skip to main |
skip to sidebar
They're really more of an amusement device - although it's nice to keep an eye on things too. We caught the turkeys at the back door just before Thanksgiving, and now we've had another feathered visitor.
This guy was down on the ground and just flew right up to the camera. Here's the first video.
We thought it was a one time deal until he came back about a week later. This last video is almost like the first. He was down on the ground and suddenly decided to go back up and check things out.
We had been waiting for the Conservation Commission agent to come back out for the final inspection. This, of course, was caught on camera too. About 30 minutes after he left, the snow on the PV solar panels let loose all at once.
Then last Saturday night there was a big procession out front. Just after dark, there were three police cars with their lights flashing but no sirens, followed by a black sedan, a black van and then a bus, followed by another police car. It turns out it was Sargent Shriver's burial procession. His funeral was in Maryland earlier in the day and he's buried in St. Francis Xavier Cemetery, which is just up the street. Here's the link.
Added 1/26/2011:
I believe that our mystery bird is a black capped chickadee. However, we've had a new visitor.
This one has talons.
We'll need to see a little more of him to figure out what he is.
It seems that the rest of the world has been inundated by snow, but not us. Sunday night that changed.
A storm largely out at sea gave Cape Cod eight to twelve inches of white stuff.
The light strings were even, but the weight of the snow stretched them out.
It all looked very picturesque - until I had to shovel the stuff. Shell driveways are a pain. There's no way to scrape them without depositing the shells elsewhere.
I wish the snow had come a week earlier. For two years in a row it rained at the annual Christmas Stroll. This year, though, it was cancelled due to high winds and heavy rain.
a
From the start I had decided to have the house wired for Christmas window candles. Although I wanted to be able to flip one switch and have them all come on, some of them are in bathrooms and are on a GFI circuit so it takes two switches. I bought the LED bulbs last year but things weren't far enough along to use them until this year.
I am surprised that C6 LED bulbs aren't more available. They are readily available online, but I have not yet found them locally. The LED's don't put out quite as much light, but they run much cooler and use maybe 1/10 of the electricity. They didn't even measure 1 watt each on my Kill A Watt. You certainly don't need to worry about singeing the window shades.
This year I ran the LED light strings around the porch and deck, but next year I'll probably get more energetic and run them up the gables and across the front of the house.
Our tree is from Balsam Hill. Although artificial, it's quite realistic.
The LED lights look just like the incandescent mini Christmas lights. The outer branches are moulded to resemble an actual tree and the inside of the tree is the cheaper twisted plastic strip branches. If you look closely at the enlarged photo you can see them, but they're not very apparent.
When we built our first house many years ago, I chose most of the the lights in one afternoon. Cost was a primary concern and, as it turns out, we've slowly replaced those fixtures over the years. This time these are carefully chosen and permanent.
I have to note that most people will look at the photos - and there are a lot of them - in this blog entry but only scan the words.
Most of the lights are from Hubbardton Forge. You can see our road trip to their factory in Vermont, along with our visit to Handmade in Vermont, where we bought most of our fixtures. Like most of our lights, the front porch light is simple with a few subtle flourishes.
It has the opaque mahogany finish which matches the finish on this one (below), which was a returned item from Handmade in Vermont that we bought for 75% off of list price.
All of the interior lights from Hubbardton Forge have kind of a similar theme, although there are several different styles. It was a splurge, but they look great. Most of them have compact fluorescent bulbs. A few of them, like the Powder Room fixture in the background here, are too small for a CF bulb and have halogen bulbs instead.
The Hall fixture is similar to the main Living Room fixture and the Foyer light.
The one in the corner of the Living Room is one of the new designs from Hubbardton Forge and looks pretty cool at night. It's kind of a glowing column of light.
These are not my first choice for spotlights, but the price was right. They're a little too close to the ceiling so they do project light onto the beam.
I really liked the Tech Lighting Sprocket fixture, but they are surprisingly pricey for such a simple little fixture, especially when three are needed. They also have a neat little heat resistant flight paper shade available. The cheapies do the job, though.
This is the CF fixture from Home Depot that we used in a number of places like Closets, the Laundry Room and at the back door.
We had a hard time finding energy star ceiling fans that don't look like they're from the Victorian era. This one is from the Period Arts Fan Company which is an offshoot of The Modern Fan Company. The wall sconces are dimmable, although my wife has a compact fluorescent bulb on the left and I have an incandescent bulb on the right. Even with dimmable CF bulbs, they get down to about 50% and then shut down. The IKEA furniture works pretty well in the room. For some reason they've discontinued the Tingvoll bed frame. Some of IKEA's styles can be a little strange, but this one's a classic.
