Better living with robots... going mainstream

If you've seen any of my posts on LinkedIn, you might know that I have an interest in robots & machine intelligence and how it can make our lives progressively better in the next few years.  As a starting point in experiencing directly the impact, our family decided to take the leap into a floor vacuuming robot.  

After a bit of looking around and reading online, we settled on the Neato as it seemed to get good reviews, and from videos online it appeared to use good AI for floor coverage & not needing to bump into things all that often.  We found one on Amazon in their deals/used section, and picked it up for $100 where new ones seemed to be going for $300+.  From my other posts, you'll probably also notice a theme that I'm a fan of repurpose/reuse, which is just a good cover story for someone who likes the hunt of a good deal and doesn't mind a bit of fixing.    

With the usual quick service from Amazon, we had our new 'bot in a matter of days, got it charging, set the schedule and then tried out the spot clean function.  It fired up without a problem, and like a miracle started moving around the floor sucking up all kinds of dust, dog hair, and other random stuff we dropped in its way.  It is a bit loud, but we got used to the white noise, and surprisingly the dogs seemed not to be bothered in the least by the noise or the new addition to the household.  My son Kaden quickly decided it was colored a little like R2D2, his favorite Star Wars character, and that became its name.  

Here's R2 driving around... 

The next few days worked like a charm, every 9am R2D2 would fire up and move about, and we couldn't believe all the stuff it seemed to find... despite my wife being a neat freak and constantly vacuuming.  It had no problems navigating the home, going under couches, etc, and seemed to get smarter over time.  Every now and then it would hit the fringes of a carpet and get hung up, or wander under something really low and be unable to get out, but it lets out little beeping noises and the kids had fun hunting it down.  R2D2 had become part of our family, and did an amazing job keeping the dust & dog hair down and letting us focus on other things.  

Unfortunately, somewhere into week 2 or 3, R2 started having problems waking up, and soon after seemed to be completely dead.  Figuring that, as a refurbish, this was perhaps a battery issue, I ordered some new extra powerful batteries.  A couple days later, we fired R2 back up, and it worked again for a day or two, then rapidly konked back out.  We were all pretty sad, as R2 had become part of our routine and his absence helped us realize how much we valued his contribution.  

After some looking online, it turns out this particular model seems to have problems with aging on the factory capacitors that help bring him to life on startup.  With some help from other DIYer posts online, I was able to track down the 7 little caps that needed to be changed out, and $5 worth of parts off Alibaba were soon ordered.  I haven't done a lot of soldering since engineering school, so I was looking forward to seeing if I might remember anything.  

A few days later, my parts arrived, and here's some pics of robot surgery... getting him apart was a little tricky, but loads of fun and the kids seemed to like seeing the insides of a robot.  

R2's brain...

After a few tries getting the caps to seat into the green circuit board, and realizing my eyes are far worse than I imagined for close soldering work, R2 went back together pretty well.  A couple hours of charging later and he fired back up... our family was complete again, and that expensive engineering degree paid off again! (ok, I really didn't need any degree, just a screwdriver, YouTube, and a steady hand on the soldering iron)

Our takeaway from this little experiment was that robots really do have a place in a modern home, and can be quite affordable if you do a little searching.  Robots and AI are certainly getting to the point of being more than just a novelty - we're not yet at the point of seeing general purpose AI, but with the explosion of home automation & IoT (Internet of Things), advances are coming fast and there's a lot to be gained along the way to truly general purpose robots like in the movies.

Unless you have a house full of shag carpets or tassled rugs, I'd highly recommend trying one out. We have had such a good experience that, after finding a good deal on a floor mopping bot, we've added to our collection!  Here's R2's buddy C3PO hard at work...

Solar electric makes sense, even in cloudy NE Ohio!

