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Motronic posted:There is no flooring other than "painted concrete" that survives what you experienced. I mean, he could do tiles, right? I plan to replace my basement rug with vinyl planking myself; the concrete is pretty smooth, and I live in a dry climate, but the idea of basement carpet feels...wrong to me.
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Jul 10, 2019 02:17
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LogisticEarth posted:Wouldn't a grouted ceramic tile floor hold up? I have a few friends that live in legit flood zones and the tile seems to hold up fine. That entirely depends on the subfloor, but yes, you got me here. You can put that down and have it survive but with no decoupling systems so you better be drat sure that slab is stable (it's probably not if you're dealing with this kind of flooding).
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Jul 10, 2019 02:46
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I want to get my house wired with ethernet cables. First, I called some electricians. They told me they only work on high voltage systems and I should call a handyman. I then called several handymen and they said they don't do this kind of work, I should try a contractor. I then tried a couple contractors, one said I should try a handyman and the other said they could do this work but they have a minimum contracting fee of many thousands of dollars and that I could probably get it done much less expensively somewhere else. Have any of you had your homes wired with ethernet? What kind of person did the work? Who should I be calling? Edit: It's a small house in the Bay Area, drywall. This is not a large job. Chimp_On_Stilts fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Jul 10, 2019 |
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Jul 10, 2019 18:42
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Chimp_On_Stilts posted:Have any of you had your homes wired with ethernet? What kind of person did the work? Who should I be calling? My cable company install techs did this for me.
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Jul 10, 2019 18:44
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Chimp_On_Stilts posted:
Google home audio/video services in your area. You'll probably find someone willing to do it. I think home automation/security places may also do this as well. edit: EAT FASTER!!!!!! posted:My cable company install techs did this for me. Really? I've always had to twist their arm to do anything less invasive than blasting holes through siding wherever they feel like.
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Jul 10, 2019 18:49
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DaveSauce posted:Really? I've always had to twist their arm to do anything less invasive than blasting holes through siding wherever they feel like. lol yeah they do love to do this one but no these guys were fiber to the house techs and showed a little bit more restraint when I asked them to run a cable drop from the router to my battle station.
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Jul 10, 2019 18:53
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Chimp_On_Stilts posted:Have any of you had your homes wired with ethernet? What kind of person did the work? Who should I be calling? Search for low voltage contractors or home AV/automation companies as mentioned. Any interest in DIY at all? What sort of layout/configuration is your house, ranch, multistory, etc? Depending on the structure it could be dead simple or a huge pain in the rear end. You don’t need a ton of specialty tools beyond some fiberglass rods which you can pick up in the electrical section of any home improvement store. My first house was a single story ranch with a huge attic space so everything was incredibly easy to run. New house is two story with a basement but thankfully the basement is half unfinished, half drop tile so getting the first floor wired has been easy. I keep the modem/router in the basement and have my access point in a closet on the first floor, which is almost exact center of the house. Not in a hurry to wire up the second floor until I invest in a camera system as there isn’t any good path up to it. My options are either punch out of the basement and run conduit up the outside or remove a 50A sub panel on the exterior intended for a hot tub. The conduit path for that goes inside the garage and would make it possible to run a replacement conduit up into the attic space. devmd01 fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Jul 10, 2019 |
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Jul 10, 2019 19:27
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Low voltage or A/V companies are the right folks to ask. Expect it to be more than you really want to spend though. I was quoted at 110 a drop. You can also try to find a cable installer, or low voltage guy who wants to make some quick side cash and throw them a couple hundred to do it. I'd ask in a local FB group or Nextdoor if anyone knows someone. If you have attic access, and all the runs are internal walls you can totally DIY this youself. edit: Did you check Craigslist? Several companies offer Ethernet wiring in their listings. skipdogg fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Jul 10, 2019 |
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Jul 10, 2019 20:32
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Running Ethernet yourself is a fun, puzzle-solving exercise. It teaches you a lot about how your house is built. It also may drive you insane.
