wHobbit Hole Power Station and house tour

top of the hill here where the hobbit house is uh and i'm gonna go over to the power station oh i am in the park okay here we go this is good i got this thing that i could wear on my neck to to have my hands free so see i got both hands on the wheel and i can see the road and i'm not even looking at the screen this is great we got a little snow up here oh we're getting a little sideways i do have four wheel drive i'm not going to turn it on yet see how we can do up here without it just to know uh when other cars come up here i will probably go into forward drive here pretty soon but here we are this is the power station there is a pile of panels there that we haven't put up on the house yet there is the shed that we call the pavilion and we are sliding around that's kind of fun i'm actually really impressed with how the truck is handling the snow all right here we go i'm going to put a beanie cap on because it's going to be cold out there all right ready guys here we are i can't see any chat i wonder what's going on with chat sorry i can't see any chat i wonder where it is oh there's chat live chat all messages are visible uh oh there's chat oh now i see chat oh good well it's too close to my eyes for me to read it i'm gonna need to get some glasses if i'm gonna read this okay this should be good sorry about the delay we had uh a ton of snow in our area today and the roads were miserable for the first hour and a half of my two and a half hour drive so it became more of a four hour drive all right here we are let's see we can make this comfortable perfect okay there's the hobbit house down there it looks pretty cool with the snow on it that's the first time i've seen it covered in snow pretty sweet there's aiden dale all right so we are going to put more panels up there we're going to extend this roof out so these holes and that and the cement there those are pillars for new footings that we're going to put in so that whoa whoa almost fell in the snow new footings that we're going to put into to support these new panels up here okay this is since i'm down here on the first floor this is the generator uh let me see hopefully the battery is still working on it ah talk on it we may need to jump start that because they turn off stop turning off the freaking breaker oh man who's doing that okay we may be okay yeah we may be okay okay that breaker not that it matters to you guys but that breaker there uh the small one powers the battery charger for this this thing has a car battery in it and i've had to replace three car batteries because i couldn't figure out how to keep them charged but now i've got them figured out just somebody keeps turning off that breaker okay this is our little swing and our beautiful view out here and that lovely it's lovely to me all right up the stairs this is where the magic happens in the power station here so that there is the inverter and the charger i took i took the panel off because i was messing with the other day how much land do i own 40 acres 40 acres up here this is aiden dale all right so this tells me right now that it's in inverter mode and it is not taking really any power because all it's doing all it's powering right now is the battery charger downstairs okay uh here's our battery pack this is a 48 volt battery pack there are 16 6 volt batteries they are 430 amp hour batteries so we've got them in parallel uh we've got eight in parallel so we have 48 volts and 860 amp hours now uh if i was just running the lights and things in the house that uses about what i on this thing here according to my little readout there at 48 volts with just lights and things on in the house maybe the refrigerator and stuff we're only at about 8 to 10 amps so 860 amp hour battery if we say we're going to use 50 of it before we you know before we have to stop we've got 430 amp hours at at 8 amp hours maybe even 10 you've got what 40 hours right so we could run off of just batteries for 40 hours if we didn't charge them up right now the only method we have for charging them up is the generator down there which i'm going to turn on here in a minute once we're done up here talking about this but eventually we'll have solar and we don't have that connected right now have i checked out the battleborn lithium batteries i i know about battleborn but i have not checked them out specifically i would love to expand and have a whole lot more batteries up here i would not be uh it would not be out of the realm of imagination to to have several large battery packs up here this is the solar combiner panel uh all of the solar wires when they do come in and i was hoping to be able to do that yesterday and today but not with all this snow but when i do get the wires from the solar panels into here they will all combine there's a breaker for each set of solar panels and then it goes to a bus and then we've just got a positive and negative that will go out they'll go into our trough here and then up into here and down to the charge controller which is down there that from what i can gather that is going to be my best bet for having an automatic turn on of the generator these little wires you see right here if i set the generator to automatic mode and i touch those wires together i've got it set up so that touching those wires together turns on the generator taking them apart turns it off so my thinking at worst case like if i can't get this thing to play nice and and automatically do that is i will put some sort of a sensor some sort of a voltage sensor that i can get information from i may be able to get this you know information from this but if i don't i'll do something with home assistant esp home and i will get a voltage sensor that says when the voltage battery gets below whatever is the threshold will decide you know 45 44 or something whatever then close that relay turn on the generator right generator charges up this goes once this voltage gets to well i don't even know would have to i'd have to play with it because it would go to like well no it measures it maybe 56 or something like that and then it separates right that's a lot of that's a lot to depend on uh esp home and home assistant to do and do right so that would be you know i want to believe that i would i could rely on it but i would be a little concerned so i i'm it's gonna take me a bit more time still to figure out this thing has the ability to to it's got a couple of extra pins on it that you can terminals that you can connect to and then it's got ways you can program it so that it'll do basically what i just said if it's you know if you get below a certain voltage it will activate a pair of terminals a completely isolated pair of terminals just like these and then when it gets above a certain threshold it'll take them apart so hopefully that'll work but we'll see midnight has an ethernet port that uses rs232 and that could pull not sure if there's an integration awesome well let's let's find out i'm going to see i'm going to look into that so this was part of why i was talking about digging a trench or getting a wi-fi dish to beam up from the house because i need this and then the generator also has a an app and an ethernet connection so yeah this thing has should be able to connect to the it worst case i can monitor it on my own through their apps right of course i want to integrate into home system but if i don't if i can't at least i can monitor it on my own and i can trip a relay you know set the relay so that i can turn on the generator and turn off the generator remotely from wherever i am part of the reason that i drove up here today uh is because i want to get the heater going before janice and the kids all get here so i had to drive up here like several hours ahead of everybody else so that i could get the heat going in the house now if i was if i had all this connected and i