I've always been interested in sustainable living, as a way to reduce the footprint we have on our environment, as a way to teach the kids about good stewardship, and simply because it makes us less dependent and saves money.  Solar electric had been something my wife and I wanted to try for a long time, but the cost of a system never quite made sense vs the payback.  Especially when you factor in the installation.  Things have gotten much more economical lately, but this is still the snowbelt of the midwest and not Phoenix or California.  So I did what I usually do, set alerts on Craigslist and kept an eye out for the opportunity to buy a system from someone, and in the meantime did a bunch of reading on what it would take to do the install work ourselves.

Two years ago, when we moved to the rural east side of Cleveland, Ohio, we finally got our chance to jump in with both feet.  I found an ad posted by a retiring couple in Morgantown, West Virginia looking to sell an entire 8000 Watt, grid-tied system.  The grid-tie approach greatly simplifies the installation because you are essentially tying into your home electric panel just like adding a new breaker, without the extra work of battery banks, etc.  On the downside, if power goes out on the grid, the inverters will sense the change and shut off flow from the panels to the house (protects if people are working on downed lines), but we really weren't preparing for a zombie apocalypse and the price the WVa couple was asking made it worth our while.

My son and I rented a small trailer, climbed in our minivan and drove a few hours south... and were stunned when we arrived to see the extent of the sustainability conversions this couple had done.  As a neurosurgeon and professor at the local university, their motivations were more philosophical than economical, but they had a list of sustainability improvements that would leave anyone impressed - water reclamation with a massive cistern/filtration system, well-stocked gardens, solar water heating, wood boiler, solar electric system, and probably a list of other things we never got around to seeing.

Check out the awesome central boiler they had in the basement... would've loved to do something with this, if only we had a crane...

The couple was super friendly, telling us a bit of their story to this point and the adventure they were going on next, as they retired to the coast of mexico and no longer needed many of the systems.  Unfortunately, we couldn't talk them out of their brand new Tesla Model S, but we did pick up the system, had some delicious cheesecake, and headed back to Cleveland.

Here's a series of photos showing our progress toward electricity independence, jump-started in large part by this wonderful couple.

After a long days drive, our haul... 41 panels, 3 inverters, racking, and all sorts of wiring...

 

In the garage, I added the two inverters to pick up the ~30 panels from the roof, plus the third to run the 12 panels in the yard.  Later, I found that it was easier to run the back yard panels in to the basement main breaker panel, so I moved the big white inverter inside.

This is almost done, after the change... 

Here's the start of the work in the main electrical panel to make room for the inverter that will be tied to 12 panels planned for the back yard.  I needed to move the alarm system, rearrange all the cable & telephone lines, and install junction box to tie in the new panels and the generator transfer panel.  Around the same time, I stumbled on a good Craigslist buy on a generator transfer panel... we had experienced a bunch of outages in our first few months here, so seemed like a good idea.  As you might guess, the moment I got that generator in place, we've never seen an extended outage since!.

Installed... certainly not done, as there's always something to improve, add, and lots to clean up...

Now up to the roof to install the racking and put up the panels.  This was surprisingly easy, just line up the racks, use roofing tar to prevent leaking where the screws go through the shingles, and screw down.  Getting the panels up and on was a 2 person job, but they went on very easily.  The hardest part really was carrying them up the ladder with my son.

Here you can see where a bank of them sit on the other side of our solar water heating system (wrote about this in another post)

 And then to the backyard, where we built a wood frame and layered the panels in.  This is still a work in progress, as we will be planting trees behind to make it nicer to look at, and I'm putting in a movable angle mechanism to allow for increasing/decreasing the angle to make more effective in the winter.  Someday maybe I will splurge and make a proper metal stand-mounted rack that tracks the sun... but that's way down after the other projects my wife is patiently waiting on!

After all this was done, I was really surprised and a bit frustrated to see our electric meter still spinning!  After staring at it for a while in disbelief, knowing I had almost nothing drawing electricity on, I realized something I didn't know... these older pot meters spin backwards if they are fed from the house side!

Our meter before... 

Our meter after the roof panels got tied in... 

We weren't just saving electricity, we were producing and feeding the grid.  Time to call the utility to get our meter changed out to a new smart meter and get paid!

