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Personally I leave the lights off or they are turned on only when needed. I like darkness to be well, dark. I hate this light show phenomenon, street lights are bad enough.
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Nov 20, 2019 14:07
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Sirotan posted:Hey thread, let's chat exterior lighting. At night around my house it is absolutely pitch black. Since it is winter in Michigan that means when I get home at 5pm it is a struggle to even get my keys into the lock because I can't see poo poo. I've got a light above my side door that until yesterday I assumed was dead. Last night I got home and it turned on as I drove up, and then this morning when I fiddled with the switch it turned on and stayed on. I have now learned that it is (possibly) one of these motion sensing lights that turns from manual to motion sensing mode if you toggle the switch off for 1 second. Yay? I've got a timer switch on my front porch light that adjusts itself to come on 45 minutes before sunset, and shut off at 10:30. In my carport, I've got a motion flood that comes on automatically at half brightness when it gets dark enough, and goes to full brightness on motion, so I've still got some light out there until I get close enough to trigger the motion.
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Nov 20, 2019 14:25
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knox_harrington posted:I think I'd be quite pissed off if a neighbour installed floodlights that shone 24/7 straight into my windows, particularly out in the countryside. Your light would not actually be allowed in my neighborhood, as the top of it is unsheilded! I don't think solar-powered path lighting is going to be enough light for my needs here. Currently thinking about going with this one: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Heath-Zenith-Shaker-Cove-Mission-150-Black-Motion-Sensing-Outdoor-Wall-Lantern-Sconce-HZ-4135-BK/205958446 which has a motion sensor, but also has a setting that allows it to come on after dusk for 3 hours, 6 hours, or until dawn at 1/4th of the brightness, but will still turn on to full brightness if it senses motion. And I can still override these settings by turning the light switch off for 1-2 seconds. Also I tried to observe my neighbors a bit closer last night, next door neighbor leaves their porch light on all night and someone across the way had theirs on for about 4 hours after dusk. Seems to be about 1/3rd on the street leave something on all night. Edit: there are just so many lighting choices, jesus. Maybe I need to just go all in on a smart lighting system since I'll be replacing almost all of the lighting in the house from this point on anyway: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/philips-hue-outdoor-motion-sensor-black-and-white/6326655.p Sirotan fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Nov 20, 2019 |
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Nov 20, 2019 14:26
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I pointed a motion activated double flood light straight into my neighbors bedroom, but I hate his guts so 
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Nov 20, 2019 15:07
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His Divine Shadow posted:Personally I leave the lights off or they are turned on only when needed. I like darkness to be well, dark. I hate this light show phenomenon, street lights are bad enough. I agree. I keep a soft, yellow light on my front steps, but it is only bright enough to illuminate the steps and door. When I had my property landscaped to manage runoff, the one thing in their design that I did not go with was the lighting system that would have put spotlights on featured plants, the front of the house, and such. I do have a motion-sensor light on my driveway that lights up for about 5 minutes for safety's sake, but my neighbors on that side have the same thing on theirs, and we talked through the aiming on both so that nobody gets a blast of light directly into a window.
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Nov 20, 2019 16:47
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Dusk to Dawn with motion sensing has become my preference. Come on at dusk, can be set to turn off after 4, 6, 8, or dawn. The lights come on bright and brighten on motion, otherwise they are dimmed. Easy to find in porch lights. Hard to find in spot and flood lights. Depending on the size of the area being lit--going with two lights might be the solution. Something that stays dim. And another to light the area on motion/for night time mowing. (for those Thursday nights when you know you're going to be gone and blew off mowing the previous weekend.  )Sirotan posted:Edit: ... Maybe I need to just go all in on a smart lighting system... There is another thread in this sub all about home automation. Home Assistant and/or SmartThings work great if/when you move past the Hue hub basics. Smart lighting has gotten easy enough for my parents to implement without help.
HycoCam fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Nov 20, 2019 |
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Nov 20, 2019 17:34
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HycoCam posted:Dusk to Dawn with motion sensing has become my preference. Come on at dusk, can be set to turn off after 4, 6, 8, or dawn. The lights come on bright and brighten on motion, otherwise they are dimmed. BRB - replacing my zwave switch for my landscape lights with a zwave dimmer. That's a really, really good idea.