could just get on the phone or get on home assistant go click and turn on the heat then i could still be at home i'd probably be packing packing more orders i didn't see what somebody just said what was that last bit of chat dan somebody just asked a question and i missed it i'm sorry how long of a drive from home uh normally two to two and a half hours today with all the snow it was almost four i left at 7 30 so it was four hours yeah um i slid out a couple times it was crazy all right so something to show you here this uh this switch here it will isolate the generator so if i right now like i said the generator is set up to charge the batteries and then the batteries go to the inverters those are two inverters and that powers the house that goes to two 40 volts whatever powers the house if i want to switch to the generator and just have the generator pass through that's my pass-through switch so boop i pass through these are 5.6 kilowatt inverters so i have two of them they're peak pi 5.6 kilowatts but i think they're they're like if you wanted to run them for a long period of time the max is 4.4 so if we say i've got 8.8 kilowatts of continuous power if i use just these the generator is 14 kilowatts so if down at the house like i've told the the workers the guys that come up here and work your electrician was very neat the box came this way this is this is the uh this box came this way from unbound solar um i've had other issues with them but i gotta say they build a good box like this right here is pretty nice i totally agree there's no wasted wire everything is uh and it was all connected like the only things we connected was the battery terminals going in here and some of this stuff the generator and the battery terminals from outside this is a temperature sensor for the battery pack that's it that's what we that's what we hooked up everything else was already done in there uh so what i was saying like if we have a if we have a lot of load down at the house i'm afraid that someday you come there and it's all stolen because everything is open oh we're gonna have thank you guys i we're this doesn't have a gate on it yet but it's going to so i guess for now they could try and steal it all but um i guess that's another reason for the cameras which i have so i'd be able to actually you know what my contractor lives a couple miles not even a couple miles away and you know this is idaho so there's a lot of guns so somebody came up here to steal it and i could see them on the camera i would just call my contractor and come over here and at least scare them away hopefully but yeah i agree we in fact not even just uh for the fact of somebody stealing it um but uh i think by code you have to have these things locked up if they're above a certain voltage i think i'm below that voltage but the the last set of plans revisions we got back from the guy said we do need to lock it up so there will be a door down there uh there's isn't at this point because we're only partially done with everything uh so i started saying so when we're down at the house and we're like working on things we've got like saws running and stuff or certainly if we turn the well like now when i turn the heat on and the water heater um there's nobody in idaho so nothing to worry about nice then um we just run the generator i don't do the bypass though so we're still kind of limited to the 8.8 but that should still be okay wildlife yeah there's plenty of mice up here that's for dang sure um i wonder if we get a bear or anything up here raccoons stuff like that i don't know i don't know good point maybe i need to put some plywood down before we leave because after we leave uh this weekend i'm not sure we'll be up here for quite a bit guns i need to oh this would be a great place for my nerf turret so anyways that's that's that any other questions right now about the the power system and if not i will go turn on the generator and we'll drive down to the house so lead acid batteries um you know right now just charging off the generator but that's there for the solar once i can get that someone has to pick those potatoes hey cerebral dad how's it going yeah there's people up here but there's not very many which is which is lovely that is lovely all right let's go down and turn on the generator that's going to be noisy so once i turn on the generator you're going to have a hard time hearing anything that i say probably for a minute just so we get away from it so we can enjoy the piece we do hear the highway you see the highway out there so they didn't show that on the on the tv show they want to make it look like we were really really in the middle of nowhere we pretty much are in the middle of nowhere i love me some cables hey seamus how's it going man yeah i like the power factory thing in there i like the power plant i think it's going to be good i just uh need more time to spin to make it make it right i love this is why the chair this this seat is here because i this is how i like to look now you can't see the mountains over there right now because of the clouds and such but straight ahead over there that's all mountains actually all the way around is mountains all the way over there's mountains the town is that way this is a mess forget the mess yeah sheamus how you been man i haven't seen you forever i do got a wind thing here but more solar stuff anyways lots of lots of stuff up here this is my kind of work area this is where we store things and work on things so all right cool pictures of the house from up here i love that place it's my happy place not lovely i don't think we'll be watching the sunset much tonight though all right let's see if the generator will start the generator doesn't start we're in deep trouble hopefully it'll do it let's see nope nope and that's because they turned turned off that freaking breaker oh don't turn off the burger man so that means i'm gonna have to try and figure out how to get it jump started with my truck ugg ugg maybe if i let it charge for a little bit let's go down to the house i'll come back up and i won't bother trying to jump start it while you guys are are here oh that makes me so so upset it's the problem with having things i have done is i'm the only one that knows how to manage it and somebody thinking that they're being helpful turns off the turns off that breaker and then my battery doesn't get charged in my generator dang it hey look at that handsome guy right there hey this is what i'm using today for streaming okay ah all right well that really sucks [Music] it'll be all right though we'll get it once we get it started it'll be fine let's put this in four wheel drive this time and we'll back up a little bit here strap a harmonica on that phone mount so this should be uh high on the list of uh of nerd dad christmas presents this thing this thing to strap your phone to your face it's pretty useful i'm gonna run over some things here i don't exactly know what because it's covered in snow all right oh there's another thing we need to do so we'll have to i'm gonna have to come back up here in a bit fill up the well fill up the well tank but i should have lights in the house so sign not to turn that breaker off yeah i know i i did not think anybody would turn it off i thought that they knew well enough i don't i do not know why somebody would turn that breaker off then they just thought they were helping i don't know i don't know what they're doing it's twice now that has happened i don't know who's turned it off i'm sure it's just like a you know contract or somebody being helpful but not very helpful here that i don't crash into something all right there we go all right let's go in go see the hobbit house i love it love it love it told my kids i'm gonna have this cart till i die all right here it is so we've had a lot of sloughing i don't know if you can kind of see the black there on the