@BrooklynRowHouse

It's 2009. Time for Secession!

Steve — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:42:00 +0000

Every presidential inauguration year seems to kick off another round of local secessionist talk. In 2001, it was about New York City seceding from New York and becoming its own state. I admit to a certain degree of sympathy for that given the fact that NYC is the revenue cash cow for the state. But few people took the talk seriously. Short of NYC becoming a hostile nuclear power, there's no way Albany would agree to let us go.

In 2005, the local news was about Staten Island secession. Its promoters have a different plan. They want to leave NYC and become part of New Jersey. I didn't have a problem with that. For me, Staten Island is mostly just an obstacle to be navigated on the way to New Jersey anyway. If it became part of New Jersey maybe it would get better malls.

Now Long Island wants to secede and become the 51st state. What kicked this off is a $1.5 billion payroll tax to bail out the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Never mind that the MTA is underwriting the money-losing Long Island Railroad which brings over 250,000 Long Island residents into NYC every day to earn their livings while they contribute little to NYC's tax base.

It was a set up for one of the funniest videos I've ever seen lately: a Daily Show piece with the hysterically sarcastic Samantha Bee.

No brag intended.

Steve — Fri, 15 May 2009 04:40:36 +0000

A couple of weeks ago one of my stained glass designs was picked for the Dragonfly Design of the Month, May 2009.

I don't consider myself an artist in the visual sense so I was kind of embarrassed by the attention and decided to keep it to myself. But I wanted to publicly thank Michael Wilk, president of Dragonfly, for the honor. So here it is. I know I probably wasn't the most cooperative candidate he's dealt with.

I also wanted to give a plug to Michael's Glass Eye 2000 stained glass design software. Believe me, if it can make a graphically challenged person like me create a nice looking design, someone with real talent will be able to do amazing things with it.

One more announcement. I've been blogging for Old House Web for the past couple of months -- my first paid blogging gig! Unfortunately, I've been neglecting my own.

So I also wanted to apologize to readers of this blog for the lapses in posting here. I've been very busy with Childrens Health Fund the past couple of months and it's looking like it will get even busier as I've been assigned a new childhood nutrition project. Fortunately for the kids, I won't be teaching them my personal food groups (Cheetos, General Tsos, Diet Pepsi and margaritas) but building the software.

However, my next project really, really will be to start constructing some of these stained glass designs. Really.

Tainted Drywall

Steve — Thu, 07 May 2009 04:19:42 +0000

I ran across a story today about a new health threat from a strange source: drywall.

My first thought was, "you've got to be kidding!" My understanding from watching the How They Make Stuff TV shows was that drywall was about as inert a product as you can find: gypsum slurry, a fiber binder and recycled paper. How can that possibly be a health threat?

Tell that to the dozens of families who have been forced to evacuate their homes in Florida thanks to outgassing of drywall allegedly imported from China during the home building boom. Residents of these homes talked about a foul rotten-egg smell in rooms built with this drywall and, worse, whatever is causing the smell is also corroding metal in the homes: wiring, air conditioning coils, faucets, even table lamps.

Testing agencies have tentatively identified the smell as being sulfur dioxide, a toxic gas which can cause breathing disorders and be potentially fatal to those already suffering from asthma. The chemical is also consistent with the metal corrosion found in these houses.

Over 300 million square feet of this drywall was imported to the US and may be installed in as many as 100,000 homes and renovations constructed since 2001. Most of this drywall apparently ended up in the south, mainly in Florida, where the heat and humidity aggravates the outgassing.

The federal government is taking this seriously enough that it's alleged President Obama fired his legacy chairperson of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Nancy Nord, over the controversy.

What strikes me about some of the photos I've seen, like this one, is how quickly metal is being corroded by the sulfur dioxide fumes. I've worked with chemicals like muriatic acid (dilute hydrochloric acid) and know what those fumes can do to unprotected metal. It rusted my new hammer across the room in literally two hours. It's scary to think what it could do the wiring inside a wall. Corrosion creates resistance and resistance creates heat, especially at fixture connections and pigtails. So there's potentially a third danger with it: fire. And, if I recall correctly, sulfur dioxide is itself highly flammable.

