Paint blobs

G'day all!

I've been starting to get antsy about painting some walls around here. Purplexity has been painting the walls of her new place and I am like I WANT TO PAINT! I want to put my mark on the inside of this house! (Rather than simply wiping off the marks the previous inhabitants left... Mrs M I think used the walls for navigation and she was either minute or had bad osteoporosis ;-)

So two days ago, nathan and I rode up to Bunnings (like rode up on our pushbikes) and I eyeballed the paints and we brought home some sample pots in green. Bright cheerful green.

I decided that the fibre room is first under the hammer, or at least the paint brush and roller. I painted up some board as the paintshop lady suggested so we could get some idea of how the colours looked. I didn't like one of the greens - too yellow I thought as I painted it. One green is the same tonings but slightly darker than the kitchen. The other is obviously green.

The fibre room is currently these colours:

Do they look like me? A darker beige on the wall with the window, lighter beige all round, white cornices and a pale sage green roof. Hmm...

Then I painted some rough squares of colour on the walls in different places in each of the three greens.

Suddenly the green that was too yellow was a winner! (it's the middle one.) But an even bigger winner was just looking at the wall and thinking "I really like having the colour blocks on the beige."

So my current plan is to get some more sample pots in some different greens, lighter and darker shades, not too much darker, and get a little roller and just paint squares on the walls! I have thought about masking taping the wall up so that we have the beige background with happy greens on it but I don't want it too sqaure and geometric.

It will be different! And if it doesn't work, we'll just paint the whole lot green.

:-)

There's something in our garden

G'day all!

We made actual garage progress yesterday! Yep, I found the rendering manual. I had tidied it cos we had visitors and it ended up in a box. So we played.

The hardest part is getting the undercoating rendering stuff the right consistency. Too wet and it runs and drips off the wall. Too dry and it just peels off. Around the right level of goop, it sticks and smooths over the polystyrene beautifully. The best consistency is like a thick pancake batter, or a runnyish cake batter.

So we made a little progress:

This took us about an hour and a half to do from mixing the rendering stuff to pressing on the fibreglass matting, and we got much faster as we worked out what consistency the render should be.

Having managed to get rendering goop all over us (it burns sensitive skin a little but hands seem immune to its effects), we sat down for afternoon tea. Nathan was looking at his plants, as always, when he spotted something.

OH MY WORD! ORCHIDS!


We have Pterostylis growing in our back yard, right where we were going to put the vegie patch. The vegie patch is moving to the other side of the yard now :-) We've been told that the soil was trucked in from somewhere else, but I am starting to wonder about that now. We know there are leek orchids out the front yard and sundews, and Pterostylis in the back yard. Remember this house has been here for nearly 50 years. That just seems gobsmacking that the things survived or that if they came from elsewhere the rest of the soil conditions are ok for them. None of the orchids are particularly exciting but they are orchids and they are in a part of suburbia that has been here for almost 50 years. That to me (and Nathan) is really exciting.

*BOUNCE*

anon!

Passive auto-switchover for rainwater tanks

You have a rainwater tank and a nice pressure activated pump. When you turn on a tap, the pump turns on. When the pressure at the pump reaches a set top point, the pump switches off.

The problem: when the tank runs dry you'd like to use the town water.

Known existing solutions:

• Put a ball valve in the bottom of the tank.
• Use a float switch to turn on a solenoid to stop the tank running dry.
• Refill the tank with a hose.
• Have a stop-cock to connect the mains into the high pressure side
• Use a float switch to turn on a solenoid to connect the mains to the high pressure side.
  

The solutions are all commonly used, and I know an instance of each. They are all wrong for one reason or other:

• The pump still has to run even though town water is already available at a high pressure.
• Some kind of manual operation needs to happen to switch over or to top up. People forget and tanks over fill or valves get left on, wasting town water when pump water is available.
• Power has to be available for the system to work.

I have implemented a cheap and robust alternative as proposed in ATA's Renew (forgot which one). The idea is to use a device called a 'pressure reducing valve' to provide water at a pressure just lower than the pump switch on pressure, so that if the pump is inactive the town water is available. The renew design called for a variable pressure reducing valve, at a cost of $300 wholesale. And they don't make them go low enough for my little rivaflow irrigation pump. This design uses a $6 plastic version with a fixed rating of 100kPa.

Thus, the pump can simply be switched off when the tank runs dry. We can do this using a float switch and a relay (the pressure switch itself may have a relay you can subvert).

After ringing a number of plumbing supplies and being told that my idea wouldn't work (when it is plainly clear that it must) and anyway, you can't get pressure valves like that, I found a suitable pressure reducing valve at the local big box hardware store. The device is actually designed for very low pressure irrigation systems, but it is well made with a thick HDPE case, solid looking white nylon valve assembly and a heavy gauge membrane. The high side is rated to 3MPa.