house but we have had a little bit of sluffing of the of the stuff now there is very high likelihood that i'm going to slip and fall right here uh that's a bit of a hill okay great there is a hoobit hole compared to your house this is my hoover hole oh man look at that drift on the on the snow there sheesh okay i have no idea how messy this is going to be we had contractors in here yeah it's going to be a little messy not too bad not too bad so that's our piano that thing's 180 years old i think we decided no yeah night 1884. so 140. plow the road you that you paid for yeah somebody's gonna have to plow it so there's our fireplace that's what the contractor's been working on looks pretty dang good i like it it's not real fire it's an electric fireplace it's fake fake fire so something new since the last time we were here is these beams check out those beams i was going to stream about those last night but uh i wasn't up here obviously so those are the the fake beams that that piece of stuff that i just used to kind of clear the snow away that's what those are made out of and they look awesome ah 32-hour work week the norm gains support in congress oh fantastic sorry i just got a news i'm gonna go for a 32 hour work week for sure okay beautiful window view here all right well it could be messier it's not the worst i've ever seen it so most of you if you've seen any of this stuff that we've done up here before if you've seen the the tv show or any of that you've seen a lot of this like i said the the pillars are the new thing the beams um i guess for those of you that haven't seen it let's take a look at a couple of these other really cool bits so obviously the door is a main attraction right the outside of it you saw but uh the hinge here is is the main attraction that door has got to be over 200 pounds i think it's crazy what do i do as a day job or is content full time i wish john i wish content was full time no i am an anesthesiologist by trade by training and that's what i do for most of my most of my money um so we got these custom-made stained glass windows a tree that was what janus chose and this is the lonely mountain pretty cool yeah late to the game what tv show oh cerebral dad this it was uh called building off the grid and if you go to amazon search for building off the grid look for uh season 12 episode three you can watch us build this thing you can watch us build it right friends uh she's stanford oh cool she loves her anesthesia all just good we typically are are well thought of we're typically just don't ask administration if you ask surgeons and nurses and patients we're pretty we're pretty popular administrators not always so much so all right sleepy time what andrew you just got here greetings programs how's it going so we do have all of the all of the modern uh modern uh comforts that's actually a dishwasher there is a garbage disposal that's a gas stove uh that doesn't really vent outside slow nightbot but it's working oh well i'm glad oh and by the way this is only on youtube right there's gonna be no twitch because i'm doing this live from my phone so so we have a fridge um you guys have seen a lot of this so stop me when you when you uh have seen everything you need to see so the lights have been on in the house i didn't turn those on there's a couple of my light fixtures so we've got two chandeliers that i would need to get uh wired up and hung up here before too long should have squirrel on the stained glass window i don't think my wife would have gone for that uh but those are two different two chandeliers pretty cool right when is the next 12 streams or christmas uh sunday but i will be live tomorrow as part of the home assistant conference am i using lumencash yes i am kdot yes i am we're going to go down and see it what was the name of the show building off the grid building off the grid ledia fied yeah yep uh so master bedroom here oh you got to see this part right for those of you that haven't seen the tv show and you don't know what's going on here this is this is the pantry right just the pantry nothing here but a pantry we do have microwave and things and then this is a secret door into the master bedroom yes it is that's made by a company called murphy doors they make them here in utah and also in kentucky and they are awesome i love that window that's my sunrise window um we do have a big ol walkout whew it's a lot of snow and a lot of brightness but big walk out here this is a fully open door so this this a bi-fold door so when this opens this whole thing is open out to that it's pretty cool he want a hidden door so bad murphy door man murphy door john they are awesome so master bathroom here it's pretty small but one of the key features here is this we call dragon scale dragon scale tile in the master and because of the dome you know we get these funky walls right because of the way the shield the ceiling is and stuff so we've got these funky walls and funky shapes in the in this uh bathroom but there it is and then there's another gorgeous view of what we've got outside which is awesome thank you andrew thank you there's that guy again all right uh so let's go downstairs because i think what everybody is very interested or at least you guys would be very interested in seeing would be the um would be the mechanical room with a lot of that stuff in there oh yeah the lights are on so i'll be okay with the lights okay so now we go so we've been working on getting this wayne's coating in and we've obviously been staining it at different stages just because that's been the way it's been around here so yes i do have lumen cash this is actually lumen cash so that's just a strip of leds that's underneath the edge there pretty cool we just barely put in this last time so it hasn't been sanded or stained or anything and then all right let's see pool table pretty awesome and then we do have let me let me turn on a few more lights here let's see because i want to show you this other this other all right so we've got more lights here i'm going to close this because this is another secret shh don't tell anybody oh come on it's a little stuck that one's a little tighter than the other one but we do have some very cool hoobit art a very cool hubet art i couldn't read with that i couldn't read that message i'm sorry oh we normally have we put the chess pieces away we normally have uh you know this is a lord of the rings chess set that we have on this table here that whole area right there is gonna be a map of middle earth that we have pretty sweet right so that's gonna be the map of middle earth all right now can you see you can't only see barely but here's another wall another bookcase right now there's no light in there right now but that door opens so that's another secret door and this is another secret door and then we've got a tv room in here so i do have a couple of blue lights just for just for kixies but this is the tv room yay tv room because we're barbarians we're hobbits not barbarians we still have to have tv and then here's where the magic happens as far as uh all of the fun things so i will point you through everything that's in here okay this is where you guys are really gonna get to nerd out okay so this guy right here this is the geothermal heat exchanger so this is a ground source heat pump and my glasses aren't working so well anymore i can't see hobbits not barbarians yes check all right so these black pipes here and those black pipes up there those go out to the geothermal pipe field so those go out the house here and then they're out there on the hill there is a there was a huge trench uh 30 feet wide 100 feet long eight feet deep with three rows of spiral pipe it's like an inch and something inch and a half pipe i don't even know how many feet of it 900 feet maybe more of it your wiring ocd is kicking in so what this does is it takes when we're trying to