My unanswered question is why this Chinese drywall is outgassing sulfur dioxide. Testing agencies have found at least three sulfur products besides gypsum (calcium sulfate) in it. Perhaps it's used as a foaming agent to make the slurry? Who knows?

There's a central information clearinghouse set up for it at http://www.chinesedrywall.com/.

The Tormek Blade Sharpening System

Steve — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:12:53 +0000

Shop owners love to brag about the incredible tool buys they've made on eBay, at flea markets and at estate auctions. Like my $50 Hitachi framing nailer and $125 radial arm saw.

But most of us have also made purchases we're less proud of, like the $100 "miracle corner clamping system" I bought at a tool show which turned out to be utterly useless for anything besides building the tiny box the salesman demonstrated at the show. Naturally, we don't talk much about those overpriced white elephants, which is probably why these hucksters are still in business.

Then there are those purchases that fall somewhere in the middle: useful tools with staggering price tags that don't really justify the tool's performance. When I purchased the Tormek T7 wet grinder at the International Woodworking Show in New Jersey, I was afraid I'd made just such a buy. After purchasing the optional jigs and accesories I needed for my planer and jointer blades, knives and scissors I walked out of the convention center almost $700 lighter.

Indeed, there's not much to this tool. It's basically just a slow-turning motor with a couple of wheels, a plastic bath tub and a steel frame. But it does an excellent job. Over the past four years I've taken for granted how much it's meant to always have sharp blades, chisels and knives in the shop.

Sure, experienced old timers can accomplish this manually with a sharening stone but it's a skill I don't have nor am I particularly eager to learn it with my expensive blades. There's more to it than just rubbing a blade against a block, like maintaining the precise bevel. Get this wrong on a 12" planer blade and you might as well toss the set and buy new ones.

That's how I balance -- or possibly rationalize -- the cost of the Tormek. I was spending a hundred bucks a year on new planer and jointer blades before the Tormek but I haven't bought a single set since. As an added bonus, I have scary sharp chisels, scissors and kitchen knives too.

In fact, if you've never had a knife professionally sharpened before you don't know how sharp they can be. Perhaps for liability reasons, brand new, store bought knives are usually pretty dull by comparison. 

More Tormek instructional videos are available here.

Building stairs the EZ way

Steve — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 22:36:23 +0000

Shortly after I took possession of my house, I was cleaning up the cellar one afternoon when I noticed my cat, Chopper, engrossed with something halfway up the old cellar stairs. I checked to see if he might have a moth and instead saw a pile of paint chips and wood fibers below the stringer he was pawing at. With the paint removed, I saw hundreds of white wormy looking things. Termites!

How did this happen? I'd closed on the house nine months earlier. My inspector found some evidence of an old termite infestation and, to be safe, my lawyer made the closing contingent upon an exterminator's report. The report was so terse that the inspector could have Twittered it: "Found/killed two termite colonies. No evidence of internal infestation."

Evidently this bonehead's inspection was as thorough as his report because the termites had dug a tunnel from the far foundation wall, across the ceiling through a 3" floor joist, and down the stairs. It cost me $1500 to have a licensed, BBB-certified exterminator exterminate the house. There's more to that story, but I'll digress on that some other time. What matters is that I had to replace that staircase. I was very lucky it didn't collapse on me. 

I had seen a stair building system on one of the home shows that I wanted to try, called Easy Riser. It's basically a sleeve made of solid pine with "wings" made of particle board made to slip around a 2x8 stringer. With Easy Riser you avoid making a bunch of conventional sawtooth cuts in the stringer, which is not only time consuming but weakens the stringer as well. Instead, you slip the Easy Riser assembly around a 2x8, drive a bunch of screws into the wings and there's your completed stringer, ready for treads.

I located a dealer for Easy Riser, bought a box for seventy bucks, then over to the Borg store to purchase the prefabricated treads and risers I needed. Construction literally took two hours. Easy breezy.

