Vakkotaur

The main light in the kitchen is in the center of the ceiling and if you are at the sink and there is no light from the window, such as at night, you cast a shadow right on the area you are using. Thus there is a light over the sink. This was a fluorescent tube, which was nice as it was lower power and lower maintenance than the incandescent that was originally the central light source. That central incandescent bulb was replaced some time ago, first by CFL, then by LED.

The light over the sink would sometimes start almost as soon as the switch for it was flipped. More often there was a noticeable lag. And increasingly it was enough to make me wonder "Did I flip that switch or not? If I did, shouldn't the light be on by now?" A while ago I had finally had enough and ordered a replacement tube. This tube was LED and not of the new 'direct replacement' variety, so I had to redo the fixture wiring to eliminate the ballast and starter. A simple matter of wiring...

Except whoever committed the installation was, how shall we say... oh yes, an imbecile. There were already several junctions and patches, it seemed. The mounting to the ceiling was (and alas, remains rather) dubious. And to add the cherry to dubious cake, he put the switch on the neutral wire. For those unfamiliar with US household wiring: That's bad. It means even when 'off' the light was 'live'. This might not seem important for a light up in or near the ceiling, but it's bad practice and shoddy workmanship. It also has me wondering what else is screwed up in this place.

It took longer than I cared for, but the fixture has been rewired, with the 'live' or 'hot' line switched (so when the lamp is off, it should all be effectively at ground level voltage: 0). and the LED 'tube' installed. I like that it seems to be easier to specify color temperature for fluorescent tubes and their replacements. I didn't have to hunt through seemingly endless 2700K (yellow) and 5000K (blue) and 6500K (very blue) options to find the 4000K (white) option I actually wanted. There is still a slight delay between flipping the switch and getting light, but it's reliably under a second.

The last few times I'd used the clothes washer the clothes seemed wetter than the spin-dry should have left them. Then the washer went *THUMP* *THUMP *THUMP* the last time. Uh oh. Called appliance dealer to see what a repair might involve. It would involve, at a minimum, about $700. The advice was to replace since it wouldn't be much more and then everything would be new.

We did that. A friend recommended a different dealer in town (one that I had pretty much forgotten existed) but I felt like the service was better or at least lower pressure on sales ("We don't need fancy. We just need clean." "OK.") and went with that. The dryer is fine, but of course this is a stacked setup that must be stacked due to location of fixture and such. There are stacking kits. But those only within brand and then often only within model. So now we have a new washer, with an older dryer, separated by a bit of old carpeting. The installers decided the best or at least easiest course of action after that was a real Red Green solution: duct tape. Yes, really.

Jay and I both decided that would simply Not Do. Even with alleged vibration sensing and damping, trusting things to six strips of duct tape seemed insane. So I went to the truck stop and bought a come-along strap setup and wrapped that around the washer-dryer combo. A few more carpet scraps as things were ratcheted tight and I feel a lot better about things.

The repaired bulb didn't last very long. It's not an outright failure, but looks like a heat issue. After a while the base heats up and seems to go into a protective thermal shutdown. Then it cools down and the light starts up again. It's a slow cycle, but still annoying. I've pulled the bulb again and replaced it with a Sylvania-branded CFL.

Yesterday the warranty replacement LED bulbs arrived. I decided that the office needs more light than they provide. The office is now all-CFL again and looks the better for it.

One LED bulb is in a desk lamp that had been sitting all but unused for some time. That's where the Sylvania CFL came from. I put the lamp in the living room at the end of the couch where it makes a reasonable reading lamp. Since it uses so little power, I won't feel too guilty about not turning it off should I decide to take a nap and not feel like getting up turn off the light.

The other is near the back door and lights up the small area joining the kitchen, downstairs restroom, and laundry area well enough. But it also revealed that I need to change the switch (hopefully just the switch!) for that light: Off isn't really fully off. The bulb still glows, if dimly, when the switch is off.

There have been more than a few articles about compact fluorescent lights recently. Today jmaynard and I went over the lights in the house and we wound up replacing a good many of the incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent lights.

The first place to get the treatment was the office as those lights get the most use. Other rooms, such the kitchen, the machine room, and with some effort the bathrooms got changed next. Later, after another trip to the store (we cleaned Hy-Vee out of their inexpensive 60 Watt compact fluorescent lights) the various closets, part of the basement, and a hallway light fixture were converted. That last one could use another CF light, but one will do for now.

There are a few incandescent lights left in the house. The attic lights which don't see much use are unchanged, as are the lights in the track lighting of part of the basement. There are a few lamps that don't see too much use so changing them over can wait indefinitely. The spiral design (and the now hard to find design with the multiple U shaped tubes) don't look right in the exposed setup the dining room fixture uses. While there are compact fluorescent lights that look more like regular bulbs, those are still rather pricey and the fixture needs four of them. A fixture at the top of the stairs probably can't be changed without changing the fixture itself. It's quite certainly original with the house, built in 1949.

Things are generally much brighter now, even as each fixture with swapped lights consumes less energy. The office had four 40 Watt incandescent bulbs, for a total of 160 Watts. Now it has four 60 Watt equivalent bulbs, so we get the light of 240 Watts incandescent - but each light only uses 13 Watts, so we're only using 52 Watts total for office light now.

The downstairs bathroom is much brighter though that is mainly because the tubular bulbs (not 1949 -- made in Taiwan) had such huge dark deposits on the inside of the envelope that they reminded me of a vacuum tube "getter." The lights still burned, but were so dim we figured they were 15 Watt bulbs.

We now have a drawer full of incandescent bulbs. One did get put to use, replacing a bad bulb in the garage door opener. We've got spares to last a while.