heat the house it takes the cold from in from the house which is kind of hard to understand for me but basically it takes the the fluid that's in the pipes that are out there in the in the um field and it dumps cold from out there and heats up the wall heats up fluid in this tank and the fluid that's in this tank then runs through the floors here through these valves and such and heats up the house through the floors it's actually not really cold in here even though it's like snowing and totally miserable outside i can see what the temperature is i bet you it's in the 50s in here it's really not that cold what's that say 56 56 it's not so bad i don't think it's bad i don't know compared to outside so anyways geothermal heat exchanger radiant heat in the floor this is just the regular water heater water softener that's not terribly exciting because we don't have a normal air conditioning furnace kind of a system we've got to have a little bit of fresh air so this is our little bit of fresh air it's only like i think it's only like 130 cfm or something like that it's not very much that's hot huh guys oh 56 seed i wish no actually i don't wish that would be melting anyway so that's that sucks air out of a couple spots in the house and pushes it outside and it brings air from outside and they they mix the temperature and humidity together and then it pushes some of that fresh air back out uh that's an expansion tank expansion tank now you want to look at the electrical stuff don't you yes you do okay so starting down here this is the home assistant amber yay this one's poe version home assistant amber which is now going to be home assistant yellow we'll we'll talk about that a little more tomorrow the home assistant conference this is my rio link nvr really only three cameras maybe hooked up to that right now this is my uh 24 switch poe switch right 13.3c for those of us on the other side of the world thank you guys so that's my poe switch and then this is well these this is uh alarm wires for the front doors and a couple of windows this is lumen cache this is lumen cache so uh i actually feel like my wiring is is better than it would have been otherwise but this is the basics of the lumen cache system right now so everywhere there's a switch so an input of some kind or other you need one of these if it doesn't have a driver on it up here it's because it's just going to a switch so i've got a few places where the switch is not actually directly connected to the lights that's what this looks like with a patch panel oh i don't know this is a patch panel i guess this is the lumen cache panel so you plug these uh pdf no this this is a pd pw power distribution module pdm these are the oh i can't remember what he calls these anyways these are the inputs so this is a switch so each time you have a switch you've got these things now got to have a rack what we've got here now these are the led drivers okay so these these black ones are constant current there are some that are constant voltage they're red actually look like here i've got a couple of them here right here these are the constant voltage ones so if you use these whatever voltage is coming out of your power supply is what's going to go to your lights if you're using these then you set them to whatever current you're going to want to go out to your lights based on how many fixtures or what your fixtures are on that circuit and you only have options of like 0.75 gosh what is it again it's all in milliamps like 0.75 1 1.5 and 1.75 or something like that i can't remember there's four options there's four options for how much current one of these can put out and the max is only like one and a half amps or something so but these are the these are the constant current modules so these go to lighting circuits right so this one goes to kitchen number one and that's it it's not on it's on this it's just the the current and then the current this one or this uh this driver because of this jumper is actually listening in on this switch which is this switch here which goes to the extra back door switch all right that's where that one is controlling okay so when i flip this switch this oh there's no driver on that one it's not that one it's a different one where is it that's this one sorry jumper was in the wrong place it's this one front door so this switch goes to the front door so when i flip on the front door switch this one goes on and actually this one does two i believe both of those two go on they're both listening to this switch okay so that's one way to do it the other way to do it is the way that i did it more often is all of these and on these i've got the module the switch module down here connected to the driver so these pins on the top of the switch module here you can just plug the driver in there and if you do that then in your circuit you just wire in the switch uh into the circuit so that you've got one circuit that's got the switch module and the driver on it and that's how i did most of the house so that means i took one wire from here ran it out to where it was supposed to be ran it through all the places where the fixtures were going to be and then ran it down to a switch and then i used this combination in other places i ran a wire just to the just to the fixtures and then another wire just to the switch and then i combine them or i link them together through these jumpers so there is also a a smart module for this where i'll be able to use mqtt and control it all with the home assistant but i haven't gotten to that point yet so questions what do you guys think about that um what else is there in here those that's the big stuff right that's the big stuff i've got tons and tons of of uh ethernet jacks throughout the house would see very interesting what is this this is my lighting this is my lighting panel so my lighting is all low voltage dc lighting and it's all running through ethernet cables so i have all the switches coming back to this location yes clint that's exactly right all the switches come back here and none of the lights except maybe lamps are run by 120 volts million dollar question if you had the opportunity would you do that setup again yes i like it i would do it differently but i would use this same system again unless i found another one that was comparable what was that noise unless i found something else that was comparable i would use this again how many panels do i have those i have another i have a third panel but i don't need it i have two and that's all i need needs more blinking lights [Laughter] yeah i like the having the low voltage uh dc lighting i think it makes a lot of sense and this is a decent system once you figure it out what would i do differently i would run more wires luis i would run i would run more wires i would definitely um yeah i would run more wires i'm getting into the problem sometimes where i i want to have like in this this room has been okay but i've got five fixtures here right so five fixtures and a switch and what i found is that depending on the fixtures uh if you have if the fixtures draw too much current if you i'll show you in a minute what they do in the bedroom so if you get the wrong fixtures if you get fixtures that require too much current then you're in trouble and so i think i would what what derek who makes this system recommends and i couldn't see myself doing this but what he recommends i think if he had his his options or his his wishes every time you would run an individual ethernet wire to every single fixture now if you think about what that would mean in a room like this that means each of these would have an individual ethernet cable going back to the panel that's a lot of wire but more importantly that's a lot of ports i mean that means for each of these for for each fixture in the house you'd have to have a port and each of these has 16 ports and each of these costs