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Nov 20, 2019 18:10
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HycoCam posted:Dusk to Dawn with motion sensing has become my preference. Come on at dusk, can be set to turn off after 4, 6, 8, or dawn. The lights come on bright and brighten on motion, otherwise they are dimmed. Easy to find in porch lights. Hard to find in spot and flood lights. I can't tell if you are specifically talking about this motion sensor (as it is called Dusk to Dawn, vs just the concept of dusk-to-dawn lighting), but this seems pretty neat: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NDFQF2T/ref=ask_ql_qh_dp_hza quote:Any way to keep the floodlights on (at a dim level) and they get brighter when detecting motion. AND off altogether if it's daylight? And their outdoor light is a little expensive but fairly nice looking:  (theres a cheaper one but it can't change color/temp)
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Nov 20, 2019 18:30
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I have a lantern style light outside my front door so I put frosting film inside on the glass to diffuse the light, I also put a dimmer warm led bulb in it. It's not offensively bright or harsh from 20' away.
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Nov 20, 2019 18:45
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Sirotan posted:I can't tell if you are specifically talking about this motion sensor (as it is called Dusk to Dawn, vs just the concept of dusk-to-dawn lighting) Porch lights are easy and you don't need to go SmartHouse. Lots of manufacturers make them, it is just knowing what to look for. Heath calls it DualBrite and a handful of these lights have it: https://www.heath-zenith.com/t/decorative-lighting/150-degree-motion-detection But grounds lighting/security lights work really well when combined with smart home stuff. Hue is a really easy way to start. (My spots are controlled with GE/Jasco smart switches connected to a SmartThings hub that is triggered based on automation of motion events using Home Assistant running on a Pi3. )
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Nov 20, 2019 19:16
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Interior home lighting chat: I want to install some pendants over my island. What are the appropriate hangers/jboxes I need that can support a hanging object? Obviously, most pendants aren't terribly heavy, but I want to do it the right way. From what I've gathered, there are new construction hangers that you nail into your trusses or joists. I think these are typically for ceiling fans, but I assume it will work just as well for a pendant light.
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Nov 20, 2019 23:12
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Motronic posted:Wait.....you TALKED to other people? That live near you? And don't think I didn't appreciate the risk! He's a retired boomer with back problems, so he can't get out much. The only way our conversations would last less than 30 minutes would be if one of us were hit by a car mid sentence E: I'm looking to winterize our house, and one of the suggestions that came up repeatedly was caulking your windows, interior and exterior. Here's an inside window, which is representative of basically all of them in the house. They're "middle aged" (15 years? 20?) windows in what I believe are original window frames, which if that's the case, are 19th century. The yellow lines indicate the seam at which I applied clear latex caulk. My question is whether that's actually accomplishing anything, or if I'm wasting my time. 
The Wonder Weapon fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Nov 21, 2019 |
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Nov 20, 2019 23:13
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Thanks for exterior light chat, goons. We find ourselves in the exact same situation right now with sunset coming earlier and near-misses surging in our parking lot. Two flood lights and a minimal security camera should be enough.
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Nov 21, 2019 00:16
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The Wonder Weapon posted:And don't think I didn't appreciate the risk! He's a retired boomer with back problems, so he can't get out much. The only way our conversations would last less than 30 minutes would be if one of us were hit by a car mid sentence
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Nov 21, 2019 07:25
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Best fill that open space with caulk then.
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Nov 21, 2019 08:18
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I imagine expanding foam could work too.
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Nov 21, 2019 13:15
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When I got my home I had to add two egress windows to the basement rooms. They were supposed to be flush finned windows but the kid at Home Depot hosed up the order and got me center fins. I basically compensated for it by setting the framing back a bit and covering them with vycor and caulk. But there's still the issue of trim/finish material on them, and I'm wondering whether or not I need to trim them for the winter to add a layer of water protection. Here's one window, this is framed and shimmed correctly:  I live in Salt Lake City, so I'm expecting about 6-10 inches of snow in the window wells (wells are about 6-8 inches deep below the sill, drainage includes marble chips on top of broken concrete). To make matters more complicated, I'm planning on pulling one of the windows and reframing it as right now it's pretty crooked against the house. It's not Grover bad, but it looks pretty bad. My current stopgap measure was to take some PT board, rip it down and fill in the gaps as seen in the pictures. This is the other window, which was framed too tight to shim and so we had to set it and seal it as it was.  I figure this would help keep water out, weather the winter and then I can pull the strips off and easily reframe the window in the Spring/Summer when we remodel other parts of the basement. I've also got some plastic "stick-on" trim that looks ugly but less ugly than an exposed window. So my questions are threefold:
Thanks for the help here! We're getting our first snowfall today and I just want to make sure my roommates downstairs will be OK.