That's it... took a couple days to get the roof panels up, another day to get the yard panels, and the electrical work was probably another day of work spread out over a couple weekends.  Plus a half day spent in the car to WVa.  Not a bad way to spend time with your son!

Sustainable living's impact on a furnace room

One of the reasons we looked at this home (after the overhead bridge to the shed!) was that it already had a geothermal installation, and this started us on our journey towards sustainable living.  Below are a few pics showing the evolution of the furnace room as we progressively expand our "off-grid" capabilities.

First, the bridge, just because it is so cool :)  In another post, I will come back to this to show the rebuild of the retaining wall and new wood boiler that went in this area.  

So this is what we started with when we got here... the usual electric water heater with addition of geothermal waste heat loop.  Unfortunately, this turned out to be corroded and not cycling, so we were left with very high electric water heating costs.  

The geothermal unit is a Water Furnace brand, a little older but a large unit and lots to work with.  In the winter, we seem to use a lot of auxiliary electric heat, so someday I will have to look into the geo loops to see if all working right... but we had a few adjustments to make before going there.

First, we added an in-line, on-demand gas water heater.  This was a big Noritz unit I found on Craigslist... the guy swore it worked, but when I got home I found the flow switch was shot, but a little research and a $50 part and we were back in business.  This thing is a beast, probably could run a small motel on it, but I had in mind using it for radiant floor heating as well so should be plenty of capacity.  

The Manabloc manifold will come in handy later for re-plumbing direct runs to shower, tub, etc for that instant-on experience.  The manifold was one of the few things I didn't find on Craigslist, as Manablocs are just nice to work with.  

Next came cutting into the gas line and adding a branch to feed the heater.  This was the first time I did gas line work - it wasn't overly complex but was much harder work than expected to deal with the black pipe, and I won't pretend I wasn't a bit nervous about getting it right, leaks, etc.  I probably ended up with 3-4 gas leak detectors all over the basement just to be sure, but in the end it all worked out pretty well.  I did spend a lot of time on-line reading how this work is done, tricks plumbers use, etc, and was pretty proud of my new skill (later would use it again to add a gas line to the kitchen stove and other stuff)

After a bunch of playing around, I ran a few lines to the first floor master bathroom to try things out.  Drop ceilings in the basement are a blessing.  Later you will see that the location of things keeps moving as I add/extend and attempt to clean up so my wife doesn't keep telling me we will never be able to sell the house!  Note that the old water heater is serving as a holding tank before the Noritz, and later this will become a key element to reducing our gas/electric demand.  

Now on to my next Craigslist find, a solar water heating system that my son was nice enough to pick up in Michigan.  Eventually, this got replaced with a newer setup we also found on Craigslist, but I ended up with a couple good pumps, a controller, and a bunch of other parts that will come in handy over time, and my brother got the other panels for his system.  Not a bad find for $100.  

Here's the start of mounting the pump setup.

Now the madness begins... stripped out the stuff I didnt need from the pump setup, added a filter as I had heard that well water could be hard on on-demand water heaters.  An unexpectedly huge side project installing venting from the Noritz after finding that we had only one path available to the other side of the house as ever other spot is consumed or blocked.  

Here's where I discovered the other solar water heater setup on CL, the first of several detours... you got to stay nimble when building the thrifty way.  Apparently, the guy who owned these was hoping to use as a demo on his own house and start a business installing solar water heating.  Unfortunately, he didn't check the bylaws and the neighbors complained and he had to take it down.  So I ended up with a really nice setup for about 1/6th the cost of buying new, and did the install with my son so no labor cost... one advantage of living in the country, people are nice and rules are a little less rigid.  The system came with radiators to use in your shop or house, so we decided to put in-line with our central ventilation to pre-heat the air before going to the furnace.  Everything I read said to put it after the fan, but I didn't have room to work and didn't like the idea of water sitting above all the electrical components in the geo unit vs on the infeed where any leak will just spill out before the unit.  Needless to say, my wife wasn't thrilled to see her husband practice his new sheetmetal-working skills untrained...

