The trees be a changing. It is interesting to note the higher ratio of deciduous trees near the house as a result of the previous clearing of large fir trees, which allows the maples to come in quickly.
As for the house, insulation work is still going on inside, and siding and painting outside. The driveway is getting prepped, and I think in the next 2 weeks I will pull the 1000ft 12ct fiber from the house to the gate. #DoneIn2020
Insulation is under way. We are using a mixture of materials for different parts of the application. The walls in the lower garage and shop start with closed cell foam, and have R19 batts applied on top of those. The primary purpose of the close cell phone there is to seal up the garage/shop from the rest of the house, and the batts are a material designed for acoustical isolation as well as the standard thermal properties. Interestingly the batts are somewhat eco -friendly in that they use a natural plant based binder as well as sand, so no phenol-formaldehyde.
Most of the main and upper floor walls are using blown in high density cellulose insulation, which with the 5.5″ thick cavity gives the walls an R19. There is some closed cell on the walls with concrete foundation exposure, as well as the areas under the metal roof (effectively actic-less). The main attic will be blow in with 18″ of cellulose (R60). Some of the longer walls have rockwool insulation for fire prevention.
The deck coating system is also getting installed. It is a sealed membrane system with a stainless steel mesh followed by a concrete like polymer material in multiple layers.
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).
Low voltage wiring is complete. Total wire was ~105,000 feet, mixed between Cat6A, Cat6, fiber, security, and speaker wire. That is 20 miles ( 33km ) of wire… which seems like a lot. 240 drops total.
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.