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Jul 10, 2019 20:35
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skipdogg posted:Low voltage or A/V companies are the right folks to ask. Expect it to be more than you really want to spend though. I was quoted at 110 a drop. 110/drop is a normal price for running in a drop ceiling. I'd never price a residential job that low.
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Jul 10, 2019 20:40
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ethernet is going to be obsolete, sooner probably than later, do yourself a big favor and run conduit with nice round corners and stuff so that ethernet wire can easily be pulled and replaced with whatever in 10 years Like maybe thats the standard anyway, but just make sure that's what you're contracting for, not just jamming wires wherever
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Jul 10, 2019 20:55
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I am not afraid to DIY this, especially if it saves significant money. My primary concerns are (1) I have no experience here so (2) I might gently caress it up / cause damage. I'm a new homeowner so I'm still in a phase where every dent I make causes me to cringe, and I don't want to be a DIWHY bonehead. The house is approx. 1,500 sq ft, one story. No attic. Very small crawlspace beneath the floor - I've never actually crawled down there, so I don't know if it's even possible to move around much. I imagine it's filthy. I also don't know what it's like inside my walls, so I don't know how to plan routes for conduit. Thanks for the advice to use conduit rather than straight ethernet. Could the existing electrical wiring already have conduit that I could also use for ethernet cables? Is that ok to do? Again, I have no experience here.
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Jul 10, 2019 21:06
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Chimp_On_Stilts posted:Thanks for the advice to use conduit rather than straight ethernet. Could the existing electrical wiring already have conduit that I could also use for ethernet cables? Is that ok to do? Again, I have no experience here. No, and if it does, still no. You can't mix high volt and low volt. This job is going to need to be done from the crawlspace based on what you've said so far.
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Jul 10, 2019 21:13
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Motronic posted:110/drop is a normal price for running in a drop ceiling. I'd never price a residential job that low. Yeah, the companies we use at work charge 110 to 140 a drop, but that's all materials included, certified with their fluke to standard, and warrantied. (Real business, with appropriate xM in insurance, employees with benefits, etc) I was quoted 110 a drop from a couple young guys doing a side hustle, with me terminating the lines and providing the materials. At the time the 500 bucks plus materials for 4 ethernet drops wasn't worth it. I sure as hell made sure my new house was wired during construction though.
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Jul 10, 2019 21:20
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I know that the answer to this question is, "It depends...", but what is a reasonable price for a termite treatment and prevention on a 1,400 sq.ft. single story home? We discovered dry-wood termite pellets in several places in our home, and hired a guy to come inspect the place. He found more indications of infestation as well as some dry-rot and fungus in other places. No subterranean termites were found, thankfully. He suggested local treatments and then a preventative treatment of all areas in the crawlspace, attic, and around the house. Total price tag $3,600. That seems really high considering tenting the whole house is around $2k. I need a sanity check on that price. I'm in Southern California, so an earthquake is going to imminently collapse my house no matter what anyway.
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Jul 10, 2019 22:10
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Anonymous Zebra posted:I'm in Southern California, so an earthquake is going to imminently collapse my house no matter what anyway. You'd be surprised what does and doesn't survive. Earthquakes are very stochastic and so is structural response. It's not like floods where it is a very binary outcome.
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Jul 10, 2019 22:39
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Chimp_On_Stilts posted:I am not afraid to DIY this, especially if it saves significant money. My primary concerns are (1) I have no experience here so (2) I might gently caress it up / cause damage. I'm a new homeowner so I'm still in a phase where every dent I make causes me to cringe, and I don't want to be a DIWHY bonehead. Agree with others, you'll be paying at minimum $100 / drop and you can easily purchase all tools and materials for that and DIY! Crawlspace sounds like it will suck, but what better way to get familiar with your house than crawling directly into it's undercarriage? I ran a half dozen lines for my home (through the attic), but I touch computers for a living so was able to  borrow the materials from work. Biggest bugbear was the stud top-plates.
