The Quarky Engineer

Electrical plan round 2. Eric Rosenberry keyed me into a good idea. I was planning on getting a residential 600amp service, but PGE offers a metering plan for EV charging that has variable time-of-day rates. From 10pm-6am power is about half the cost of normal day rates, but day rates are between 2 and 3 times normal rates. If you did your entire house as time-of-day metering you would probably pay more, but if you get 2 meters, and only connect EV charging to the time-of-day meter you can get the best of both world. Since you can program the Tesla chargers to only charge in that time interval you can always charge at the low rate every night. The additional meter cost is only $11/month, so less than the additional charge for a 600 amp service.

That leaves me with the other 400amp service for other regular house stuff. Attached is a new house layout with 5 total panels. 1 Panel dedicated for EVs, to main panels in the mechanical room, a seperate generator panel, and a panel in the shop (for all of the lower level stuff).

Comments and criticisms welcome!

A little progress on the house…

The foundation footing are almost setup for pour. Due to some small changes, it looks like the footings will be about 150 yards, the foundation walls about 140 yards, and the garage floors about 70 yards.. so around 360 yards give or take a bit. That would be around 45 trucks worth, or about 1.5 million pounds of concrete.

That seems like a lot of concrete. The guys putting the forms together said it seems like these load calcs are for a commercial building, not residential.

Of course there are already 46 pilings that go 50-55 feet deep, and are 3 feet in diameter, so that is probably at least 500 cubic yards, so I guess I am getting off easy!

Something fun this way comes…

This billet Subaru block is downright beautiful! The surfaces and contours provide rigidity improvements, and the closed desk design with ringed sleeves will provide support for much higher combustion pressure. Block clamping is significantly increased with second main bolts and much thicker mating surfaces.

Manley Crank, Steel O-Ring Head interface, 14mm head studs, Cosworth Valves, Springs, and Cams. Michael Roark and the guys at Extreme Turbo Systems will provide the 4″ Intercooler and their kick ass precision 6870 kit.

Thanks to Myles Kerr and Lucas English and English Racing, Rick Arbogast and the guys at IAG, Martin Donnon and Willall Racing Pty Ltd, and Perrin Performance. (and Darton Sleeves) Timothy Bailey and I will be cranking on the Cobb for this one.

I don’t think I’ll be able to match the 1130whp of my GTR, but we will give it a shot. 🙂

This will be a great daily driver setup, especially for those rainy winters here in Portland.

Anyone have an opinions/experience with any particular multi-room audio controllers (with or without amplifiers)?

I have mapped out speaker locations in our new house, and it looks like I will have a total of 20 zones (40 speakers), give or take a few. Routing all of the speaker wires to a central location is easy, and I would like to have in-room source and volume control (but not passive).

For example the Russound CA66 is a 6 zone controller that supports inroom keypads (over CAT5) and handles source selection. You can bridge them together to get more zones.

The MCA-88X is a better alternative, as it does 8 zones, and also has much better API support , plus better direct streaming support. The downside is the CA66 can be purchased directly, while the MCA-88X is a ‘certified installer only’. I don’t mind purchasing the gear from someone, but I really don’t want them configiuring the gear, and I highly doubt that would be able to do the things I want to do. ( Aside from the standard music stuff, I want to integrate it with my security setup, as well as the home automation system ).

(For example: https://www.russound.com/products/audio-systems/multi-room-controllers/mca-series-controllers/mca-88-8-source-8-zone-controller-amplifier#overview )

Progress – Thanks to Eric Rosenberry for his tree cutting expertise…. Forms and rebar incoming.

A few new toothpicks..

It is interesting to see the correlation between the outdoor air quality ( measured in downtown Portland , in RED), vs the PM2.5 as measured by my in house monitor ( BLUE ).

Both periods are the same ( the month of August ). The measurements are the same unit, so the inside air quality is much better than outside air, but as the outside quality really gets worse it propagates inside.