In the endless effort to improve the home’s efficiency and reduce contributions to climate change, I took on replacing the water heater with a heat pump water heater. There were a few reasons for this, and the stars aligned to make it happen. There’s a lot of hype about heat pump water heaters. They’re super…
Category: Building
Do Treehouses Need Permits?
The short answer, as far as I can tell, is no. And the neighborhood seems surprisingly cool and impressed with it. I looked at the city websites to do some diligence, but the closest I could find was a deck or a shed. Decks have certain accessibility requirements that are not possible in a treehouse,…
Installing Solar
I installed a 4kW solar array.
Building My Bed
Since moving in, I had planned to have a Murphy bed, and style it in the same theme as the rest of the room; spacey without any specific branding. Here are the after photos. Continue on for the full process. To start, I modeled it in CAD, and here are some renders: When I purchased…
Side project – Mallards Fast Pitch
My hackerspace Sector67 was approached this winter with a problem; the local minor league baseball stadium (Madison Mallards) fast pitch sign was old and no longer working, and they wanted some help fixing it up. In exchange for our expertise, they promised significant advertising and publicity, and they would have us be special guests at a…
A Kalahari Christmas
After Erin took me on a ski trip to Salt Lake City for Christmas 2010, I was far behind in the Christmas Karma. For 2011 I planned to take her to a resort in Wisconsin Dells, which is sort of like the Las Vegas of Wisconsin, except with water parks instead of casinos. Of the many resorts,…
Fast Scanner
Since I’m moving in a few months to an apartment of significantly reduced size, I am starting to reduce the size of my collection of stuff. One thing I’ve been carrying around is everything from my college career. I have every syllabus, paper, homework assignment, handout, midterm… in total it was three boxes full of…
Mouse Modding
Last night I made some changes to my mouse; we’ll see if they’re improvements or not. Originally I was dismantling it to clean it. Something had gotten inside the wheel and was causing it to scroll inconsistently. Once I got inside, though, I saw an opportunity to tune it. First was the clicking on the…
Broken Car Lock
It’s no secret that I love my car. It’s been extremely dependable, has treated me very well, has a good personality and an adventurous attitude, and doesn’t ask for much (it’s a 2000 Chrysler Neon, and yes, I mean Chrysler). I’ve had it for almost 10 years and put over 100,000 miles on it myself…
Camera Troubles
Erin handed me a camera a week ago that had gone through some tough times. It had been dropped while on, and the lens assembly was broken and askew. The camera couldn’t recover from it on its own, and so I was brought in to see if I could fix it. Having been able to…