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Jul 10, 2019 23:00
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Leperflesh posted:ethernet is going to be obsolete, sooner probably than later, do yourself a big favor and run conduit with nice round corners and stuff so that ethernet wire can easily be pulled and replaced with whatever in 10 years I feel like this comes up often and it's always refuted because your average home usage will never need anything more than 5e or 6 and I don't see a future within the life of the structure where you're gonna be wanting to run fiber everywhere.
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Jul 10, 2019 23:17
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couldcareless posted:I feel like this comes up often and it's always refuted because your average home usage will never need anything more than 5e or 6 and I don't see a future within the life of the structure where you're gonna be wanting to run fiber everywhere. Yeah, I mean nobody really knows for sure. But for example you might decide in the future to pull speaker wire; and the idea that we'll never need more bandwidth has been floated many times in the past and it hasn't held, maybe in 15 years when we're all watching our 10k TVs and playing interactive games on them in every room we'll want more. Anyway, I was imagining a situation where you're tearing open the drywall across many feet of wall, going through walls between rooms, maybe going up through a floor to a 2nd story, etc.: in those cases, you'd like to avoid ever having to tear open those walls again, and the nominal cost of doing it with conduit is not that high compared to the cost of all the drywall and painting work etc. BUT: if 100% of the ethernet is all going in the crawlspace, and you're OK with just drilling holes in the floor next to baseboards and having a little bit of wire coming up the wall to a plate with maybe something covering the wire? Then there's not so much need to run conduit, because the wire will be easy to replace later. You can even do it all inside if you don't mind having things like these running around between rooms and over doorways and stuff.   It's a matter of how much you care about appearances, basically?
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Jul 10, 2019 23:31
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Anonymous Zebra posted:I know that the answer to this question is, "It depends...", but what is a reasonable price for a termite treatment and prevention on a 1,400 sq.ft. single story home? Don't be silly, an earthquake isn't going to bring your house down - it's the resulting neighborhood fire!  I was recently quoted the same numbers for a similar house. I think part of the cost is all of the paperwork they have to do from people discovering they have termites then hiding it and selling the house. Ours had no signs of active infestation, he found all the old evidence we treated and knocked down when we bought the place but he still had to fill out some form for the state. He warned me several times that if he looked he had to report it, and they have no way to distinguish old-and-dead from recent-and-not-currently-visible. My old patio cover is down! Good news it uncovered some rot at the edge of my roof where it was joined to the house. So it begins in earnest.
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Jul 10, 2019 23:34
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couldcareless posted:I feel like this comes up often and it's always refuted because your average home usage will never need anything more than 5e or 6 and I don't see a future within the life of the structure where you're gonna be wanting to run fiber everywhere. Agreed. The 'run conduit everywhere' sounds good in theory, but unless you're building a new house, it's totally impractical. What's far more likely is that wireless technology improves to the point that wires aren't needed for most tasks...we're pretty much there already as long as you're not in an area with tons of congestion. Most devices don't even have ethernet ports anymore, and even 8K video is possible on gig-E with room to spare.
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Jul 11, 2019 03:07
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And in this specific case, with a crawlspace, there is really no reason to. Run conduit if you need to cut drywall to cable. If you don't it's not worthwhile. Also, "fiber" (what kind? It's not all the same) has been something a certain subset of people thought was "future proof" for a long time now. Turns out nothing any normal person would want in their home has supported fiber natively other than toslink. Fiber is not going to be a thing in homes, now or ever. You can certainly run it and use it, but it's going to be little more than a mess of media converters (powered) hanging off of each drop to convert them into something sensible, with a very overkill-for-your-home switch full of fairly expensive SFP/SFP+es that will be and will sound like datacenter equipment.