like 200 and something bucks so i'd need like four or five of these i think to to accommodate every fixture in the house if i were to do it that way so i i don't think i would do it that way i think i might do two fixtures at a time and and leave it at that because that gives you the ability to have um that gives you the ability to have uh bigger brighter fixtures but not quite so many um and but you know in some cases it's fine like these lights are fine can i dim these lights yes i can yes i can alright and we're gonna we're gonna step out of here for now i'm going to turn that off we're going to step out of here but yes i can dim these fixtures and this is a really cool feature with lumencash is i can just hold this if i hold the button right so i'm just going to hold this and you see them dimming right now the nice part here so if i turn them off or if i hit the switch they turn off when they turn back on they turn back on to the dim setting if i hit it again they turn on to the bright setting and then i hit them again and they go off so pretty cool right and if i just hold it they'll start to get bright again and if you set them to a hundred percent once you've held it long enough then they just go on and off so it's really cool and actually the those switch modules they do i think it's about seven or eight different uh different um if uh different uh switch modes honestly all the options to make that possibility in our house something something i'm sorry it went away possibility in our homes we would jump on it centralized management yeah i think it's the way the future i really do i really think it's a good a good way to do it makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons now let me show you what happens i had to replace these i had some brighter fixtures here and ignore this one in the middle this one is actually supposed to be a you know a cool uh over the pool table kind of a fixture that i haven't built yet um but that that that's coming but i had to replace these i had some brighter ones here and the problem was they they flickered and let me show you what happens if you get um basically the other than i don't know what else to say other than the wrong kind of fixtures so when i turn this room on when i turn this bedroom room on see that that's what happens when uh it's drawing too much current there's only four fixtures here but these are different fixtures and i think they're a little brighter so they have a little higher current draw now it's okay with these fixtures if i hold my button until it increases it'll increase eventually it'll stop flickering there now it's fine but when i go to turn it off it flickers and then i can turn it again it turns it off so every time we have to power down the house i have to come through and do that again in these lights and then i just have to tell the people that are using the the rooms that that they need to touch the button twice okay now this one this one was already done so that's good because we didn't turn off the power last time we left the house so and then the the lights i have they do have the option of having blue or regular lights you know blue or like a yellow uh so on a couple of these i put blue just to be just to be fun all right continuing the tour we do have uh our back to tank bathroom so this is our back to tank that's what the kids that's what zachary calls it he's a big star wars guy so this is a back to tank bathroom it's about the smallest bathroom you could get there's that funny looking dude again we have we tried in so many ways to do so many things to make this house cool right we got towels with cool things on them like that cool sinks like this all of our sinks look like that pretty much what are the lumen outputs i don't know i'd have to look them up so those fixtures so these see that there those are fixtures i basically had to make right i mean i i bought the this part and the diffusers but i had to wire them up and put little leds in there that would work with lumen cache because you know you can't just plug and play with the lumen cache stuff you gotta there's a lot of fixtures that will work like even these these come with a voltage regulator on each one that will take it from 120 volts down to whatever it uses i just take those off hook it up to my constant current driver and then they work right so those ones aren't too bad to modify but it doesn't work with any regular fixture all right this is our big bathroom so big tub bathroom again cool light fixture decorations two cool towels i mean like we really went all out cool seeks right this part this is amazing i love this i love everything about so fantastic all right i'll turn that off uh i don't know if that's gonna be i'm not sure that's big enough hopefully he measured anyways all right turn this light off oh see it got brighter because i had dimmed it so look so if i turn it on it's dim hit it again it goes brighter and turn it off ah i was fortunate to see your tv debut your acting with the cement was first class thanks yeah some of that cement stuff was real some of it i did have i did fake all right okay so we're going back let's go back upstairs um turn the lights off down here all right what else do you guys want to see i can show you the backyard oh bat low power a mo power mode so i'm already what am i at 41 minutes okay well we'll go till my phone dies it was at 100 percent so we'll go till it dies now we'll go out the backyard here and i'll show you some of this oh we've had a little bit of landslides here but i'm very proud of my railing i built that railing that is those are like five dollar posts and we're losing him yeah probably and uh i just really love the railing of course we have a hot tub we can hardly ever use janice she was pretty funny about it she did not she did not hold back telling the telling the tv people that it was lame that they would have us pretend to lose a part when we had we had actual real drama that they could have used but instead they had us pretend to lose a piece so all right all right what do you think i think we're probably i don't know how the battery's doing all right let me see i'll sit down here and look at the chat for a minute and i can answer questions if you want to see something else let me know very late but you made all rights are good enough we didn't think you're going to be here glad you made it buddy all right let me turn the camera around and then you love the whole thank you mike47 how's it going i'm gonna have to have these on if i'm gonna read any chat so this is where i will be streaming from tomorrow can't wait for a future episode of this place thanks sorry i missed it did you talk about your new home assistant box downstairs a little bit the home assistant box downstairs is uh the um what's it called the amber home assistant amber so it's a raspberry pi 4 with a custom foot board whatever you want to call it you know the board that it sits on that's custom made by the home assistant guys it has a zigbee receiver built in and it's got usb ports it's poe mine's poe oh of course i'm wearing my michigan hat go blue so now my phone says 10 it's 10 oh you know what i could charge it i don't charge it off topic but sacrificial pixel still needed with the new quads no but you can use it if you run into troubles with the flickering problem so we have had some flickering problems where's my here it is but generally no the sacrificial pixel is not needed um but it won't it it may it may help solve the flickering problems if you if you're having flickering problems you can still put in a you can still put in a sacrificial pixel all right it's got a little bit of juice there we go power on okay it may say bluetooth connected all right did my did my um did my sound change tell me if my sound changed the house looks really comfortable it is so comfortable tony i love being here how do i like