Open Cavity - I Get Busy

With the refrigerator out of the van and the cavity open, I had easy access to the electric cavity from above by taking out the cavity floor.

Cabinets

In the meantime, I decided I was tired of clocking my head on the cabinet handles that stick out and got new ones to replace them. I found some very pretty ones that are a bail type (like on furniture) that also only drop down 1”. The hard part was finding ones with the screws 3 3/4” apart as most handles are 3”. The new ones stick out just 1/2” and are quite a bit prettier than the plain C ones that came with it. I also found ring handles for the lower cabinets and drawers that go well with the handles. Then I needed to do something about the other hole. I found 1” back plates that I can screw in after I paint the head to match. After I got the new handles, I decided that I would like the bail handles on the bath door better than the smaller rings, so I ordered a few more. It changes the character of van decor, and once again, I notice how much the cabinets need to be refinished. (Bonus! I can get the refrigerator thru the aisle now without taking off the cabinet doors thanks to the non-protruding new pulls.)

LiFePO4 Batteries - First Experience

3/21/14

The batteries were left with the van sitting and not doing anything after the batteries were installed. I pulled the fuse on the CO and LP monitors because they are not working and beeping. After about 2.5 weeks, the battery monitor said they were at 12.5V and the next morning, they had shut down entirely. The Battery Management System (BMS) is supposed to do that with a bit of battery left. The volt meter showed zero volts, which it should in a shut down situation.

LiFePO4 Batteries

I decided to go ahead with replacing my very dead Group 31 AGM batteries with LiFePO4 batteries of the same size. I contacted Smartbattery.com and they were very responsive to all my questions. They weren't the very cheapest I found on the Internet but they seemed to be one of the few who have a clear business and support their product. After a couple of days, I got handed off to their distributor in North Carolina who was also very responsive to all my questions and who went the extra mile in finding the correct answer for me and my specific set up. When I ordered them, I called the guy and gave him my credit card number on a Friday afternoon. I told him I didn’t need instant service and could wait until Monday. He had a different person call me for the details and I got the call back by 4pm which was too late for them to go out that day. But they went out on Monday and I got them via UPS on the following Wednesday. Very fast delivery.

House Batteries - Going to Lithium

It is time. My two 3+ year old 100AH AGM house batteries are toast (I found a date on the sides after I pulled them out). Using the shore power and the converter/charger, they haven't got up above 11.1 volts. On the off chance that there is something wrong with the charger, I attached a regular charger and got same thing. They won't charge so they are dead. Time to replace them.  This may well be the cause of my refrigerator failure last summer (It wasn't). I can't test that out until I replace them.

LTE Runaway

Last month, I got an AT&T hotspot and was quite happy with it. I have the 5GB/$50/month thing. My house is among the many places where there is very limited Internet options. The AT&T signal is good there and most of them time I get good speed with it. In all of January, I used about 2.5GB of data. Quite good since it even included streaming a single TV program.

A few days ago, I suddenly started getting emails from AT&T that I had used 3.5GB, shortly after that, 5GB and they added a gig for +$10. I shut off my hotspot (airplane mode) at the 5.99GB mark.  I had a few web pages open but no streaming and I have ad blockers to cut that kind of data usage. My firewalls and virus scanners were up and I ran them afterwards to check my system and it was clean. It had run thru 5.5GB of data inside of 2 hours and I was not doing anything that should have eaten that kind of data. Yikes!

I called AT&T Tech support and all I got was that they registered a sudden increase in data download and too bad for me. They insisted it could not be their meters going haywire (I believe Technomadia had an episode of this with their Millicom hotspot). The only suggestion is that I turn the hotspot off when I'm not using data - something I already do.  It is clear that AT&T will do nothing about it in true Telco fashion  - their motto is it is always the consumer's fault. And they really don't care. They have zero incentive to fix such problems. To them, they just charged me an extra $10 and didn't have to provide anything for it.