But it didn't eliminate the need for tedious calculations of the rise and run. You still need a rafting square, a calculator and lots of pencil marks to locate the brackets on the stringers. Those calculations can be complicated and prone to error, especially with a staircase as steep and shallow as the one I was replacing. Nevertheless, I couldn't see how you could improve on Easy Riser until I ran across another stair building system called EZ Stairs.

EZ Stairs takes it to a whole new level. Like Easy Riser, you don't have to cut up the stringer -- just attach the EZ Stairs bracket to the stringer with screws. But that's where the similarity ends. For one thing, EZ Stairs' brackets are metal. But where it really improves on Easy Riser is the adjustable spacer tool that automatically sets your custom rise and run. The stringer is actually two parallel boards, which can be tongue-and-groove for a more finished look. After you've used EZ Stairs online calculator to compute the setting for the spacer tool and you've attached the brackets with one screw into each board, you slide boards in opposite directions and, presto, there's your stringer. Just drive some more screws to secure the brackets and mount your treads and risers.

The EZ Stairs video will explain it better.

Warning: R-rated Geek Content Follows

Steve — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 03:08:05 +0000

After three weeks of updates and upgrades to my Insteon home automation setup here, I ran across this YouTube video today which summed up the experience nicely.



Okay, upgrading my HouseLinc software wasn't nearly as painful as trying to get that "Stupid Piece Of S**t That Doesn't F*****g Work" ISY99-i installed. But it wasn't a stroll on the beach either. HouseLinc v2 imported all my Insteon device settings from HouseLinc v1 fine, only to report that it couldn't communicate with three quarters of them. It took half the night to get everything working -- changing outlets for the serial PLM controller, rebooting it, resynchronizing the database, etc. Caveat: if you want home automation and none of this makes any sense to you, you might want to do yourself a favor and hire a pro.

In the end, I don't have a clear idea what I did to fix it. It just suddenly stopping throwing errors and started working.

It's bizarre, but the new PLM refused to work in same outlet that the old one used, but it's working fine in an outlet that the old one didn't like. I assume it's some kind of noise issue in the line and maybe the new PLM does a better job of filtering it at the expense of signal sensitivity. Who knows? All it means is that if it happens again I'll have to test the Infinite Monkey Theorem one more time. But at least I can say that it's working NOW and it's working well.

From a user perspective, there's not a lot of difference between Houselinc v1 and v2 except for the presentation. There are some new bits, like a daily "System Maintenance" cycle (which isn't really explained), the drag/drop works better and the software does a better job of identifying the Insteon devices it encounters.

The one new piece of Insteon equipment I got works very nicely. It's a wireless, multi-scene portable remote called, predictably, RemoteLinc. It's a little larger than an iPhone and has six programmable scene buttons plus Dim/Bright and All On/Off buttons. It requires two plug-in modules called Access Points, which handle the wireless signal and are plugged respectively into outlets sitting on opposite legs of your breaker panel. Installation is relatively painless. Plug one in, push the Set button and then run around the house plugging the other one into outlets until you see a steady blue light.

Then it's back to HouseLinc to program it. Note that Houselinc isn't required to program RemoteLinc. You can also select the devices you want RemoteLinc to control by putting the device into beacon mode and then having RemoteLinc scan for it. However several of my Insteon devices are buried inside ceiling light boxes so HouseLinc is definitely the way to go.

The next step is to see if I can get the Unix box to talk to HouseLinc's PLM too. Once I get everything programmed, I'd rather put HouseLinc aside and have Unix control Insteon events so I don't have to leave my Windows box on 24/7. Some experimenting showed that these Unix shell commands worked with the non-HouseLinc PLM to control my upstairs hallway sconce lamp.