the amber is it worth the overall cost in your opinion you know seth i haven't used it much i think the idea of having a dedicated home assistant hardware is good um so i i don't know of course they sent it to me so i don't know what it is jk2 how's it going joel um yeah i don't know i don't know the cost be honest what is the cost of it i would say it's worth you know it's worth 100 bucks prob maybe a little more new almost an amber yellow is always amazing stable over poe mine mine seems to be stable over poe we will know more after this weekend does it maintain the temperature well fantastic like the heat hasn't been on in this house in days it's obviously freezing cold outside and it's 56 degrees in here so it maintains the the the temperature in here unbelievably well 50 150. i mean what are you gonna pay for uh i don't know what the specs are on it but if you think about a a blue or not a blue a um raspberry pi 4 with the memory um a zigbee dongle you know poe i don't know i i think it's probably if you're if you're really tight if you're on a budget you're on a tight budget and um you're okay with like loading your own stuff from a raspberry pi or whatever then then yeah you could you could still do that and you'd save some money um i think having it all in one with the the the memory um you know it comes pre-loaded with home assistant it's got the zigbee dongle included it's poe man i like it am i powering it off solar yummy yeah i so if you when when i'm done here i'll be done here in the next 10 or 15 minutes when i'm done you can go back and watch the beginning and you can see that uh the whole power station that i went through and spent the first 20 plus minutes of the stream today going through the the the power up at the up at the pavilion the the power station that we have so you can see all about it but right now the the um the solar panels are not connected so right now we're running off of batteries and the generator so that's our that's our system currently and we we charge the batteries with the generator four gigabyte plus it's plug and play that's not a bad deal see i'm glad you think so ben i'm sure that the home assistant guys are not trying to um you know rake anybody over the coals on price on things they're trying to make it enough of a profit to make it worthwhile and that's it let me go check real quick okay um so yeah i love these beams are those not so cool those are foam guys those beams are foam and that's where i'm going to run the wires for the lighting the low voltage lighting you should do a m2 drive oh i didn't see the rest of that so good enough sorry ordering an amber to replace the nook reminds me that i need to subscribe to nabucasa not just subscribing nobody cost was a good idea um so yeah tomorrow morning um about this time i believe it's gonna be around noon i think it's 12 o'clock if your generator battery is dead that is yeah i didn't hear what you said first chris did you say you come help me jump start it because that's what i'm gonna do when i get off the stream i'm gonna drive my truck up there and hook it up to the hook it up well i'll drive my truck up there i'll get in position to jump start it and since it's been charging for an hour and since it's connected since i have that breaker on it may start up it may start up but what am i running for a generator oh good question so it is a kohler k-o-h-l-e-r it's a kohler 14.4 kilowatt propane generator and we've got a thousand gallon propane tank that's buried out here so that's kind of our only um my wife just sent me a picture that's of our only one our only um sort of coal burning or whatever not that we were really trying to avoid it i would have rather had oh actually our stove burns it too i would have rather had um the water heater the like domestic water heater run off of propane as well but we didn't plan the we didn't plan the exhaust so when it came time to connect up the the water heater they said well where's your where's your exhaust for your propane water heater and we didn't have one and we didn't really have a very good way to to add it so we ended up with an electric water heater which running on batteries and solar with an electric water heater is a horrible idea if we run if we run the water heater and the the the geothermal at and you know everything else we're pulling over 100 amps at 48 volts so at that rate our battery will last four hours that's not to cut it not not going to cut it at all so right now like for the next probably 12 hours we'll run the generator full time we'll turn it on and we'll we'll run the generator and it'll it'll um it'll charge the batteries but we'll we'll heat the house we'll fill up the water tank with hot water and then we'll turn it off new place is looking great thanks need to check out that off the grid episode keep up the great work thank you very much bear claw yeah the check out building off the grid episode 12 no sorry season 12 episode 3 and it's on it's you need to demand propane water heater yeah i just need to we need to build in a um exhaust slk batteries lithium iron phosphate based and reasonably priced okay cool slk batteries i don't remember what we paid for those batteries up there for that battery pack it was the cheapest option and anyways heat pump on electric is much more efficient than gas and can feed from the panels the heat pump for the yeah that's good my mom's rv conversion and they've been great okay cool well we've got you know we have a lot of a lot of solar panels so i think we'll be pretty good in the daytime when we can get a little sun and then we just need to have a sensor on it so it just kicks on the generator and it runs for a little while till the batteries get charged and then it kicks off again that's that's what the generator should be for is just kick on when we need the batteries to charge turn off when the batteries are charged and in most cases even on a day like today we should be getting some solar power and we're just not high efficiency on demand heaters that use the plastic 636 pipe for exhaust oh really i need to yeah again when we we did this with the tv show and so we had to rush a lot of stuff and so a lot of stuff got done without a lot of planning and it ended up you know not being ideal a lot of time and effort but we're helping inspire you welcome the daughters i saw something you know what's funny answer me this guys program the lights are turned off answer me this fellas um you smart smart guys out there um yeah i wish okay let me let me answer that in a second but um i think our gfi receptacles are tripping because of the power that's coming from the inverter like they don't like the power that's coming from the inverter it says it's you know sine wave something something but i think it's tripping our our gfi receptacles i hear them i sit here and i just heard one a second ago just click and it happens all the time and i gotta go around and you know start them back up again um it didn't do that before we hooked up the batteries we were just running the house off the generator all the time but now we're running you know off the batteries and the inverter and it's just not i don't know if something comes up with those i don't know what to do about it i don't know what to do about it now somebody asked the question i think it was john asked the question about the geothermal system now here's another one where the the um i had to make sure it has a good ground connection same issue with off-grid set up oh okay great i'll look into that um the the geothermal heat exchanger i expected and when we first talked about it um my understanding was it was going to be part of our domestic hot water and then the the company that was doing it was i think i don't know the whole combination of it and unfortunately i didn't have a lot of time to sort it out with them but i think they were concerned that