(insert photo here)

The final layout of my rainwater irrigation system is:



A nice additional feature is that if your water demand exceeds the pump capacity the mains kicks in seamlessly (within the inertia of the pressure reducing valve and water in the pipe etc). It is good to have the valve as close as possible to the manifold as a result.

In which we decide to finish the garage

G'day all!

We had big plans for this weekend. I promised to help Nathan with the garage. We need to get the last of the foam onto the back corner so that we can start rendering and stuff.

So I wandered around, doing my own thing, whilst Nathan did his own thing - trying to stop a leak in the toilet filling pipe (note he forgot to tell me that he hadn't fixed it and had not reconnected the pipe...until after I discovered there was no water in the cistern....).

Then I came home. Within half an hour, the sky turned dark grey and the trees bent under the gale-force wind:


and suddenly it was persisting down! The rain was coming in sideways:


I discovered that the front porch is not water-tight - there is a gap between the house guttering and the laserlight.

Within 15 minutes, we had had at least 7mm of rain (someone had not emptied the rain gauge for a couple of weeks), but more like 10-15 cos the garden started looking a bit flooded.

Anyway, after an hour it seemed ok to go out again. The garden was damp but not flooded - it seems to soak up any moisture it gets. Our previous place would've been under water. The radar map looked like this:

(image copyright BoM.gov.au) The rain band was to the north of us. We only needed to go a kilometre north of where we live and a couple of ks west.

Well.... let's just cut it short. (most pics not clickable)

The normally placid drain by Springvale Road at Spaghetti Junction:


The corner I wanted to turn left at.


This brave car (a year old Mazda 6) took on the flood waters of unknown depth at the corner where I wanted to turn left. Nathan said ah just follow them. Go on! It is OK!:


I am very glad that I didn't follow it. a) the water was rising as we sat waiting for the lights to change, and b) this:

Oh dear!

The local drain/creek - the concrete base is about a metre under water here:


The "retarding basin"

(if you look at the big image, you might just be able to see some spots on the water - these are native ducks. Normally they swim really close to the edge of the weir, but not this time!)

The sun starts breaking out:


The radar map when we got home, safe and sound thanks to my lovely little car:


And the rain gauge - emptied before we went out:


So much for getting that last lot of foam on the back corner of the garage! Maybe it is not DH's brother who is the jinx!

Nathan vs Garden round 2

On Sunday Nathan took on the neighbours-be-gone on the other side of the path form our new garden bed. The plants did provide a privacy screen but let's face it - they are pittosporums growing where we want to put the roses. Roses vs pittosporums. Roses 1: pittosporums nil.

So Nathan attacked the neighbours-be-gone with crow bar and mattock. Here's the photo story of his mighty battle with one of three plants:

Note the technique with the mattock.


Sometimes brute force can help

(though the mattock works better)

Going

Going

GONE!

And turned to mulch.


After hard work, a man deserves a long cold beer


ahhhhh!



Now we have a mulched bed awaiting some rain and placement of roses! Hooray!


Nathan 2: Garden nil! See the difference?


anon!

Wet wet wet

G'day all!

Ever since Nathan pulled the cladding off the side of the garage, the weather has been a bit equivocal.

Today Nathan's younger brother came around to help put the new cladding on.

Here's a picture of the sky this afternoon (not clickable)


And here is what the cladding looked like on Monday (picture taken from south end):


And here is the pic from today (note the addition of the full bin of water, picture taken from north end):


Here's a portion of the radar pic from the BoM at 9pm today:

The big arrow shows the direction of the rain. The little arrow shows where we are. Note that the rain does not extend more than about 5km beyond our place. It has been like this for most of the afternoon. Typical!

However, these

are really happy about the rain because half the plants were plonked in the ground last night before the rain started.

So there is good to go with the bad.

Switcheroony

I've come up with a really simple circuit to allow me to turn the lights on and off either in the garage, or in the house:



The idea is to use a relay that will stay on given current limited by R1 (I used 100ohms with a 12V supply and a 12V relay). The relay is wired to latch. To switch the device on a switch bypasses the latch contacts turning the relay on (which then stays on from current through the latching contact). To switch it off another switch shorts out the relay coil. I used momentary contact rockers from DSE, which look quite nice. You can add as many extra switches as you wish, and a computer can switch either way using a suitable buffer such as a 4000 series tri-state buffer or a pair of transistors.

The second pole is the light circuit pole. I used a 240V rated 5A DPDT relay, which cost me about $5. The power supply can be shared with other devices and the circuit produces very little noise (considering its got a relay). If you shared lots of these devices on the same power supply you could switch multiple lights using a single switch using a diode from each circuit to avoid loops.