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Nov 21, 2019 18:41
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This might be kind of a weird question, but does anyone have a house with an exterior door that opens outward? We're thinking about getting a new front door and we're trying to figure out if we can get it outward-opening, since our entryway is really small and it's just kind of annoying. But then I started thinking of whether I've ever seen a house with an outward-opening door, and really, I'm not sure I ever have. I can think of a few reasons that might be the case: - it would get rain on it when you opened it - possible snow blockage - can't put a storm door on it We don't really care about any of those things, because it's already under a covered area and it barely snows here. Is there any other reason I might not be thinking of?
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Nov 22, 2019 15:38
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Sir Lemming posted:This might be kind of a weird question, but does anyone have a house with an exterior door that opens outward? We're thinking about getting a new front door and we're trying to figure out if we can get it outward-opening, since our entryway is really small and it's just kind of annoying. But then I started thinking of whether I've ever seen a house with an outward-opening door, and really, I'm not sure I ever have. I can think of a few reasons that might be the case: Hinges on the outside make your locks even more pointless.
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Nov 22, 2019 15:45
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H110Hawk posted:Hinges on the outside make your locks even more pointless. This is true to a degree, but there's ways to deal with that. I have an outward opening door and the hinges are secure enough. It also makes it harder to shoulder barge.
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Nov 22, 2019 16:11
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TIL: outswing doors are actually more secure https://www.finehomebuilding.com/2011/01/05/inswing-or-outswing-doorsquote:The first red flag most people throw out when I recommend an outswing door is the security risk. They feel the exposed hinge pins are a weak spot thieves can exploit. That may have been the case many years ago but security style hinges are now common on outswing and many inswing doors. Tabs or studs on the hinges prevent the door panel from being removed even when the pins are popped out. The tabs and studs are either integrated into the hinge leaves or can be retrofitted to old hinge models. And some hinges also have special threaded pins that resist extraction without a special tool. So with the hinge issue off the table, an outswing door is actually more secure than an inswing door.
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Nov 22, 2019 16:21
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Sirotan posted:TIL: outswing doors are actually more secure https://www.finehomebuilding.com/2011/01/05/inswing-or-outswing-doors
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Nov 22, 2019 16:34
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Sir Lemming posted:This might be kind of a weird question, but does anyone have a house with an exterior door that opens outward? We're thinking about getting a new front door and we're trying to figure out if we can get it outward-opening, since our entryway is really small and it's just kind of annoying. But then I started thinking of whether I've ever seen a house with an outward-opening door, and really, I'm not sure I ever have. I can think of a few reasons that might be the case: All doors here (scandinavia-ish) opens outwards.
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Nov 22, 2019 16:45
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The back door of my 1950's house is outswing. It has a deadbolt lock, and the hinge side has metal rods that extend through the frame and into the wall when closed, so that it can't be popped out easily.
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Nov 22, 2019 16:50
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Yeah I tried really hard to get an outward opening front door and got peer pressured into not doing that by the builders and window/door fitters, purely based on expectation. "but what about when you're coming in with shopping" was the main argument. Because it was early in the process and the door has a multilock I caved, and don't mind that much either way. Getting the handedness right turned out far more important. Also FWIW I could switch mine to an outward swinging door in about an hour with minimal expense.
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Nov 22, 2019 17:07
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Interesting, I was kind of expecting "that's a terrible idea don't do it" but I guess we might keep looking into it. Haven't checked building codes for our area yet, but things seem pretty laissez-faire around here...
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Nov 22, 2019 19:20
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All new front doors are out-swinging or sliders here. Security is based on window structure more than the hinges (the hinges are huge, beastly things). https://www.ykkap.co.jp/search/index.html?s=door&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=ykkap
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Nov 22, 2019 23:10
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I've always found being that concerned with security, at least on a majority of American houses, to be mostly impotent. "Locks only stop honest people." Many homes have patio doors, ample ground floor windows that can be wrenched open or have their glass shattered, etc. It's not to say that you should be intentionally making your house more unsafe, but that a lot of time and effort may be spent on features that at the end of the day don't make your home safer. Rather,a couple security cameras, inside and out, will do more to help you after a break in than commercial grade door hinges will to prevent one.