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Jul 11, 2019 14:53
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I didn't think it was worth specifying single or multimode because neither have any sort of practical application at home for the reasons you mentioned.
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Jul 11, 2019 15:28
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couldcareless posted:I didn't think it was worth specifying single or multimode because neither have any sort of practical application at home for the reasons you mentioned. Yeah, wasn't calling you out on that. I mentioned it because a lot of the people I've seen on the fiber bandwagon over the years literally don't understand there is a difference, and it's more than just those two, since there are additional commonly used flavors of multimode in particular. Some of which have.....surprise....fallen out of favor in the last several years with some new entrants. I guess my point is fiber is a moving target the same as copper ethernet.
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Jul 11, 2019 17:48
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I bought a roll of cat6 cable and ran it through my brick house behind baseboards designed for cables behind them, it took maybe a couple of hours. YouTube videos are literally all you need for this. One for the punch tool, one for beginners mistakes for the modem and switch setup. One thing I'd recommend is to definitely get a switch with PoE. I'm looking at replacing my one year old switch because I didn't know any better when I bought mine.
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Jul 11, 2019 17:53
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This conversation makes me really glad I have both a basement and an attic; all the wire runs around the basement and then up into the walls, and the second floor stuff runs from the basement up along the chimney well to the attic and then down to whichever room is needed. We had a ton of rewiring done and the electricians only needed to cut a handful of index-card size holes to make specific runs and otherwise there was no wall destruction involved at all. If we ever get to wiring up a network or something it should be relatively simple.
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Jul 11, 2019 18:21
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For anyone that is thinking of doing this themselves: always pull two cables to each drop, even if you only plan to use one. You'll thank yourself someday.
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Jul 11, 2019 19:19
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Or at a bare minimum leave pull strings everywhere so you can easily add more. But yes, always run n+1.
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Jul 11, 2019 19:22
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Ashcans posted:This conversation makes me really glad I have both a basement and an attic; all the wire runs around the basement and then up into the walls, and the second floor stuff runs from the basement up along the chimney well to the attic and then down to whichever room is needed. This is how my house is. Once I found that the chimney chase had enough room on the sides to drop wires to the basement (where the gear is), the party was on. I also haven't hit any dreaded fire-blocks mid wall in the study cavity, so running from the attics to the rooms is very straightforward.
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Jul 11, 2019 23:30
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Motronic posted:Turns out nothing any normal person would want in their home has supported fiber natively other than toslink. ...and just to add to this, TOSLINK sucks. It's an optical format yes, but it's already obsolete - it was invented in 1983, and most cables use plastic optical fiber, which has cable length limits of 5 to 10 meters, beyond which you need repeaters; you can use expensive glass fiber cables instead, but now you're just putting even more money into a bandwidth-limited outdated cabling system. quote:Unlike HDMI, TOSLINK does not have the bandwidth to carry the lossless versions of Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio, or more than two channels of PCM audio. Pretty much the one and only advantage of TOSLINK is that its immune to RF interference. But uh, digital music equipment uses all manner of clever error detection to cope with interference and bit loss, so that's really not an important advantage in most applications. In conclusion, in addition to nobody should use fiber optics in home, nobody should use TOSLINK unless they're just dealing with older equipment and don't have a choice.
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Jul 11, 2019 23:44
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Just buy the gold plated audiophile toslink cables.
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Jul 12, 2019 00:45
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The real question is how hard it is to DIY one of those pneumatic tube systems. Edit: I would also accept a Mr. Rogers trolley I can send from room to room.
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Jul 12, 2019 01:21
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Hoo boy, I am new to the lawn ownership game and I tried using a hose-attachment "lawn fertilizer" bottle. I missed the part in the instructions where it said to keep hose flow at the absolute lowest minimum. The bottle drained in seconds so I've got a HELL of a fertilized south half of the lawn and a not-so-fertilized north half. Oops
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Jul 12, 2019 04:06
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Without going through 176 pages of this thread, have solar roofs been discussed before? I was reading a little about Tesla's solar tiles and became intrigued. Seems like I can roll this into my mortgage and get a tax deduction on my mortgage interest. Does anybody know anything about this and whether it's worth looking into? My roof is going to need to be replaced in the next few years (I'm estimating) and it seems that this would also add a ton of value to the house.