The circuit has some nice properties:

• It is quite robust, as the relay and resistor can take a lot of abuse.
• The signals are sent via reasonably high current making the system quite noise immune.
• It is very simple to assemble and debug.
• It interprets set and reset as a reset.
  
• It starts in a known state, off.
• It uses no current when the light is off (ignoring power supply).
• You can read the current state looking at the switching lines, so you can use a suitably low current indicator at the remote end (perhaps a buffered LED). If you only have a few switches you can probably get away with just a LED from switching to ground at each rocker.
  

All in all, a very nice design. The only thing I'd like to extend it would be to make the local switch (the one on the wall for the light) look like a normal switch, and to actually be the relay itself so that the switch displayed the current state. With that you'd have a very elegant home automation system.

What complete rot

A few weeks ago I noticed a bracket fungus growing on one of the window panes. I was a little worried, and looked it up in a fungus book. Phew, it wasn't the dreaded dry rot, just a wet rot. I figured it probably only went as far as the window frame.

A week later I decided to open the window to let some fresh air through the garage. The window pane dropped out of the frame. I though, ah well, lets see how bad it is. Big mistake!

This evening I spent a good hour scraping out and painting all the rot in the structural timbers of my garage. We had intented to spend the evening installing the new cladding, but I ended up spending my time repairing damage.

The problem is that the previous owner noticed that the weatherboard cladding was rotting. And decided that the best solution was to cover over it with cheap vinyl fake weatherboard. As a result the fungus, which was established in the corners, decided to venture out into the structural timbers as well.

As a result, I've decided to fix the garage up properly. This means pulling off all the vinyl, pulling off all the rotted weatherboards and fixing the frame. As I delved deeper into the garage I came to the realisation that the previous owner was definitely from the if it ain't visibly broke, don't fix it school of house maintanance (I am now quite scared of what I'll find under the house cladding). The roof leaked into the wall space, so he nailed some plywood over that to hide it (this wasn't just to sell the house, the plywood itself has been there at least 5 years and badly rotten too). The corners have all rotted away completely, so he replaced them with some pine(!) and nailed some cement sheet over the top. And when that started looking tatty he nailed more cladding over the top.

Thankfully, after spending a good hour tonight I've removed and replaced the problems on one corner and 2 sides. We should be able to attach some of the cladding tomorrow after I've restored the drainage trench around the outside.

I'm going to replace the two small glass windows with a double glazed polycarbonate window the full length of the window space. (I'm using twinwall polycarbonate mainly because then I don't need a strong frame for it, and because I am planning to put an airconditioner in the garage for those cold winters and the height of summer). I'm beginning to think that despite all the claims of the passive solar mob a well insulated window on the south side is pretty good. In summer it doesn't let any hot sunlight in, in winter it gets a lot of light from the sky - particularly if it is overcast. It also suits my garage layout a lot better :)

I've now installed all the power into the garage and had steve check it over and do the paperwork. It's nice to have all my bench tools ready to go at a flick of a switch rather than requiring me to rummage around looking for the extension cord.

A modest manor

G'day all!

Welcome to a Modest Manor.



(if I was being really tricky, I'd link that to one with an open door and have a slideshow of the inside of the house...)

Woo hoo! A new house blog! This blog is for us, to see how far we've come, and for you to laugh at the things we've done.

Today was an interesting day. It rained, a lot. It rained more today than it has for the rest of the year. This rain fell because Nathan pulled the cladding off the southern and western garage walls over the last few days.

As the rain fell, we loaded up the trailer with old vinyl cladding (I keep typing that as clagging) and weatherboards.

$50 to tip the blasted stuff! We only had $55 between us! On a scale of 1-10 of good tips, this one rated about a negative five. No signs, no indication of where to dump stuff - you just drive out over everyone else's (non-perishable) rubbish, pray the tyres don't find something sharp and then get bogged in a soggy patch.

Yep, we got bogged. We had to lay the old cladding and weatherboards out around the back wheels of the car, after taking the trailer off. Not taking the trailer off would've been disastrous - going backwards would've jack-knifed the thing and if we were pushing the car from behind to get it out, the trailer would've run us over....

So Nathan and I pushed the car and D reversed it, and all this smoke rose up from the back wheels, scaring the crap out of us, as they burned rubber and paint on the vinyl cladding, but we got it unbogged!

I am still covered in tip muck.

We cleaned the rotten bits out of the hardwood frame (chisels are wonderful things!) and Nathan treated the areas with an antifungal copper solution. Now we can put the sisalation on and then put the polystyrene cladding on and render it.

Simple eh? LOL

anon!