It also came with this wonderful new water heater... a lot like a traditional heater, complete with electric, but it has an inner coil that allows you to run water you've heated from the sun (or other sources, as we'll do later) through the potable water without mixing.  This pre-heats the water in the tank, meaning less need for gas/electric when days are sunny.  Since we live in cloudy NE Ohio, the backup Noritz & other options help... this is us changing out the water tank and a pic of the roof showing the new water heating setup... good to have south-facing roof space!   

Note the dorky home-made radiators as I was worried the top of the Noritz would get super hot... after putting in use, I've found unnecessary and since removed. 

One thing if you are thinking of doing this, be careful, solar heated water gets HOT!  Here's a pin-hole leak as I was installing and literally the steam that is blowing out... (yes, solar electric on the other side... that's another Craigslist find and a post for another day)

Uh oh.. much to my wife's continued dismay, we discovered another good deal on a wood boiler... so 2 tons of prodding & pulling & a bit of help from the neighbor next door with his skid steer and the boiler is in place under the bridge.  

Back into the basement, the new water heater tank is in place, lines run down from the roof, things are working great, just needs a bunch of cleanup.  

So along the way, we decided to start my brother's place with solar water, and my parents were kind enough to pick up another manifold for his place.  Unfortunately, after looking at his plumbing more closely, all his runs are pretty short and it doesn't seem worth the effort to add direct runs.  Hmm... what to do... well, my princess' toes did get cold in the bathroom our first winter here... now that I have all this free hot water, some radiant floor heating surely seems a good idea.  So on another free wall in the furnace room, off we go... by the way, if you haven't worked with Pex, it's the greatest, and you really don't need a lot of talent to figure it out.  Saved me an unbelievable amount of cost in plumbing services as I'd never do all this myself if I had to work with copper.

So now back to the roof as I learned how heat impacted plastic... added a standard well pressure switch in-line with my pump to turn off if it senses another leak.  

Time to run the boiler line from the outdoor wood boiler.  This seemed like an enormous project, but after picking slowly away at it, turned out to be not too bad.  A lot of physical work, and some help from my dad to get things in, but overall a good project.  The special aluminum lined pex was a little pricey, but soooo worth it after I saw how easy it was to straighten out vs normal pex and maneuver through the basement.

Time to hack into the sheet metal again, to install one of the radiators the boiler came with.

Fired up and working like a charm... later I will work on a recirc system inside the boiler to make it more efficient and reclaim all that waste heat/gas going out the chimney.

So here's the system as it stands today... 5 different sources of water heat (geo, gas, electric, sun, and wood), with the benefit of instant hot water to most parts of the home and radiant floor heating in the 2 main floor bathrooms and both entries to keep our toes warm in the winter.  Someday I may extend the radiant floor heating to other areas of the home but those seemed to be the most impactful... plus after all this, my wife deserves me spending some time to clean it all up & make it prettier, or at least not quite as scary to future home-owners if we decide to relocate or downsize!  

All-in, I estimate we've spent about 6k on this, plus a bunch of hard work and our water heating bills have dropped to pretty much just the handling charges & taxes to keep gas running to the house.  If we assume a pre-install cost of ~$100/month for water heating & handling (roughly what we were paying at our last place, here it seems close but hard to tell from prior owner records), the payback should be about 5 years - when you factor in the savings in home heating, I'm guessing we will recover our cost in 3 years, plus the added comfort, security, and knowledge we're using the sun for most of the year to limit our footprint.   

(This probably isn't the end of the plumbing story... but focus is now shifting to electricity generation... )

Sharing the joy of auto-filling your Keurig... (taking efficiency too far?!)

First, I need to give credit that this is not an original idea... I got this off some YouTube video I found after having to get up from my work for the second or third time in a day to refill my Keurig (yeah, First World Problems, I know...).