# Turn upstairs hall sconce ON
rs232 -d /dev/ttyS0 -b 19200 -s "\h02 62 04 51 C1 0F 11 FF" --hex --verbose -r9 --wait .4

# Turn upstairs hall sconce OFF
rs232 -d /dev/ttyS0 -b 19200 -s "\h02 62 04 51 C1 0F 13 0A" --hex --verbose -r9 --wait .4

The Key Food Disconnect

Steve — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:26:43 +0000

In December, your wannabe Norm Abrams (me) tried a taste of old school investigative bloggerism and reported on the troubles with the construction of the new 69th Street Key Food supermarket. The local pols and press had been reporting that Key Food was on schedule for January opening. Problem is, I wasn't seeing any work being done on the place. Then the day after Christmas while walking the dogs by 244 Bay Ridge Avenue, I saw a stop work order from the Dept of Buildings plastered on the side of the building.

Everything must have worked itself out, or one would presume so, because on Feb 10, 2009, there was a post on City Councilman, Vincent Gentile's, blog announcing the long awaited completion date for the 69th Street Key Food Supermarket.

I want to update everyone with some good news: work on the site recently resumed, and the store is expected to open in the end of March. So in just a little over a month, Bay Ridge will have a new supermarket!

It must have embarrassing when the day after Gentile's optimistic announcement the Department of Buildings issued a second stop work order on Key Food, this one for violating the first stop work order issued back in December.

What the heck is going on with this place? Apparently, the work that resumed on Key Food was also being done without a permit.

Suffice to say, it will take a miracle for Key Food to meet its revised March opening date when, according to the DoB's Property Profile Overview, the stop work order is still in effect a week later. I walked the dogs by the job site this morning and it was buttoned up tight with no work being done.

There are other questions about the new Key Food which haven't been answered except with vague hand wavings too, like what about parking?

As originally announced, a parking lot would be built across the street from Key Food in the old Harry's annex to accommodate this. But there's no work being done on that either. Presumably, that building would have to be razed because it's almost certain the existing structure can't handle the weight of thirty or forty cars.

What's going to happen to the traffic congestion on 69th Street if this Key Food opens without parking? It's a narrow but heavily used cross street for commercial traffic as well as three city bus lines. As it is now, it only takes one double parked truck to create a traffic jam.

No one wants this Key Food to open more than me but there seems to be a major disconnect between what the community is being told and what's actually going on. As of today, February 17, 2009:

Can we get some straight answers here?

Beware the Sucker Holes

Steve — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:43:08 +0000

No, that's not a pornographic double entendre. "Sucker hole" is a term I learned from an old flight instructor. It's a break in the clouds which beckons naive, non-instrument rated pilots to take a chance on finding clear skies through that hole only to have the clouds close in on them and leave them in zero visibility.

Last week I said I'd post my progress with the new Insteon home automation device, the ISY99-i. Lemme digress for a second. Say what you will about marketing droids, but when a company goes to the trouble of holding a brain jam to create a slick product name for its baby -- like "Insteon" for example -- it says that someone was paying at least a little attention to the customer. Needless to say, this wasn't done with the ISY99-i.

I've been through this so many times that I knew with 89% certainty what I was embarking on. Out of the box I saw that I was going to have problems. For one, the packing slip said that there was a DB9 serial cable. In fact, it was a cable with a DB9 on one end and an ethernet connector on the other. Useless to me, or for any other purpose I could think of. And there was no manual, just a link to a web site, where it talked about an installation disk, which also wasn't included. After a half hour of searching the site for a download I ran across a forum message saying that the ISY99-i doesn't use an installation disk.

You know, I can understand why a paper manual might be out of date, but a web site? This wasn't a good start. It only got worse from there.

For one, the device requires Java to be installed on your computer. My professional experience with Java includes countless crashed web browsers, broken web sites, locked up devices, bloated web servers and poorly written spyware. The ISY99-i didn't do much to temper my dislike for Java. But that's only after I managed to get into the software. I spent most of the afternoon trying to communicate with a dead device until a response to my "Helllp!!" message on the company's forum told me that I had to disable my anti-virus software. What?!! Does the company really expect its customers to also invest in compatible A/V software to use their product? 

The reply was correct however. I moved the installation to a disposable laptop, disabled my Kaspersky A/V software and the cryptic terminal software loaded. The screen looked like something only an old mainframer could love -- like a 1994 college science department web site.

