The Quarky Engineer

I picked up all of the local options for LED can lights, and ordered 8 more off Amazon. I am going to build a test fixture and do some measurement and analysis, as I don’t trust what the box says.

Lots of new things underway – With that ridiculous water tank done, the storm water filter garden is being built. Hole, liner, rock, and 25 yards of really nice soil plus 78 specific plants picked by the city. Yea. All of this to protect the soil from rain falling from the sky.

Cedar walls/ceiling for the vault, more paint on the outside, drywall delivered. We installed two temporary 20kw furnaces today to help heat and dry out the house.. A good way to break in the meter! We are also going to install the two infratech heaters, and those guys are 6kw each. If I can get a few Teslas on the chargers we can see how much that transformer can really dish out. It is rated for 75kw, but no doubt in this cold weather it can do a lot more.

Drywall starts tomorrow as well as a bunch of interior trim work, and of course more exterior painting and some cedar ceiling work.

I need to select some light bulbs for the new house.. I checked today and there are 230 indoor can lights, 30 external can lights, and 38 indoor shop/garage fixture lights. (plus probably 30 other regular fixtures, but those are something Kristin is dealing wtih).

For the indoor can lights the fixtures are 6′ cans, so they can fit a variety of options. I would tend to do the recesssed lighting trim, which is a single trim+led unit (not a bulb that unscrews). This is pretty common in very new houses, especially if you want a sealed light look.

Within this variety there are two key variables –

Brightness (~600,~800 or ~1100 lumens, which corresponds with ~ 75,100,150 watt equivalents)

Color Temperature – 2700, 3000, 4000, 5000K. A typical old school incandescent light is in the 2700K range.

A typical LED fixture in 2700K, 660 lumens, is around $4 in quantity.

There are LED fixtures that have a selectable switch on them you can set at install (or change) that gives you 4 color temps. Those fixtures are around $25 each.

There are also LED fixtures that have remote selectable color temp (via zigbee for instance), and they are around the same cost ($25 each).

Any comments/wisdom on color temp choice? I would tend toward 3K for most things, and if there were a location I might want the user adjustable color temp it would be the master. That would facilitate the color temp changing in the evening and morning with the other automation tasks.

As for the brightness, I need to do some light mapping to see what will work best. If every bulb was an 800-900 lumen bulb that would be around 3kW of power (~ 12.1w each). Consider that if these were old school 100w bulbs that would be 26kw!

The outdoor cans are a little different. For those I will do some kind of controllable RGBW bulbs.

81 Z-Wave switches ready to install! I am using these Homeseer WD-200+s, which had individually addressable RGB leds.

A small update – The storm water tank is completed and buried, with the filter planting area being the last thing needed.

The ceiling for the outside rear deck is getting installed, and you can see the spots for the Infratech heaters. 12,000 watts of juice.

The side grass is also starting to come in.

Our WWIII Nuclear Fallout shelter has arrived, complete with 2 fully rotating gun turrets. Installation is underway.

Just kidding. This is the water tank for the stormwater management system. 25,000 litres of water storage. It is composed of three pieces with what are pretty much gigantic exhaust clamps to hook them together. Concrete is poured on the inside of the tank as well once placed.

The water from the house gutters goes into a filter bed first (with plants), then into this tank, and then the outflow goes down the hill 1000ft to a stream.

Needless to say this is massively over engineered. The excavators think it is pretty cool, as does Audrey.

Kristin was driving back to our old house when she passed these on an articulating truck on Skyline and she thought they must be for some huge commercial project somewhere. Ha!

Fall colors are really coming in as the trees change, and interior trim work has started. Audrey refers to the house as ‘furry’ at this stage, as all of the insulation is done. We are experimenting with doing a lightly trimmed window in a more modern way ( not drywall wrapped, but similar with wood trim).

The flat roof sections still need to be installed (metal roof there), and the siding and exterior trim is at about 80%. Painting is following the trim closely and should hopefully finish up next week.

The driveway is getting prepped, and power has been conduit routed along the driveway on both sides. I did a power outlet every 75 feet or so on both sides of the driveway all the way from the house to the gate, with the front half fed by a dedicated meter at the gate, and the back half fed by the house.

It looks like we will need about 28,000 sq ft of asphalt. Back of the envelope says that is a tad over 1 million pounds of asphalt, and probably another half a million pounds of rock.

Based on the remaining work I would guess we will move in late January to early February, which isn’t terrible given we started the project in June of 2017.

In order to get power at the gate, which is about 1000ft from the house I added a dedicated meter. I’m pretty lucky that when this driveway was originally laid out there were 6 extra 2″ conduits installed all the way from the house to the street that I can use for data and control. I just got a 1000ft roll of 12 fiber single mode, plus 3000ft of shielded Cat6A.

Next up is to dig the footers for the gate and the control system. I’d like to have the control system automatically detect our cars and open the gate without interaction. Some kind of RF system should work for that… something to research. I considered putting an HID reader, and then I can add my friends HID cards (from their work, etc)…

I also need to figure out some kind of small fiber splice cabinet to terminate the fiber into, as well as to house a switch and few other things.

Back into the whole-house-audio stuff.. I mentioned previously the need for something to handle 12 audio zones, and in those 12 zones a total of 38 speakers (19 stereo pairs). I have so far found three reasonable solutions, but would love to hear if anyone knows of something that I missed. The key requirement is to simply be able to play a number of sources in any combination of zones.. however the number of sources is pretty small, so 3 or 4 sources. There really isn’t a reason I would want 12 different things playing on all 12 different zones.

Solution 1: HTD (Home Theater Direct) – They sell a ‘Lync’ system that is exactly 12 zones, and if you buy more 12 channel amps as many speakers as those zones need. It has room controls (touch pads over Cat5+), supports voice assistant integration (alexa, etc), phone/app control, etc. The switching matrix by default has 5 inputs, but can support 12 additional ones… but really that isn’t needed as the practical use case is almost entirely listen to music or podcasts, both of which can stream off an Apple TV or the like. The pricing of the HTD stuff is very good, and they support end user installation and configuration.

Solution 2: Russound – Their MCA-88 system can support up to 36 zones, so 12 is doable, and they have the same streaming support, input support, and room controls. Their in room controller is a bit older tech looking, but the single biggest negative is the Russound stuff requires a dealer to install/config. I really really really dislike that as I don’t want to have to rely on someone else to do configuration changes, and I certainly don’t need the installation help.

Solution 3: Sonos – Sonos now sells either a dedicated ‘AMP’ module that is a sonos controller and amp mixed together, or just a standalone line-level output Sonos controller called ‘PORT’. I really don’t need a dedicated sonos controller for every speaker pair (and the cost would be pretty high at 19*$700). If I used the PORT modules as sources and drove those into a multi-channel amp system that would work, but I would still need 12 of the PORT modules for 12 zone, which is paying for independent functionality that isn’t needed. I could use a Sonos PORT as as ‘source’ in either of the above two systems if I wanted that functionality.

I’m leaning towards HTD.

I have color coded the house speakers for determining R and L channels. I’m not sure if it is better to have the imaging in the same direction, or the opposite. If I were to reverse some of them, there would be more intercepting area where you would hear a stereo effect.

The blue lines represent zones, and there will be 12 zones for the upper 2 floors, 38 speakers, plus 2 more zones and 6 more speakers on the lower level. I’m going to need 4 of those 12 channel amps, which do 100w per channel for a total of 4400w (44 speakers total).

The little red rhombuses are the subwoofers, which I also need to assign to zones.

Any input on the layout and channel orientation?