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Ask Slashdot: Ideas For a Geek Remodel?
An anonymous reader writes "What would you do to 'go geek' if you had a major remodel on your hands? My wife and I are re-modeling my in-law's 3000 sq foot single-level house, and we're both very wired, tech-savvy individuals. We will both have offices, as well as TVs in the bedroom and dining room. My question to the community is: What would you do if you had 10-20,000 to spend for this kind of remodel project? What kind of hardware/firmware would you install? I'd love to have a digital 'command center' to run an LCD wall-calendar for the family, and be able to play my PS3 from anywhere in the house (ie, if everyone wants to watch Netflix while I'm in the middle of some Borderlands). What else have geeks done/planned to do? This is a test run for a much, much nicer house down the road, so don't be overly afraid of cost concerns for really great ideas. We will be taking most of the house down to studs, so don't factor demolition into costs. For culinary-minded geeks, I'd love any ideas you have to surprise my wife with cool kitchen gadgets or designs."
The #1 thing I've always wanted to do is put the whole entertainment system behind glass and give it muffled fans and intake filters. I'd really like to eliminate every little bit of noise finally, even the TV has a hum to it. And then there's the dust, which could be all but eliminated by using the right materials for building the enclosure, and the use of the aforementioned filters. I'd give it its own system for control of temp and humidity too, since that's relatively easy if you have all the other parts.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Faucet over the stove.
As soon as we moved into our new house I replaced all the switches with an Insteon system and an ISY-99 controller. I absolutely love it. Being able to turn off all the lights in the house from the bedroom is great. I can put the kids lights on timers, see if any lights are on, have the sprinkler system turn on per water need (connected to weatherbug), setback the thermostat automatically when we leave the house, have a night kitchen run scene, etc....
A DIY friendly system and the programming language on the ISY is easy to use and quite flexible.
I have been very happy and wish I had done it on the old house.
#2 favorite thing (actually probably #1 but it is not really a remodel item) is a whole house Sonos system. The perfect audio sync and ease of listening to anything anywhere in the house is great. I used to be a developer for GiantDisc (which still has the best cataloging system available anywhere) but the Sonos ease of use and perfect audio sync won me over.
I would have easily removable wainscotting for access to the walls, and lots of conduit allowing whatever room-to-room connections I might need later. I'd model it on hospital setups, but go cheaper:I'd use luann paneling for the wainscotting, for example.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
It used to be 'This Old House'. Now it's "This Old Mansion". I don't think their renos reflect the average person's home by any measure. You can't base what an average person does to renovate based on that show. I stopped watching when it started getting as ridiculous as it is.
I have a cousin who renovated two 100+ year old homes for a fraction of what those guys spend. He lived in the first for something like 10 or 12 years. He renovated the second one in the early 90s and still lives there (it is an old farmhouse built in the 1880s or 1890s that is now part of an older subdivision that grew around it). But the heavy work isn't all that can be done to save. For example they found a nice granite counter top and island top that was used in a demonstration kitchen and was close enough to what they needed to only need a bit cut off the end (they looked for something like this, they didn't stumble on it... these are things you do to save money).
Of course if you aren't capable of using a hammer and saw, then you need a lot of money to spend on a contractor (or if you have a lot of money to spend that you don't need elsewhere, and your priorities dictate you don't want to do it yourself). FWIW, my cousin and his wife did almost all the work themselves, and he is a math teacher. The kicker is that the job was done so well that it was used as a demonstration home by the government as to how to properly renovate a home using energy efficient materials and insulation. The inspectors visited at a number of points during the work to make sure it met the criteria (he had to apply up front and was given a grant to offset some of the cost on successful completion). He did a good job.
Maybe the OP could volunteer on a couple of Habitat For Humanity projects to get some experience working on homes if they need to learn a bit first. In the meantime watch out for the many contractors who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground or who just like to cut corners and rip off the customer.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Since you're going down to the studs anyway, find some place to put in a simple secret passageway. You know, for the kids and grandkids.