What I suspect happened is that the big ice storm did something to their network and in the repairs, someone did something that triggered a false data download and I am screwed. There is just no way I could have legitimately downloaded 5.5GB of data inside of 2 hours. Even streaming wouldn't chew up that much data so fast and I don't stream.

I worked for years in computer systems and I know how easy it is to make an error and screw up networks. Especially when the shit is hitting the fan and you are scrambling to get things working again - exactly the situation after the ice storm.  Most of the weekend was dropped down to the HSPA+ network on my phone so it is clear they were having problems.

So the bottom line is, LTE is great but watch out. Caveat emptor, indeed.

Purging on

My dump run was 660 pounds of old door and trim, the vinyl and underlayment pieces for my hall and powder room and a lot of accumulated household trash. Nice to have it gone but there's a lot more.

I've been in this house for 20 years. 20 years of accumulated stuff. We really do expand our stuff to the space we have. And then some. I've been clearing out the family room, my main room that I've lived in for all that time. I cleared out the bookcase, cleaned it and moved it to a corner of the new living room. I put back about half the books but they probably should be gotten rid of.  I have a lot of gardening, field guides, and construction books but nowadays, when I want to find out about something, I google it. I learned a ton from those books. How we have changed how our minds learn. It used to be that one had to have a library or go to a library to learn about something. Not anymore.  It is mostly all on the web or can be gotten in a digital format that weighs little and takes little space.

I decided that my old stereo should go. I had a nice pair of speakers, a receiver, tape, and gasp, LP player because I still have a library of old vinyl LPs. I found the manuals for them too along with the manuals of several old and long discarded pieces. This stuff is over 20 years old! The tape player hasn't worked right in years so it can go to the recycling center - more loading up the van. The speakers are big and the receiver still works so they went to Goodwill. I haven't used the stereo in years because I now use a smaller much more modern unit.

I still have a VCR and old CRT TV. I thought I had a few Jane Austen shows on VHS tapes that I would like to copy to DVD but in the purge, I found that I had already bought them on DVD so those went to my neighbor who wanted them. In my cabinet, I had a ton of old movies that I had taped off analog TV. I have not had the VCR running in years and years now, so they all can be dumped. The picture quality won't be worth trying to copy them. I couldn't get the VCR to show on the TV anyway so they both went to the van to be taken to the recycling center.

That leaves some old cassette tapes and the LPs. Before I retired, I bought one of those all in one LP, tape record to CD machines that also has a radio in it meaning to digitize the old media to CDs. I hadn't ever started that project. But now, I will. I moved that unit into the new living room along with the cabinet and started it. It works pretty well altho using a program like Audacity to clean up the recording and convert it to MP3s is time-consuming. I got a pack of CD labels and used the on-line Avery program to make some labels for the CDs. That works well but I do have to pay attention to which tracks actually recorded on the CD. Sometimes, the machine adds extra tracks with nothing but static.

Pulling out the furniture that had been there for so many years is rather disgusting. The Asian brown marmolated stink bug invasion that started a few years ago left quite a collection of their carcases under it. I have a big computer Armour that has quite an accumulation of computer stuff. Most of that will be trashed because it is old now. I even found floppy disks and zip disks.  I don't think I have anything that can read the old floppies anymore.  I found a zip drive so I will have to see if there is anything on those disks that I've been wondering where they got to.  If my Win 7 computer can run that thing.  Funny how we went to technology after technology trying to squeeze more and more data onto portable media.  Now even CDs are old school and terabytes of data storage are cheap to get.

I have had a big old computer armour that I no longer want or use. After I cleared it out, my neighbor said she wanted it so she sent her son and husband to haul it out. Yay!! In my mind, having someone take it out was worth giving it away, even if I could have gotten a few dollars for it.