We have our first Thanksgiving visitor. We've seen some flocks of big turkeys around and hear them occasionally, but this one kept checking out the back door.
Take a look at the times. He's a repeat visitor.
You can't tell from the perspective, but he's looking straight at the door.
According to the state, the last native turkey in Massachusetts met it's demise in 1851. After several unsuccessful attempts to re-introduce them, in 1972-1973 thirty-seven wild turkeys were successfully introduced, starting a movement. Now there are an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 wild turkeys in the state.
The camera system is up and running.
Like most things with this house, though, it was a bit of a process to get to this point.
We knew we wanted some sort of home automation and monitoring. Down the street in Osterville we discovered Savant Systems. They can do exactly what we want and much more. Savant president Jim Carroll demonstrated some of the amazing systems they can put together. I was quite impressed, but they're much more high end than what we were looking for.
We did the typical web searches and ended up looking at what Smarthome has to offer. They have many DIY systems and the Z-Wave system looked quite compelling. Many different manufacturers make compatible components such as controls for security, alarm, lighting, doors, HVAC and such, with more being added all the time.
Even though Z-Wave is relatively user friendly, I tried to find someone who could help us with an installation and get us over the learning curve. No luck there, though. We ended up buying the Vera 2 controller from Smarthome, along with one camera. Since I wasn't familiar with any of this, I perused their web site, called to get some information, then reviewed the products on their site and then finally placed an order with their guidance. We sat down to start installing things and I have to say I was a little stumped when I finally looked at the camera output and the Vera input. I didn't see any way to connect them together. The Vera online installation info was no help, other than saying that if you buy an IP camera from them it will be configured to work with the Vera. This was just a conventional camera, though.
I called Smarthome back and they told me something that the other advisors failed to mention. I would need a networkable DVR. After looking at the DVR, hard drive, additional cameras and accessories I would need to buy, it seemed that a complete security camera system with DVR would be more prudent.
I settled on a four camera system from SVAT. It comes with a DVR with 500 GB of memory, cameras, adapters, cables and all. It is viewable from the internet and smart phones, and they have free 24/7 lifetime tech support. It is motion sensing and can be set to record only when it senses motion withing defined areas. At less than $400, I thought it was a good deal. It comes with bullet cameras and I still needed the dome camera I had bought from Smarthome, so at least that wasn't a loss.
I had installed smurf tube so that, in theory, running the wiring would be easy. I had trouble getting my electrician's snake through some of the bends so I thought I'd try the vacuum cleaner instead. I wrapped a bit of tape on the end of a piece of twine, stuck it in the smurf tube and hooked the vacuum to the other end. I thought it was a long shot, but it worked like a charm. Then I couldn't find the end of a smurf tube that I knew I had installed. I looked through the photos I had taken during construction but unfortunately none of them showed it. I had a real good idea where it should be though and spent some quality time in the basement digging through insulation and finally found it.
I hooked the cameras to the DVR and started recording. That was easy. Connecting to our network was a bit more difficult, though. SVAT tried to help us get it going without success. Although we have Windows computers, we have an Apple router. After tech support calls to Apple, Comcast and the modem manufacturer, I tried some things and then called SVAT back. Like many computer problems, there are so many pieces to the puzzle and no one person has the answer. We finally discovered the problem and let SVAT know the answer. It sure wasn't easy to get to the bottom of things.
Many of the DVR camera systems have black cameras, but this system has silver cameras which work better on a house with white trim. We have two noticeable cameras and two which aren't so apparent, which is a good combination. From a distance they're not so noticeable.
But they're more apparent up close.
It's probably not what you think. HERS is the acronym for Home Energy Rating System. We scored 45. That doesn't sound so good, but we were quite happy with it.
A score of 100 means that a home meets the requirement of the energy code. Every one point decrease represents a one percent decrease in projected energy usage. Our score of 45 indicates that we are projected to use 55% less energy than a baseline house designed to meet the 2006 IECC energy code.
The HERS rating takes into account many factors including insulation levels, HVAC equipment efficiency, window efficiency, the blower door test and water heater efficiency. This is not a superinsulated house and we didn't take extreme measures. The house, though, is well insulated and the HVAC equipment is efficient, but we couldn't even use the some of the new highly efficient windows because we had to use impact resistant windows. We did have an ace in the hole, though.
The PV solar system provides about half of our electricity. I don't know how much this adds, but seemed to really help with the HERS rating. The HERS rating also factors into our final LEED rating.