Look for dead spaces in the walls. It can be as simple as going from one closet to another. Try to connect to the crawlspace, maybe.
As a former builder I can tell you, we don't do that. Telling someone it will take longer is a great way to lose a bid... and thus never get a chance to even start the job. The "Scotty Principle" works only if you have a nice safe government paycheck.
I have to second that. Home owners never believe contractors who tell them a realistic (much less padded) estimate for how long a project will take. For some reason most homeowners think you can Drywall, Spackle and sand 2000 Square feet in a day...
I just finished a 2000 square foot renovation project. Complete teardown (to the frame, and in some instances even that had to go). The project took two of us working on it part time: 5 years to complete. The original budget for the project was $75,000. Final expenses ended up around $180,000. We definitely went overkill. Individual thermostat control for each room, Radiant floor heating, and Silent Valance cooling. Whole house Gbit Ether, CATV / phone to every room. Satellite hookup on the roof (even though we don't use it, the box is there and properly wired). 15 New skylights with motorized remote controls. Heat Pump heat and cool with Natural Gas backup. I skipped the Geothermal, but I highly recommend it for the long run. I can still switch the heat pump for a geothermal unit, and will probably do so when the heat pump eventually dies.
Additional items that are definitely worth the money, but don't have any geek shininess to them: Spray foam insulation. If you have the walls open anyway, put in spray foam. at 7.5 inches thick (exterior wall), the stuff has an R value of around 50, and unlike all other forms of insulation, it wont degrade over time. I have several rooms in my house that you can heat with a candle. My total heating bill is less than the cost of running the household appliances, even in the dead of winter.
You'll also want to make sure you have 500 AMP mains. This will ensure you have adequate power for everything in the future. Along with this, run at least two separate strings of 20 Amp outlets to every room. You never appreciate how much power modern equipment can draw until you try to run your mini-fridge, microwave, and 1000 watt stereo, only to discover that all the outlets in the house share a single 15 amp breaker... I have 2 20 amp circuits for every room. I can run most of a normal persons household on the power handling ability of half my living room, but I'm pretty sure My house is ready to handle tomorrows do-hickeys. I would also recommend getting some LED accent lighting for common areas like kitchens and baths. This stuff can be very dim, but provide enough light to act as a night light. Very cool to have instead of turning on bright lights to go the bathroom in the middle of the night and waking up the whole house.
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
500 amp mains? The heck do you plan to do that draws 120 kilowatts? Run 1200 incandescent bulbs?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Interestingly, different people perceive these things differently. I personally find that the flicker caused by LEDs (especially at 50Hz, without capacitors) is really annoying.
But the real problem is that one can't really use "colour temperature" to get a good understanding of lighting quality. You have to look at the distribution too.
Colour temperature is essentially a "weighted average" of the emission spectrum. But white LEDs have a strongly bi-modal spectrum (basically blue + yellow), which looks nothing like the smooth blackbody spectrum from tungsten/tungsten-halogen. So you can match colour temperature, but have a widely different spectrum.
Also, while the human eye has only 3 separate types of sensor (roughly "R,G,B"), with their own response curves, the resonances of the dyes in clothing, paint, or skin pigments have their own resonances too. The result is that, even if you can't distinguish LED and tungsten light from each other (when looking straight at the bulb), you can tell the difference in the scene that is illuminated.
In light of the approaching hurricane, and during heavy rain in general, I like to make sure my sump pump is keeping up (I live in an older house). Rather than continually going down to check on it, I installed a WiFi IP Camera in the room pointed at the pump. That way I can check on it periodically from my phone without actually going in there. Of course, infra-red LEDs are a must on such a setup, but they come with most cameras anyway. To generalize, cameras wherever you might want to monitor the state of the house. This would be separate from security cameras.
"I know that every word that man just said is true, because it's EXACTLY what I wanted to hear." -- Space Ghost