The Quarky Engineer

Since the northwest hillside was cleared we needed to do something to prevent erosion. After getting jute sheets installed we had it hydrosprayed. The Hulk would be proud.

Some progress in a few dimensions. Siding work continues on the far side, and body paint has wrapped around the lower front of the house. The body color is a grey called ‘Iron Ore’, and the trim is a brown called ‘Smokehouse’.

We need to protect the side yard of the house which has quite a slope on it. To do that we are installing Jute matting followed by hydroseeding. 22,000 sq ft for that side area.

Now that we have temporary power in the house, I ran an RG11 line from the house to the incoming comcast pedestal and we now have internet in the house. A few other notes on the pictures themselves.

Roofing material partially installed. The higher roof is complete, and lower flat front area roof is next (with metal). Siding is underway, as is painting. Lots of rocks and dirt moved as well.

I have some locations where low voltage lines are closer to line voltage lines than I would like. In most of these cases I didn’t want to push the low voltage towards the outer wall so as to not risk a nail coming in during exterior material buildout. The CAT6A lines are shielded, but the low voltage security and speaker wires are not…

I added some foil in some locations, but the effectiveness of the faraday shield is reliant on it being significantly thicker than the skin depth for that material at the frequency of interest. For aluminum and 60Hz, that is about 1cm… and aluminum foil is about 0.016mm thick… so it is really only a good shield for >100Mhz.

Lots of boxes. 😉 The ones to the right of the electrical panels are for the conduit feeds from below.

I also added a pull/wire box underneath of each panel in the house (9 of them) so I can install current monitoring gear on every circuit.

I am planning on using 9 Greeneye ECM-1220s, as each one can do 32 channels of CT clamps.
http://www.brultech.com/greeneye/

I have an ECM-1220 right now and it works well and is easy to integrate into other systems.

I am curious to see what other current monitoring solutions people are using.

Line voltage wiring is also phase 1 complete, and all 11 panels are set and wired! I’m not sure how many feet of wire was used for line voltage stuff, but I’ll see on the bill. The 500 ft spool of 4 conductor, 2 gauge wire wasn’t cheap (for the 4x Tesla chargers).

We passed the septic inspection, so the tanks and lines are getting covered, as well as some grading on the side slopes. Roofing material is on the roof, and the last major digging job is the stormwater tank that is being built.

Labor Day is a good day for labor.