Pretty much everything was done Saturday, which was just as well as it was rainy on Sunday. An old scanner antenna and its mounting hardware was removed from the garage. It's been a while since I was up a ladder and that might have the first time up an extension ladder. It wasn't as simple as just undoing the bolts. jmaynard had to be in the garage attic, on a step-stool, to be able to keep the nuts from turning with the bolts. And then once that part was done, it still wasn't a one-person job to get things down. At least it was if I didn't want to just drop the antenna and the pipe it was mounted on, and I didn't. I don't know who put that thing up, but it was done well.

Jay did pretty much all the work involved in changing the front porch lights. The previous lights had some goofball motion sensor that didn't seem to work well if it all. Now there are just plain lights. The only thing controlling them is the switch.

There wasn't much else, really, which made for a fairly relaxing weekend overall.

I did make an attempt at another LJ icon, starting with one of kinkyturtle's pictures but did it rather badly. I asked KT for some advice on doing it better and got it, but he went and did what I was trying to do. That's certainly faster, as he's got the experience (and talent). The result is the icon used for this post.

A few posts ago I mentioned that the house I once rented was for sale. The last time I drove by, the realtor's sign had "SOLD" on it, and the realtor's web site lists it as a pending sale. At $24,000 I'm not surprised it wasn't on the market for very long, even if the house is rather small.

The coat hooks by the back door were part of a system that looks neat until it's thought about. It was a couple plastic pieces screwed to the wall (well, to a good board mounted on the wall) and plastic hooks fit into place on those pieces. With heavy winter coats, heavy cloaks, and the like the load became too much for some of the hooks. The mounting tabs bent enough that they didn't stay mounted reliably.

Today some new hooks were bought and the old system taken down. The new hooks were spaced to take advantage of (cover up) the old mounting holes, and with new holes drilled as needed, the hooks were installed on the board. After that, jmaynard and I sorted through what had been hanging there and removed a few items that we don't expect to use often. Now there is less of a load on what should be stronger hooks, one internal door can open farther since there is less stuff behind it and one Winter item Jay forgot he had turned up... just in time for him to hopefully not need it for several months, even if it was snowing a little for a bit today.

Friday: Cleaned up the dining room some. Various boxes and packing material are now taking up much less room and the boxes can be picked up on the next recycling day. The table is still strewn various bits of computers, but that's not likely to change until the office is sorted out - and that won't be for a while, mainly due to furniture requirements.

Saturday: De-cluttered, cleaned, and re-arranged the living room. jmaynard wired up the speakers he'd brought back from Houston this Summer. A clock, a mirror my grandmother had, and a picture that my grandmother had painted were also hung on the wall. Actually the mirror isn't quite in the living room, but in the front entryway. It fits well there. While the living room isn't anything likely to make Better Homes & Gardens, it now looks much more like a normal living room.

After all that was done, we relaxed and watched History of the World - Part I which I had not seen before. I recognized many bits that I'd seen in clips, but this was the first time I'd seen the whole thing.

Sunday: Jay and I went to Sioux Falls and, since Nap's had closed (a column [See: Surprise endings] in the Argus Leader mentioned they'd lost their lease and hadn't found a new location yet - we both hope they re-open soon) we went to Famous Dave's. Verdict: Acceptable, but not great. We want Nap's back! We also did a bit of Christmas shopping and have more of that out of the way. Yay! I'd like to be done with it before Thanksgiving and avoid the madd(en)ing crowds of December. I expect I can, with one probable exception.

As Jay mentioned we saw the aurora borealis Sunday night. From southern Minnesota it seemed not to change too fast and was rather monochrome. It was both intense and not intense. While it was intense enough to be seen here and be visible south of the zenith, it wasn't 'active' with fast shimmering or much color. It was, if anything, a dull reddish, looking rather like the glow from a large city - only there wasn't one. From my father's description, it seems that a couple degrees north there was a better show.

The last 18 hours or so went better than those before them (as described in the previous post). The server could boot from a CD, and with the right CD and a bit of guided prodding it was in a condition such that jmaynard could patch it up remotely.

While he did that, I looked at the furnace. It wasn't the motor that circulates air through the ductwork. It was the motor that blows exhaust gasses outside ("high efficiency" furnace - no chimney as such). There wasn't anything I could do but clean up a bit and make things easy for the repairman.

Once the server was back, conmicro.cx wasn't resolving, but it was reachable by numeric IP. I didn't do anything there, at least not beyond answer a phone call from someone wondering where Hercules went.

Without the furnace working, it was a night of thick quilts, an electric heating pad, and a Santa hat as a nightcap - hey, it works. The temperature in the living room had dropped to 55 F when I checked it this morning. It was a bit warmer upstairs. At least this happened in late March and not January.

There's heat on in the house again, and not just the blinds open to the south. It didn't take long for the repairman to replace that motor.

By now kinkyturtle should be well underway, travelling to Lawrence, KS today, and from there to Fairmont, MN tomorrow as he mentions here. Jay and I looking forward to his visit. We have a couple things roughly planned, showing KT around the extended area and such. Stuff that there isn't time for in shorter visits, or those with more people, like the Taurmanias of a few years back.

Jay and I are already curious as to how things will appear in KT's cartoon diary about the trip. Hopefully there'll be enough free time for his sketching so that the days leading to MFF will be ready for scanning and uploading soon after KT returns home. That way all those at MFF won't be muttering about not getting to the bits they were at, or wanted to be at. Time will tell. And eventually KT will tell as well.

Also, I've been using the impending visit as a reason to get the house in order, though it might well be just so I feel better about things. The place looks better than it did not all that long ago, and I do feel better. Whether that's from things looking better, the effort expended to get things looking better, or something else I'm not sure. I just like the results, whatever the reason.