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Nov 23, 2019 01:12
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That's right :/ Bathroom windows, especially crank louver type, are a weak point because they're often left open. JP houses often have metal bars on bathroom/kitchen windows on the ground floor. https://www.ykkap.co.jp/products/ex/item/series/slim/
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Nov 23, 2019 01:52
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I want to wire my home with CAT6 ethernet. Currently, there is no ethernet wiring at all (everything uses wifi). I'm pretty sure I'm going to pay a professional to do this, but unsurprisingly that will cost literally 10x what it would cost to DIY. The work would involve: 1) Drilling hole from garage down into the crawlspace below the house 2) Running CAT6 into and across the crawlspace to 4 separate termination points 3) Drilling 4 more holes from the living quarters into the crawlspace (one hole for each termination point) 4) Runing the cables through those holes 5) Terminating the cables in nice lookin' faceplates & jacks Nearly all of this I am confident I can do. However, getting from the living quarters into the crawlspace has me perplexed - especially from the garageinto the crawlspace. From the garage, I can see that that a beam (not joist) lies between the garage and the crawlspace. Drilling a hole through this beam to run the cable sets off my "don't do this, you're gonna gently caress up something structurally important" mental alarm. There's normal household outlets in the garage, but I don't know how those were run to where they terminate in the garage wall. Also, the hookup to the city power grid runs into the garage from a telephone poll then - somehow - goes into the rest of the house. Even if I knew how it was run, I think I'm supposed to keep high and low voltage lines separate so I don't think I can follow those lines / use those holes anyway. Am I overreacting? Is this a situation where I, someone who mediocre on the handyness scale, should DIY and save a couple thousand dollars? Or is this in fact something where a professional really is necessary? As I stated, right now I'm pretty sure I'm gonna hire a local electrical company - they already gave me a bid. I'm simply here to see if I am being overly cautious.
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Nov 25, 2019 04:30
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We installed a sensor light in our parking lot (lol)
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Nov 25, 2019 04:34
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Chimp_On_Stilts posted:I want to wire my home with CAT6 ethernet. Currently, there is no ethernet wiring at all (everything uses wifi). You are over thinking this. Doing a crawl space/basement run is super easy mode.
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Nov 25, 2019 13:04
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Just take it easy and think through the things you do before you do them. There's usually clear codes for your region saying how much of a thing you're allowed to cut out safely.
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Nov 25, 2019 13:42
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Are you trying to have proper wall plates with rj45 outlets or are you running bare wires up near baseboards and putting a little wall wart connector there? The hardest part if you're doing wall jacks is finding the inside of the walls from underneath to drill up, and dealing with walls that have insulation. Id recommend avoiding exterior walls if you can.
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Nov 25, 2019 13:48
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I ran Cat5 close to romex and it seems fine
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Nov 25, 2019 15:06
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Yeah that's more of an efficiency and optimising thing. They're not nearly as susceptible to interference as wifi, at moderate speeds.
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Nov 25, 2019 15:38
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Fallom posted:I ran Cat5 close to romex and it seems fine Running data cable along side Romex is something to avoid, but it's unlikely to matter in a home network. If you do get interference the only thing it's likely to do is cut the top speed of that cable run. You may only get 1,000mbps instead of the 10,000mbps some newer equipment is capable of running at, but it's not going to be noticeable for the average home user. Note however that the NEC requires a separation if you care about being up to code.
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Nov 25, 2019 16:16
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I am about 80% done replacing the flooring in my house with vinyl plank, and I made it to the laundry room. Took out the washer and dryer and the big plastic pan under the washer. There's a threaded pipe coming up out the floor to (I assume) catch overflow in the pan and let it drain, but I was pretty surprised to find that it's just a hole into the crawlspace. Is this normal?
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Nov 25, 2019 17:11
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PremiumSupport posted:Running data cable along side Romex is something to avoid, but it's unlikely to matter in a home network. If you do get interference the only thing it's likely to do is cut the top speed of that cable run. You may only get 1,000mbps instead of the 10,000mbps some newer equipment is capable of running at, but it's not going to be noticeable for the average home user. Getting shielded Cat6 is supposed to help with this and isn't that much more expensive. The foil is a bit on a pain in the rear end though.
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Nov 25, 2019 17:32
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$1075 to prune one tree and remove a hideous and massive dead tree stump that has voids filled with cement. Hell yeah home ownership rules. also who the gently caress fills holes in trees with cement???
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Nov 25, 2019 18:12
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