When I stripped the ugly wallpaper, I got a surprise that almost all of it came off easily. All the wall paper in the rest of house is like it was put on with super glue and is a horrible job. I  stripped the trim, and scrubbed the walls about 5 times to get the old paste off. The old carpet is pulled and the van is loaded up again for the dump. Then it is patching it all and then painting.  It is amazing how much bigger a room looks with white walls and no ugly wall paper.  Then it is onto the kitchen rehab before I lay the flooring in the back part of the house.

I kept getting stink bugs coming out of the mantel as I was stripping it. These are the invasion of the Asian ones that hit the east coat.  I finally pried it off the wall and found hundreds of them behind the mantel! Yuck.  When I put the mantel back on, it is going to get plenty of caulk to keep that from happening again!

Purging is an exercise in self control. As I go thru this stuff accumulated thru my life, I have to resist the urge to keep it because once I wanted it and used it. I keep reminding myself how long it has been sitting around unused. It is time to clean it out and pass it onto someone who will use it or just trash it.

Got a beautiful full double rainbow - horizon to horizon today! Couldn't get the whole thing in one pic. The sky was a perfect prism.

Whoa!!

This month, I got a new cell phone: the new Nexus 5 unlocked, and tried out StraightTalk  $45 for a month of unlimited talk, text, data.  It is on the AT&T network and can do the LTE data speeds. The down side is that once you use up 2.5GB of data, they throttle you to 2g speeds and you can't tether the phone or roam.  But I can get 5-6mbs upload and 2-3 mps download speeds on it at home on the HSPA network and 8-12+ when it gets the LTE signal.  Compared to the 1.3 mbs at best I could get on the Sprint network and it looks pretty good.  The talk and text works just fine too and it is a lot less expensive. I also got a Google Voice number that I connected to my land line and the new cell phone.  That way, I can change out plans and numbers and people can call the Google number and still get me.

My first cell phone was an AT&T but a few years ago, I could no longer get a signal from them at my home so I switched to Sprint.  Sprint was fine for a while but with the advent of LTE networks, they have really fallen far behind.  Add to that the missing coverage on my trips and it is goodbye to Sprint. In the meantime, AT&T has expanded and sped up their network pretty well.  Verizon wasn't a real option because I get poor coverage at my house from them.

I've had at home a wireless network that bounces the signal from spot to spot for rural places that I've been paying $55/month for 1mbs up and .5 down.  It was a more reliable signal than tethering my old Sprint phone and better than dial up.  I just discovered that they have been offering 2mbs up 1 mbs down for the last year for the same price and never let me know. So I asked and they want $189 for new equipment to up the speed. I know that the equipment I have can do 12mbs unthrottled and it is a very easy software setting to change the speed as that is what it did before the installer throttled it.  Doesn't seem like a very good deal to me.  A cable modem is not an option so I'm limited for internet even at home.

Today, I got the AT&T Unite Pro hotspot with the $50/5GB/month plan and yes, I went ahead and got the contract because I am going to keep it for that long anyway so I might as well save the $150 extra to buy it off contract. It isn't like they discount the monthly fee off contract.  It gets the LTE signal really well in my house and look at the speed! 18+ mbs! Plus it is fully mobile.  All I will have to do in the van is just put it in there and we are good to go.  The hotspot has plugs for an antenna as well so that is an option.

I think 5 gigs of data will be fine for me as I don't do gaming or stream a whole lot of stuff.  If I go over the 5 gigs, they will add a gig and charge me an extra $10.  I can go to using 7-8 gigs in a month and match what I had been paying for the phone and internet so I think this is a better deal by far. Now to cancel the old stuff.

On other computer stuff since I'm on the topic.  Last year, I bought an Android tablet but it was a failure after just a few months. It started rapidly flashing apps on and off and nothing I could find would fix it. It had a short warranty so I was stuck. I decided that I really prefer a laptop and got a Sony ultralight last summer.  I still like it really well and it still works.  Windows 8 takes some getting used to but it runs real programs like the Libre Office suite as well as a bunch of apps programs.  It is incredibly light and fast with a touch screen.  The Android wannabes on the tablet just didn't cut it for real work.