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house stuff    1/6/2024

December 2023 - While drying persimmons in the forced warm air dehydrator, it worked best in the later stages with heating and cooldown cycles. As I had a TP-Link Kasa smart plug, I programmed various times like 20 minutes on/10 off with the Kasa/Tapo app on Android and iPadOS. We received a newer one for Christmas. Being curious about power usage, I bought a pack of 2 Kasa KP125M Matter smart plugs with energy monitoring.

Striving for an easier way to program these in any 3rd party Android/iPadOS app failed. Home Assistant (HA) running on a Raspberry Pi 4 was the only program that would recognize these Matter devices. As with other vendors, Google Home required a physical hub. Apple Home needed a physical hub as changes to iPadOS 17 eliminated using it as a hub. It does work on an iPad Mini running 12.5.7 which allows setting on/off times, timers, when this/do that once bridged to HA. However this was more cumbersome than the Tapo app. Since HA is open source, doing a simple schedule was not so simple - tech savvy me couldn’t do this. However an add-on appropriately named SimpleScheduler solved this basic need.

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November 2022 - The dryer stopped heating when the belt frayed and stretched in less than 22 months. There was over a dozen breaks to the reinforced weave. An OEM belt was ordered. The original lasted over 18 years. Unfortunately the OEM belt was discarded.

The Herman Miller Aeron chair requires using tweezers,brushing away and using detergent to get rid of gunk. I used thread to try to halt the mesh from further damage.

Ignoring sitting water over the long haul leads to delaminating of the Formica around the kitchen sink. We replaced the sink in October 2022 with a workstation, but did not realize the silicone coated drainer was so convenient.

 

In September 2020, our Sears Kenmore short water heater leaked after 14 years. Home Depot and Lowes only has the tall (what everyone buys) water heater in stock. Some additional elbows and pipe were added to accomodate the taller height.

November 2020 - Installed a security system based on the ONVIF open standard which allows interoperability among different vendors. It consists of Amcrest 5 megapixel internet Power over Ethernet (PoE) cameras with audio recording and microSD card storage which is made by Dahua with a maximum of 20 frames/second. There are Dahua 6MP PoE turret cameras at 20fps or 25fps@5MP. 4k (8MP) cameras cannot do these frame rates and take up more disk space for recording. Power and communication is provided by a Yuanley 8 port PoE gigabit switch with one ethernet cable to each camera. Computers can connect to the PoE also.

Rather than solely relying on motion detection, which is turned off in camera, it uses Intelligent Video Surveillance (IVS) features of Tripwire (cross over) and Intrusion (area detection) to trigger events and thereby generates emails with attachments. This eliminates a lot of the false positives like slight foliage movements. Only expensive Passive IR cameras work around this problem. Cameras can be monitored realtime or recording via PC, tablet, or phone. An interesting feature is with an SD Card in the 5MP cameras, it can flag and play only the events continuously. The video is captured onto a USB drive (former Tivo) on VIVO with a PC app by Dahua, which is the only platform for software recording, though there are many third party apps.

Initially the less expensive Amcrest camera had the IVS features disabled, so only motion detection worked. I flashed the compatible Dahua firmware to enable the IVS features. The 6MP adds Face Detection and Object Abandonment/Object Missing features. In 2022, I read Amcrest closed the loophole of flashing Dahua firmware.

January 2020 - The dryer was squealing a bit, so I replaced the rear bearing (steel fixed ball in nylon socket) and used a generic belt from eBay. The rear bearing kit was not needed but was replaced as it was $9.