the house was going to be really cold like we were going to have a hard time they didn't know how much power we were going to have and they wanted to be really efficient with the water thing and they didn't want to get involved in doing the domestic hot water and so they set it up so that it's just just the geothermal and nothing else i would really like to see if there's a way maybe if i can talk to our plumber the guy that did the domestic hot water heater and stuff to still kind of tap into that and because i think it would be much better to power some of our domestic hot water from the geothermal system and then have the the other hot water heater just as a backup which is what i expected we were going to do that's kind of what that was what we talked about was we were going to have you know some basic function some basic availability of domestic hot water from the geothermal system in addition to heating the floors and then a backup small electric or propane hot water heater for the times when we need to have 10 people shower in an hour right um because that would probably take a long time for it to heat all that water up that didn't happen soft oh soft start yeah they have soft start yes they do and even our even our um even our hot tub does actually i don't know if the main water heater does the geothermal system does how deep are the coils eight feet what do i have for a water supply we have a well and then we have a i don't remember what it is 1 500 gallon tank only makes sense they have the geo pre-heat the water saves work from the water heater right john i know so that's probably something it's certainly something that's on my list of things to revisit dump heat into the ground all summer domestic hot water heater can make good use of that right so i uh we'll we're gonna have to revisit that and i definitely want to incorporate that but how deep are the coils eight feet eight feet the the trench is eight feet deep the water so right now if i go down there and look at the geothermal system the water that's out there in the in the pipe field is 50 degrees uh fahrenheit how deep are your coils baby is that a pickup line sheamus is that what you tell the chicks at the bar what is that how deep are your coils sounds creepy when you say it when you put baby on there the tone of the love geothermal heat pump is the right way to go yep prepared filtered before heating in geo well water oh it's totally prepared it's actually in fact the geothermal system is not connected to the well it's a closed system it's a closed system it does have a way to uh we we can fill it in fact i think he said i need to do that at some point we need to check it there's a there's a pressure sensor and if the pressure sensor starts to drop then i do need to add water to it but right now it's a closed system and it's you know it's filled uh with filtered water and methanol very expensive currently yeah geothermal systems are really smart and i think they're really important and i think we should all be using them um but they aren't as cheap as the standard way of doing it which is just you know natural gas and electricity but if we were really designing a system for efficiency there's no question that a geothermal system is the way to go but they are they're cheap they're more expensive mostly because there's not a lot of people that do them so the people that do them charge a lot it shouldn't need filling unless there's a leak right and i think he said that it wouldn't need much if any you know there may be some expansion and contraction so you may get some gas that you need to vent out and and replace with water but it won't be much that's why guys from the geo didn't want to connect it to the shower in hot water oh because they didn't want well i think i don't know i think that they could we could use we could still use that tank that's that's got the um hot water that goes to the floors we could use that to heat other water so you could take the well water put it in a tank that tank is lined with a coil of this other hot water this other hot fluid that comes in from the geothermal system and gets heated up and that heats up the water in the in the in the middle of the tank which then you pump to the showers that's that's what in my mind how it should work um but right now it's they're two separate systems we've got the geothermal system that just is heating in the floor and then we've got a separate hot water heater which is lame to me that's completely separate so that's that's kind of lame what else guys we got a few more minutes i'm hooked up to the battery now i should go get the heat started soon even with geothermal you still depend on electricity which mostly coming from gas-powered plants you know mine it might be mine's not i mean eve and now there might be gas-powered plants but they're not always gas-powered plants it depends where you live and it and it certainly gets the you know gets the stuff away from us where we live you can put the if you have to have a coal a coal burning power plant you can put it out in the middle of nowhere where there's no people um in a place that gets plenty of weather so you can blow out whatever smoke and crap builds up i can tell you that i've got the same you know the same argument for electric cars i love having an electric car i've got an electric car i drive it all the time i think we should all have electric cars because most of our driving in the city is is in those kinds of cars and most of our pollution is in the cities and most of it is because of the cars so if we can move that pollution even if we're not getting rid of it completely if we're just moving it out of the city it's better for me better for my lungs anyways that's off topic somebody else asked me an off-topic question about leds did somebody else have a question about leds oh baby oh i couldn't read all those i can't read them all i can't read them all any chance any more work on the evolves not yet bear claw not yet i wish news on perma track yes still can't order yes john you should be able to order this morning i don't know exactly what time um but we have it it's on the shelves and we are going to post it up for sale mike is not in town and he fills the orders so he is understandably hesitant to post it when he's not here to start filling orders because he's you know he would then i don't know either way eta on a ditch uno if you bought so yesterday so i put those i put the uno's and quads up for sale whatever night that was was it wednesday night and send a tag when it's open we'll do and uh we got in i don't know 12 hours maybe a little more than 12 hours we got um 700 orders now usually a busy day is a hundred a normal day is like 30 to 50 maybe so busy day's 100. in one day we got 700. want to be off the grid home automation contractor you welcome the electrician to be a good place to start yeah yeah yeah for sure for sure be an electrician is good be electrician and be a plumber those are those are pretty important things um anyways so and then now we've we packed and shipped over 500 orders yesterday so if you were in the first 500 of those uh 700 orders then we we already your stuff is already at the post office and if you haven't got an email yet you will it delays a little bit um when it before it sends it out just because otherwise everybody's gonna get an email as soon as i print the label but they're actually not gonna have a shipping you know any shipping information for at least a day so you'll probably be getting those um notifications soon that you have a tracking number but if you're not in the first 500 then i i'm not going to be home to start packing orders again until sunday so i apologize for a little bit more of a delay but um when we get home on sunday i will put in as many more hours as i can spare i expect that by the time i get home sunday most everything will be sold out