After another hour or so of fumbling around I had the ISY99-i "crawl" my house to catalog the existing Insteon devices I have here. It not only failed to find over half my Insteon devices, it wouldn't let me enter them manually either.

(Edited) Further experimentation shows that it wasn't the ISY99-i box that was at fault here but the included PLM modem -- the device that communicates with the Insteon devices. Most of the same devices are unreachable with this device and MisterHouse too.

And no matter what I did the ISY99-i refused to link to the device panel in Windows XP. Did I mention the helpful error messages, like "Discovering Nodes; Retry!"?

That was enough. Smarthome.com has always been good with returns and they were no less proactive with the ISY99-i. They sent me an apology and an RMA number. Back it goes.

But that left me back at Square One and no "brains" for my Insteon set up here. Without that, I don't really have much automation here, mostly just expensive light switches with violet backlighting.

I decided to revisit some software I used a long time ago when I had X10 home automation. It's a free, open source software package called MisterHouse. I stopped using it mostly because it was WAY more software than I needed at the time. But it supports Insteon now so I think that's the way to go.

But -- of course -- there was a problem. It requires a local web server to run and my FreeBSD Unix server was missing a key component to get the software to work. Its not MisterHouse's fault. A botched server upgrade left the operating system wedged between two versions and I could find no way to back out of that. The only recourse was to reinstall the operating system from scratch, but that would mean that BrooklynRowHouse and a dozen other web sites would be offline for probably several days. Not an option.

In addition, my Dell PowerEdge server has been dumping RAID error messages to the logs and setting off sirens at 3am (no kidding) so I need to take that box down for repairs.

To make a long story a little shorter, I reactivated an old Pentium 4 box here and decided to dump FreeBSD and use Ubuntu Server 8.1, a Linux variant. Basically, I'm building a clone of the live server on another operating system. When that's done, I'll temporarily move all my operations to it and fix the PowerEdge. So far, so good.

If nothing else, now you know what a "sucker hole" is.

My house "blue screened", or The Confessions of a House Geek

Steve — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 01:27:38 +0000

I had my first Insteon home automation device failure this week. Unfortunately, it happened to the brains of the "automation" part -- the software/hardware combination that executes the timers that turn the lights on and off. Specifically, the culprit was the PowerLinc device that bridges my house to the USB port on my computer which runs the timers.

Here's the little sucker. At 70 bucks, it's not like changing a lightbulb. Okay, I was pissed about it, especially as it's only a little over two years old. But, fact is, I was never happy with this automation set up. For one thing, it requires leaving a Windows box on 24/7 for the timers to work. And the HouseLinc software I was using must have some memory leaks in it because once I removed it from my computer it seemed to gain an extra half a processor.

What I really want is an Insteon driver for Linux/FreeBSD that would let me build my own timers in Perl, which I could run under Unix cron. That's what I did with my former X10 automation layout, which was decidedly more hobbyist-friendly than Insteon but decidedly more flaky as well, which is why I got rid of it. I spent a couple of hours Googling for open source alternatives to no avail before winding up back at the SmartHome web site.

It was there I noticed a couple of new Insteon products. One was a relatively inexpensive home automation controller that runs from a smart phone. It got 4 out of 6 on my Coolness Meter but it was functionally less than I had with HouseLinc. True Geeks don't downgrade. 

Then I saw the ISY99-i controller. Now THIS is what I've been looking for: a stand-alone controller that works like a web server and plugs into an UPnP router (hey, I've got one of those!)

With this device you can not only program all the devices in your system, you can have them appear on a protected web site. That means it will run on any smart phone too, not just the iPhone. From your cell phone you can program your Insteon house devices from your office, the bus or from Moscow. That's almost 6 for 6 on the Geek-o-Meter.

So, sure, you can turn your lights on and off from a hundred miles away but what practical use is that? Almost none, but Insteon devices aren't limited to light switches. You can also use it to control air conditioners, boilers, your DVR, the irrigation for your tomato plants, video cameras, the coffee pot and in fact control anything that works with an IR remote.