With less than $20 in parts and about 30 mins of easy DIY work, you too can forever eliminate the need to refill the Keurig water reservoir.  My wife says this is just me being lazy, I prefer to think it's the engineer in me constantly looking for ways to be more efficient... aBased on the reactions I've gotten from others who've seen this little project, I figured I'd post this so a few other over-caffeinated optimization junkies might benefit from the daily joy this little hack brings every time you grab a coffee or tea... literally, it makes me smile every day. If nothing else, future co-workers/employers may better understand the extent of my fixation on removing waste from systems!  

If you decide to pursue this lifehack, you will need some very basic DIY skills (if you can use a drill, you are pretty much ready) and a few inexpensive parts I found on Amazon (probably can be found at your local Home Depot or Lowes, though Amazon ensured I got them all at once & saved the inevitable multiple trips when I forget a part or the store is out of the one thing I need).    Thiskit (link to Amazon) has most of the parts you will need (union T, shutoff, tubing, female connector), plus this float valve (again, Amazon link). For tools, you'll need a drill to run the 1/4" line through cabinet or similar, something to cut the line (scissors if you have plastic line to your fridge like me, or metal-cutting hand saw/tubing cutter if you have a copper line) and a few drill bits to tap into the plastic top of your Keurig fill cover. I'm not advocating for any of the products I linked, they are just what I used - please do a little looking around at pricing options & recommendations! 

So most refrigerators today come with ice makers... if you own one like this, then you probably already have a small water line feeding the refrigerator.  This is the source line I used for my Keurig's new water supply. Even if you don't have a fridge with an icemaker, adding a line is a pretty simple job, but I'll let you search YouTube for that.  

The steps are really very straightforward & didn't take any special talent: 

1. Shut off the water source to the fridge - this is likely a small valve where the icemaker line meets your main home piping, usually in the basement or tapped into your kitchen faucet. Or since it's such a short project you can also just turn off at your water main if easier.  
2. Cut the line feeding into the fridge and press fit the 2 ends into the T-connector. I made my connection at about waist level behind the fridge but you could do this in the basement or wherever convenient as long as you have enough tubing.  
3. Press fit the new tubing into the remaining opening in the T-connector. Run the line to the location where your Keurig is (mine was next to the fridge so I just had to go through the sides of a cabinet between the two).
4. Add the shutoff valve from your kit of parts somewhere inconspicuous but reasonably close to the Keurig. This lets you turn off the water if you need to service anything or run a cleaning cycle. Leave this closed for now - with it closed, you can turn on the water back to your fridge so your family can get ice.  
5. Now the "hard" part... Hard just means don't rush, you don't want to crack the top of your Keurig reservoir. I used a small drill bit to create a pilot hole, then increased sizes a few times to expand the hole enough to get the inlet end of the float valve through. I was nervous at first but the plastic is soft & didn't feel like it'd want to crack by going slow & building out the hole size. One thing, because the plastic was soft, the bit tended to grab and it took a bit of care to finish the edges to my wife's approval specs!  I used a small knife to clean up the edges after drilling.  You can hide any blunders pretty easily with a plastic washer but go slow and you should be fine.   
6. Connect the tubing to the float valve inlet with the remaining connector from your kit of stuff, and make sure your float valve can move freely inside the reservoir. Mine took a bit of playing with before I was happy, and you will want to watch as the reservoir fills to make sure the float is not obstructed, or you could have water to clean up.  
7. Turn the water back on if you haven't already, and open the shutoff valve leading to the Keurig.  
8. Assuming no tweaks or leaks, drop in a K cup, grab a mug and enjoy!  

Here's what it looks like all done...

You can find plenty of videos on how to do this, just search "Keurig auto fill". I'd advise looking around for a few minutes before diving in... that should also give Amazon's drones enough time to bring you the parts you'll need. Once you finish the install, please triple check to make sure there are no leaks throughout... as fun as this hack is to do, its not worth ruining a good floor over. If you are really handy & do some looking on YouTube, there's all sorts of mods to do from here. For the full IoT experience, you can add water leak sensors relayed into your water valves for preventing overflow, tie into your home automation, etc...   

I hope this brings as much entertainment as it did to me & my kids ... and even my wife, who will now say it was a good idea... as long as I am not within earshot! 

Ryan