The next time you approach our New House you'd better be smiling, and on your best behaviour, because everything you do will be recorded by one or more HD, day and night, video cameras. And this video evidence may be used against (or in rare cases, for) you in a court of law. You've been warned! In this Episode of the New House Blog we will also be reporting on two plumbing repairs. The first plumbing repair involves, surprisingly, the 1/2 bath, which we just repaired in the
previous Episode. That particular bathroom does seem to require more attention than the other two bathrooms. The second plumbing repair was for an outside remote hose spigot, and it may surprise you to learn who made this repair necessary.
Smile 1
You may recall from
this Episode the teaser image of a new run of cat 6 under our New House. Here is that image again, to refresh your memory.
We can now reveal that this cable run from our garage to the orange room was for the purpose of connecting our camera system with the rest of our house network.
But before we could run cable and mount a Cat 6 faceplate we needed to remove some superfluous piping. The galvanized piping you see in this picture used to be connected to a water softener way back in pre-Bishopian times, but it had not been used for many years. It was rather easy to remove, too.
The large rectangularish hole is where the faceplate for new garage Cat 6 will terminate in the orange room. The two smaller holes were test holes we drilled when looking for a suitable mounting point for said faceplate.
And what's inside the large hole? Not much, really. Here you can see the hole we drilled to allow the Cat 6 to come up from under our New House.
Pipes
It seems like our 1/2 bath gets a lot more attention, and needs more repair, than our other two bathrooms. And most of this involves repairs to the high-tech pressure-assist toilet. For a long time one of us (not Becky) wondered if we just had a lemon of a toilet. After the drastic repair featured in the
previous Episode we thought all of the issues were resolved; but no, after only a few weeks the toilet resumed its always-running behaviour. We had replaced everything inside the tank, so what could the problem be? Taking the lid off the tank revealed over an inch of water in the bottom of the tank, where there should be no water, and water seemed to be leaking out of the air pressure regulator at the top of the in-tank assembly.
A quick look at the online Flushmate troubleshooting guide revealed that leaking from the air pressure regulator usually indicates a lack of incoming water pressure. We knew the water pressure was adequate when we bought our New House, and we also knew that the toilet itself was in good working order, so a lack of pressure likely meant one thing - clogging of the incoming water pipe due to rust.
A quick look at the incoming pipe area revealed what you see on the left - a rusty leak where the pipe joined the shutoff valve. D'oh! At least we were finally getting to the actual root of the problem. To troubleshoot and resolve this required turning off the house water, something we are loath to do.
But do it we did, and this is what was revealed after removing the shutoff valve - the galvanized inlet pipe was rusty, clogged, and the metal was breaking down and causing water to leak - all of which resulted in a reduction of incoming water pressure.
That's a lot of clogging going on there.
Another view of the same pipe. Note how the end of the pipe has deteriorated. Also note that most of the dust on the garbage can lid is from the smoke of the Soberanes fire burning south of here.
It seemed like a good idea to look inside the wall to see the extent of the clogging and damaged pipe, but the existing opening was just too small for good viewing
So we did what anyone else would do - we opened up the wall a bit to see what was really going on (as you know, I have no fear of opening up holes in the walls). We were very happy to see that the corrosion and clogging were limited to the short inlet pipe, and we were even happier to see that the in-wall pipe is un-corroded copper.
Time to put it all back together. The new inlet pipe is copper - no more of that galvanized for us!
Ok, so the replacement drywall piece isn't quite an exact fit. But it's not too far off.
Once it's patched up with tape and joint compound you can't even tell. And where did that seahorse go?
There's the seahorse. We had to move him so we didn't accidentally sand him down or paint over him. :) And now we finally, really think we have this situation resolved. We can tell just by listening that there is more water pressure getting into the toilet than before, and so far the system has worked perfectly. Hooray!!
Smile 2
After running the Cat 6 into the garage and terminating it in the appropriate faceplate it was time to mount the POE network switch. POE stands for Power Over Ethernet, and it means that the network switch provides both power and data to whatever device is plugged into it - in this case our cameras. From a practical point of view it means that we only had to run one Cat 6 cable to each camera, instead of having to run both a power cable and a Cat 6 cable.
But where do you mount a network switch in a garage that doesn't have any existing mount points? Obviously, you make your own mount, as seen below.
This simple but effective mount was made from a single 2-by-4, split roughly in half, with each half nailed to an existing wall stud.
Our network switch mounted, plugged in, and connected to the house network. We had used up all of our blue Cat 6, so we ordered a large spool of black, outdoor-rated Cat 6.
PVC
And now we get to the second plumibing repair. Below you see a picture of our the hose hookup by our food garden.
What you don't see in this photo is the dense foliage that I had to remove just so that I could see and photograph this hose hookup. It was the afore-mentioned intense density of weeds surrounding this hose hookup that caught my attention and prompted me to look deeper.
Deeper into the ground, that is. I discovered an underground spring, springing from where the PVC elbow meets the horizontal PVC pipe.
Pre-Bishopians did the previous PVC joining, and it was not adequately joined - thus the leak. The vertical PVC work, done by me in
this Episode, was (and is) leak-free.
This repair was pretty straightforward. After turning off the water to this outlet I disconnected the elbow and vertical assembly and let the pipe drain.
Next I re-connected and cemented the elbow to the horizontal pipe and let the PVC cement cure.
Once the cement was cured I turned the water back on, tested to make sure the joint was sealed, then I filled in the hole and re-installed the bricks.
Here you see the hose re-connected and actual water flowing through this spigot.
Smile 3
The last two steps were mounting the cameras and running the Cat 6. Now, I'm not going to divulge all of the details, but I will say that we have multiple overlapping fields of view, and the cameras are full HD, recording day and night.
This is some of the new, black, outdoor Cat 6.
Here you can see a typical camera. So far the system works quite well, and it has options for remote viewing and capturing.
We do not yet have facial recognition activated, but who can say what we might do in the future?
Smile for the
bIsh