So I could (if I had kids), log into my password-protected web server, turn on some lights and watch the rug rats over net video. Or override the setback timer on my thermostat if I have to work late. Or reboot my servers. I'll probably never use it for that but it's fun knowing that I could.

One thing I do love about Insteon timers is that my "house" knows the time of day and my latitude and longitude so it takes care of turning on and off the lights for me. I didn't realize how dependent I was on that until my PowerLinc failed, I looked out of my office door one night and saw that the house was completely dark. The next morning, I found the garage and basement lights still burning. I was used to having Houselinc do a precautionary kill of those lights every evening at midnight.

When the ISY99-i gets here I'll post more about it, including I'm sure a good dose of complaining.

Steam Radiator Air Valves 101

Steve — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:46:17 +0000

As I was just opening my eyes this morning I heard a steady hiss coming from downstairs. Anyone who's got single pipe steam heat knows the sound, especially early in the morning when the boiler is working hard to warm the house from its overnight setback temperature.

That's the sound of pressure from the steam displacing air inside the pipes. It's normal. That's what an air valve on a steam radiator is supposed to do. But if it's loud enough that you can hear it a floor away, you've likely got a problem. It often means the valve is stuck open.

I went downstairs and saw that my glass exterior doors inside the mud room were completely fogged up, in fact dripping.



In the upper left corner, next to the wall, you'll see a little metal device in the floor. That's the main air valve for a three-inch pipe in the basement which feeds all the radiators at the front of the house. It was stuck open and venting steam in the tiny mudroom. Since that's the largest air valve in the system it's the worst one to have fail. I was lucky I didn't oversleep. In another couple of hours I'd probably have warped woodwork to contend with.

What caused the valve to stick, who knows? One of the problems with single pipe steam heating is that when there's no steam in the pipe or radiator, it's filled with air. Water + air + iron = rust. That's what usually causes an air valve to fail. Rust clogs the little float valve, wedging it open. In some cases, rust will stick the valve in a closed position, which creates another problem: no heat.

An air valve is a critical component in your steam heating system. If it's not vented, steam can't get through. Instead, the air will compress, equalize to the pressure of the steam and you'll have a road block. In fact, that's a good analogy so we'll use it.

Imagine that your steam system is a highway. When the heat is off, the air in the pipes is like traffic on a highway. When the boiler cycles on, the steam is like impatient traffic way at the back of the pack. Air valves are like traffic exits. If the exits ahead are closed, the traffic becomes a snarling traffic jam. Nobody moves.

On a highway, some traffic exits are a single lane and some are two and even three lanes. That's so there are no traffic slowdowns at heavily used exits. The same applies to air valves. Air valves come in six different sizes based on the size of the vent. The nomenclature is completely confusing but here it is, from smallest to largest: #4, #5, #6, C, D and #1.

Using a correctly sized air valve is important for balancing your heating system. Steam, like water, will follow the path of least resistance. In other words, if the radiators at the back of your house have large vents and are happily venting air and the radiators at the front of the house have smaller vents and are creating resistance, guess where the steam is going to go?

So which size vents go where? There are two rules of thumb:

Use larger vents in radiators at the end of long pipe runs and in rooms which are colder.
Use smaller vents in radiators near the boiler and in rooms which have the thermostat.

In fact, air valves function somewhat like faucets, or what some people believe the radiator's twist valve is supposed to be (it isn't -- that valve should either be full on or full off).

Usually, you'll find that a #5 will suffice for radiators on the first floor and #6 for radiators on the second floor. If you have a cold room on the second floor, use a 'C' valve. If it's a very large radiator, use a 'D'. Air valves on steam feed pipes usually take the largest vent size, a #1. That's the size of the valve that failed on me this morning.

It's very trial and error. It took me an entire heating season to balance my system.

A final word of advice: Don't buy cheap air valves!. Cheap air valves don't last. They're only good for balancing a system. Once you've done that, ditch them for quality air valves when they fail. A good air valve can cost $15 or more. Buy air valves at a real plumbing supplier, not a box store.