all the all of the um quads are sold out already and the boosters are sold out but quindor told me this morning he's sending 500 more boosters and then we still have quite a few uno's we still have about 600 units i think so we still have quite a few uno so you can still get on and order uno's and i will get them packed you know sunday and probably some will spill over into monday but we are doing first order first serve so we're filling orders that are oldest first okay tested this show right up to 25 meters are you talking about i can't remember what you're talking about you're probably talking about the the windows or the quads or something how much power does your wiring dissipate because of powering leds through low voltage you know i don't know russell i don't know exactly um you know i don't i don't have those kinds of fine measurements on it so i can tell you this if you know it's because we usually run everything off oh off the f amp okay thanks die because we usually run everything off you know high voltage ac yet almost all of our actual light fixtures are doing um leds we that means we have a voltage converter at each fixture right each bulb is taking 120 or in some cases 240 and it's turning it into five seven nine something for the fixture right for the led so rather than do that and have every single bulb in your house dissipating some power losing some power at the bulb we're doing it at the panel we have one power supply that goes from ac to dc and then each of those little converters uh regulates what voltage goes out to the fixtures based on what they need do i usually keep stock with permatron in the aussies yes clint yes yes yes and that's an important point we are going to have plenty of permatrac through the off-season we're we're going we're still going to get the china stuff that we've been getting but we're also going to be getting some stuff from canada we've got a separate uh second manufacturer that's going to be working with us that's going to be making permatrac in canada update on the wall facing led track similar to the nano leaf line now i haven't done any of that homemade i need to just do that in zoe's uh zoe wants room lights and that's what i need to do but no i haven't done it yet um i gotta get now i gotta get through the 12 streams of christmas so tomorrow is uh the home assistant conference i will be helping to host oh baby canada oh baby i will be helping to host which means you'll get to see me uh in between sessions and it should be cool it's not going to be last year's conference if you watched last year's home assistant conference it was pretty massive and there was a crazy amount of stuff um will yes yes and he he is in edmonton so uh he's in edmonton and he'll do he'll do installations and i think stubs stubs christmas may get in on some insulate installations this too is it cold in the hoop at hole no joe hey joe how's it going it's 56 degrees in here and i haven't had the heat on in two days do i need a canadian distributor so we're going to be making it in canada chris and then uh our guy there will probably be doing some distributing he's gonna be shipping it to us and we can ship it to other places in the u.s i'm certain i mean inside of canada he should be able to ship we've talked about maybe having him ship bulk international but yeah certainly inside of canada we will have a we will have a local manufacturer making it in edmonton we're going to keep our goal right now is no it's not cheaper our goal right now is to keep the price the same as it is for the stuff that comes from china even though it costs us uh if i went percentage-wise it might be percent more something like that it cost us a significant amount more to make it in canada but uh we're gonna try and keep the end price the same when is the eu next johnny next i got to find somebody to make some in the eu i think or or at least to ship it there we've also talked to china about our china manufacturer about shipping in bulk to places if we could find distributors in different places but you know our china distributor or the manufacturer in china he's got some issues with uh with packing and timing and things and and it's getting harder and harder to get stuff out of china as we have all experienced so trying to diversify our manufacturing is where we're at right now so and it's a lot easier for me to communicate uh when will we have some traffic available in utah we have track right now tai we just have to put it up for sale on the website and it is the stuff from china we won't have the canadian stuff until at the earliest probably march at the earliest it'll be march before we have any of the canadian stuff and there'll be some differences we'll talk about it later but there'll be some differences the china stuff is galvanized sheet metal the canadian stuff's going to be aluminum the size should be the same it'll still fit the pixels the same the distance between the pixels is the same i can't read that goes by too fast anyways why convert the power to dc to ac and then again to dc i you know what a femi i asked that as well and uh the answer is about transmission i guess because if he took 48 volts from up there well actually the solar is even higher than 48 volts but that's the answer that i get i don't know if that's true part of it too is so many of our things in our house run on uh ac power anyways refrigerator microwave you know all these other things they run off of ac tv and whatever they run off ac power so you're gonna need ac power anyways so we are making them shorter as well yes we are making them shorter there so this this shipment that we just got i think is the last shipment where they're five feet long and so instead of being 60 or i guess they came out as like 59 something inches a couple people called us out and said that's not 60 inches it's 59 something now i'm 10 inches short okay sorry anyways but instead of being 60 inches they're gonna be 46 inches because we're trying to get it in a smaller box to make shipping easier so we're going to put it in a 48 inch box so that the pieces will be 46 inches they'll be 22 pixels per bit okay um but yeah we should be getting we should it should be getting post in fact i'll check in with mike he's still not home but he said he was going to post it this morning so i will check in with him and see 10 inches stop it baby all right guys what do you think i should probably get going i got to get the heat turned on for these kids that are coming to play in our house tonight all right that was fun i hope you enjoyed it blade said he wanted to see the the house tour but he wasn't here live apparently so he'll have to watch it on the rerun right he'll have to watch it on the rerun ugh problem with wearing glasses is once i wear them and then take them off i can't see a dang thing i can see nicholas said something somebody said thanks doc thanks for sharing have a nice one something thanks all right so as always thanks for watching until next time adios have a great day guys see you tomorrow tune in to the home assistant conference i think it's at 11 pacific time 11 a.m pacific time it'll be broadcasting through the home assistant youtube channel and i'll be there see you then bye if i can find out how to stop this thing where is the button where is the button this will be one of those streams i can't turn off oh no what is this oh filters no help me somebody help this guy somebody help the doc turn off the stream oh my gosh is it really this oh wait maybe that's it okay bye

Channel: DrZzs

Views: 5,700

Keywords: Home Automation, Home Assistant, DIY, Electronics, smart home, iot, drzzs, home automation, automation, tech, drzzzs, dr zzs, dr zzzs, home assistant, iot home automation, tech hacks, technical hacks, iot automation

Id: 2DKKK2W65tY

Length: 69min 51sec (4191 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 10 2021