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Jul 12, 2019 14:36
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I can't speak about Tesla's solar tiles, but I can say this about solar. It doesn't add as much value to your house as you think, definitely not anywhere what it will cost you to install it. Solar houses in my area might list for 10K more than a comparable non solar house, but not anywhere close to the 25 to 35K a solar system costs to install. It's like a swimming pool basically. Solar is also basically a lifestyle decision as someone earlier said. I can't make the numbers work for me, and I'm in the San Antonio area. Our electricity prices aren't that high, and I can't make a scenario works where I come out ahead by installing solar even though I'm in a fantastic area for it.
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Jul 12, 2019 15:04
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Motronic posted:Look at a chair and table as a things that needs to be produced and remember that material costs dwarf labor costs.
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Jul 12, 2019 15:58
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skipdogg posted:I can't speak about Tesla's solar tiles, but I can say this about solar. It doesn't add as much value to your house as you think, definitely not anywhere what it will cost you to install it. Solar houses in my area might list for 10K more than a comparable non solar house, but not anywhere close to the 25 to 35K a solar system costs to install. It's like a swimming pool basically. I'm not necessarily looking to come out ahead, but it seems to be a good deal for a roof that can cut down your electric bill by a certain amount as well. edit: per their not-at-all-trying-to-sell-me-on-this-product website, Value of energy (over 30 years): +27,300 cost of roof: -37,400 cost of battery: -10,100 pas credit: +9900 net cost over 30 years: 10,300. with a traditional roof 'starting' at 7,100. Lots of assumptions there, naturally, including a 2% annual rate increase for the cost of electricity. Still, if I need a new roof, it doesn't seem that crazy, and it has the added bonus of providing power during an outage until the battery is depleted. CornHolio fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Jul 12, 2019 |
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Jul 12, 2019 16:01
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First, check out Google's Project Sunroof to see if the calculations even work out: https://www.google.com/get/sunroof As a broad rule, you don't want to lease your panels. It complicates the sale of your house, and the leasing company steals all of your tax incentives (the only thing that makes solar worth it in most cases.) A loan for the upfront cost could make sense, but really dig into the numbers using worst-case assumptions here. People are getting screwed by these solar deals left and right, because they don't understand how to do math and/or the assumptions are widely optimistic. For my house, it would be 10+ years to break even, and that is relying on assumptions about the power company buying my extra power for 20 years - which is highly unlikely. Google Sunroof hides a very valuable NPV calc at the bottom of the results; mine says: Net present value at 4% discount rate: -$1,857. In other words, if I invested in a system, I'm losing money.
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Jul 12, 2019 16:03
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CornHolio posted:I'm not necessarily looking to come out ahead, but it seems to be a good deal for a roof that can cut down your electric bill by a certain amount as well. https://electrek.co/2019/06/14/tesla-solar-roof-quote-price/ This is a fairly recent article. The numbers seem pretty outrageous so I dunno where they're pulling them from... but it ain't cheap. Something else to realize is that this will depend on how much sun you get, your roof pitch, direction it faces, etc.. There are some calculators out there that will spit out some ballparks.
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Jul 12, 2019 16:05
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CornHolio posted:Without going through 176 pages of this thread, have solar roofs been discussed before? Tesla's solar tiles are pretty much a scam. They're wildly expensive compared to solar panels on a traditional roof, to the point where it would take something like 60 years to break even in SoCal. They also have barely installed any so it is very niche tech. Get a new roof if you need a new roof. Adding traditional panels later will always be an option.
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Jul 12, 2019 16:07
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