Another time lapse vid – this time a view onto the front of the house. This camera is mounted on a pole and gets a bit more battered by the elements (hence the rain drop ‘filters’ on some days).
Category: House
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Time lapse video from a security camera
Last year I setup a python script to run every day at 2pm to grab a still frame from some of my security cameras around the outside of the house. Today I mashed them together to see how it’d look as a time lapse video, where 1 second = 1 day (apart from days missed due to technical issues, etc.) You’ll note that almost nothing happens there 🙂
Spoiler alert: at the two minute mark, snow appears.
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Quick trip to the bog
Before making our way up to Doolin for the weekend, we had a couple of nights in our house on the bog.
It was great to see it again, especially since we’d left it all nice and tidy. We’d left plenty of turf inside, and it was perfectly dry thanks to the Lidl dehumidifier that continues to hold back the ravages of 99% external humidity on a regular basis.
We got the chance to catch up with the local farmer, and greet this year’s guest cows. They were quite scared of us, and demonstrated great athletic prowess in being able to run and jump on fairly saturated bogland. The secret to meeting them properly was to bring food, of course.
Once the farmer arrived, they recognised either him or his van’s engine, and suddenly became very keen to interact.
A cow looking happier having been fed -
Additional bathroom heating options (or lack of)
So the radiator in the bathroom wasn’t really cutting it compared to the heating in the rest of the house. We could make good use of a remote-controlled, wall-mounted forced air heater above the bathroom door to take the shock out of the room following showers, etc. I’d seen quite a few suitable candidates last year, but we weren’t ready to think about fitting anything else at the time.
Enter Lot 20. This directive is designed to remove inefficient technologies and reduce the energy used by products that heat our homes, and has meant that a lot of old-school (very basic and inefficient) fan heaters can’t be manufactured for sale in the UK or the rest of the EU after 1st January 2018. I wholeheartedly embrace the concept of this, if not the current situation it leaves me in. I can’t get anything to fit my exact requirements now, until companies adapt their designs to comply. They’ve had quite a while to do so, but apparently not long enough yet. If I can find one that was made before 1st January, I can still legally buy it and fit it – I’m guessing that these things are like gold dust now.
So the hunt for a heater continues, and at least when I do find one, it’ll almost certainly be wifi-enabled (whether I like it or not). When the robots finally take over everything, at least I’ll have had a few years of being able to heat the bathroom for a few minutes before I got out of bed. A price worth paying, I’m sure.
Update: heater found and retrieved (pictured)
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Who let the dogs out? Pretty much everyone…
The security cameras aren’t getting a heavy workout of late, beyond dogs roaming from ‘next door’. Every now and then I’ll call them via the camera’s speaker capability, whereupon they run like hell. Hours of fun.
I’ve added a new feature to the blog’s sidebar: you can see the current indoor and outdoor temperatures. I wanted to write a WordPress plugin just to see how easy it was, and there you go… it was straightforward, even if the company I bought the sensors from have an appalling setup for retrieving the data.
When the simplest way of getting at the info was to do an HTTP POST with my phone’s ID and parse the response, you know you’ve gone badly wrong.
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Bread and avalanches
Ireland’s being going bread-mad – apparently it’s the thing to be worried about running out of in the treacherous weather. There have been articles devoted to baking your own, memes on the internet, etc.
Actually, shortly after I wrote that I went shopping in a major supermarket in England… guess what? Bread stripped from shelves there too:
Anyway, I noticed we had a mini-avalanche of snow from the roof of the bog house today, captured on the security camera above the front door as it all slid down…
Roof before:
Roof after:
Action video:
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The silicon bit – what happened?
So this blog has been about almost everything apart from technology. Due to the various Bad Things that needed putting right, the opportunities to gadget-up the bog house have been few and far between.
Clearly the best gadgets are the dehumidifiers: they allowed us to survive with only minor disease during our stay.
The next best are probably the security cameras, so at least we could see who was coming and going, doing weird stuff while we weren’t there. Quite a few unexpected visitors added interest, but a bunch of that is going to remain unwritten for now, for various reasons.
When we were over in January, I connected up a couple of temperature and humidity sensors that I could monitor remotely – one inside, one out. The numbers don’t make for pleasant reading at the moment, but at least it’s slightly warmer inside than out.
I also installed a remote mains switch that uses a mobile network for receiving and responding to commands. I added this because I noticed that the security cameras would go missing from the network for a few days at a time, and came to the conclusion that the mobile broadband router was probably down during those periods.
Since my temperature and humidity sensors are on that network too, I could test if the problem was with the camera system or the internet connectivity in general… if the broadband router goes down now, I simply send a text to my mains switch, which resets it. “Have you tried switching it off and on again?”
A bunch of these devices are on a UPS, which provides battery backup in the event of a general mains failure. Again, the temperature and humidity sensors aren’t, so if they’re dead but I’ve still got cameras and internet, it’s safe(ish) to say that the mains has been lost for a while at least.
Actually, last time we were over I put another security camera from a different vendor up to see how it behaved. Seems ok so far, although to the best of my knowledge nobody has actually passed by it yet (unless it’s proper rubbish).
I have done some other safeguarding, but I think that’s probably enough for now… wait for my “killer guard robot” post in the future…
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Have I tiled you lately?
Apologies to Van the Man.
The bathroom was the last room to get sorted out. First the flooring tiles, building on the levelling work done at the start of November:
Next, the wall tiles:
Finally, grouted:
It should be noted that most of the wall tiling was put in place by V, who (like me) had grown massively impatient at the rate of progress. I pitched the idea of her setting up as a business called “Bonnie Tiler” but she didn’t seem keen… Just checked, and that’s been done quite a lot of times already (a particularly pun-tastic article in the Harrogate Advertiser being the most obvious). They stooped pretty low using song titles littered in among the text of the story – a cheap trick that you wouldn’t catch me employing.
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Levelling the bathroom floor
Another floor that dropped away for some reason. Concrete and screed to the rescue… you can also see I’ve put a mirror up above the sink, which is cunningly reflecting the shower to confuse matters.
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Sitting room flooring down
The sitting room floor was a tricky customer – if it were any less of a level playing field, it’d be the US healthcare system. Levelling this involved digging up old concrete where possible, filling with insulation and damp proof membrane, then concreting over. The levelling phase mostly happened at the end of June but for some reason (probably complete denial) I neglected to write about the carnage at the time:
We went with laminate flooring over extruded polystyrene underlay:
