have to be able to vent out the cold air. Pumps work by sucking in warm air and blowing out the cold, so it's needs to be dissapated in a larger space or vented out. You have options for this. Most complicated is to run an exhaust vent. If you're located near an outdoor wall and are handy, this could be easy. Another option is to buy a louvered door. This is how we did ours. Our water heater is in a smallish utility closet.

It's not loud, but it's not silent like a gas heater. It has a fan that kicks on. One of our heaters is in the utility closet right outside the master bedroom and it isn't bothersome at all.

[Jaybar]

I don't know about heat pumps in SFH as well as Archie, but based on the DOE site that space is sized for air flow. You can probably get away with a smaller space if you include a louvered door, or no door at all. Kind of surprised there isn't a condenser outside where it will transfer the heat. I might be confused with what the DOE site was explaining.

[Jaybar]

Oops I was thinking of VRF heat pumps, and we are discussing water heaters - so there would be no condensing involved since all the excess heat is going to the water instead. But yes, the pump is relying on warm, indoor air to be efficient hence the large volume required. I still believe you can use a smaller space as long as it has access to adequate air flow [probably some ASHRAE 90.1 crap in there about CFM rates and net open area of louvers].

[Botosi]

Does anyone have a hot tub?

Seriously considering getting one. It's the one thing I've always wanted in my life. Just worried about the maintenance. Hear they can be quite finnicky.

Recommendations? Avg monthly electric bill increase? Lot of maintenance work?

Thanks

[Yabby]

Learned something new about my home this morning.

My master bathroom outlets stopped working this morning. Just that, and nothing else. Went and checked the breakers and everything looked good. I had a spare outlet from another project so I went and exchanged them thinking one of them went bad, nope. While I was working, my wife looked up stuff and said those outlets should have a breaker themselves (That little black/red button on some of them) because that is required when outlets are near water, which neither of them had. I always thought that was weird, but I just guessed the builders were being lazy or cutting corners.

At some point, while I was working on the outlets, my wife went to the spare bathroom, which does have that little breaker. She hit the button and it turns out it was tripped, which turned on the outlets in my master bathroom... while I was holding it. Getting shocked sucked, but at least I know that the breaker for my master bathroom outlets is in my spare... which I find weird.

[Jaybar]

I can never stress enough how much precaution should be made when working on your electrical. I've been shocked once because I touched an exposed junction box when flipping a light switch. Felt like a hammer blow over my entire arm.

Anyway, those are GFCI switches (ground fault circuit interrupter) which do exactly as you demonstrated - trip an internal circuit. Your bathroom was certainly not up to code, but I don't know when it was last built. Looking online, these were introduced to bathroom receptacles in 1975, with the latest requirement in 2005 for laundry and utility sinks.

[Kaslo]

Learned something new about my home this morning.

My master bathroom outlets stopped working this morning. Just that, and nothing else. Went and checked the breakers and everything looked good. I had a spare outlet from another project so I went and exchanged them thinking one of them went bad, nope. While I was working, my wife looked up stuff and said those outlets should have a breaker themselves (That little black/red button on some of them) because that is required when outlets are near water, which neither of them had. I always thought that was weird, but I just guessed the builders were being lazy or cutting corners.

At some point, while I was working on the outlets, my wife went to the spare bathroom, which does have that little breaker. She hit the button and it turns out it was tripped, which turned on the outlets in my master bathroom... while I was holding it. Getting shocked sucked, but at least I know that the breaker for my master bathroom outlets is in my spare... which I find weird.

That reminds me of my house, the spare bathroom on the other side of the house has a small reset button that controls both our front and backyard outlets as well as our master bathroom outlets... like wtf is that wiring?

[Yabby]

I can never stress enough how much precaution should be made when working on your electrical. I've been shocked once because I touched an exposed junction box when flipping a light switch. Felt like a hammer blow over my entire arm.

Anyway, those are GFCI switches (ground fault circuit interrupter) which do exactly as you demonstrated - trip an internal circuit. Your bathroom was certainly not up to code, but I don't know when it was last built. Looking online, these were introduced to bathroom receptacles in 1975, with the latest requirement in 2005 for laundry and utility sinks.

Yea, based on what I read, this is ok here in MI, so long as each plug leads back to a GFCI switch (Which it does, just connected in a weird way). I thought I was protected because I had the break to the master bathroom off, turns out those plugs are connected to the breaker in the spare bathroom. Lesson learned.

That reminds me of my house, the spare bathroom on the other side of the house has a small reset button that controls both our front and backyard outlets as well as our master bathroom outlets... like wtf is that wiring?

Yea, I went around my house to look for other odd things, and my washroom outlet didn't have a GFCI switch either, so I did some testing. The outlet in there is connected to my kitchen GFCI switch. I find this all weird because does it really save the builders money to wire the house weirdly to avoid using extra GFCI switches? They can't cost too much more than normal outlets.1

[Delayed]

Sounds like an inspection either wasn't done when the house was purchased, or was done by the builders friend

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[Byrthnoth]

Repainted some trim today, completing the cycle for the year. Now nothing is peeling.

[Fondue]

bought an ego lawnmower off a neighbor for a good deal and used it to mulch all the leaves in the yard, worked pretty good

[archibaldcrane]

Electric mowers are the truth