Office floor and helping friends

February is always a short month with 2 weekends already occupied. So basically I just finished the floor in the future office. Besides I helped Glenn and Anton with their kitchen which now is finished. A great metamorphosis with lots more useful space.

Floor in the office and HA glow

Meanwhile my future office needed to get a floor. Marc and Rika would be coming over and if I wanted to work from home it would be more convenient if I had my own space to sit. With a few square meters of floor it was already turning into a real room. Before I could put in the rest of the floor I had to replace part of a beam, which I had prepared already a few months ago.
It was a fun project and with the help of the high lift jack, I moved the beam back into the right position before I glued the new part in. Another very rewarding project.

The next weekend a part came in that I needed for my Home Assistant Glow project to be able to read the LED-pulses. Putting the right software on an ESP board went pretty straight forward and quick enough I had my first measurements coming in. The next day I adjusted the pot-meter and then precise measurements flowed into Home Assistant. Very nice to see different heavy users like the kettle, hub and oven show their own specific graphs.

Electrical jobs and start of an office

To be able to deliver power to the grid, our electricity meter needed to be changed and the power company wanted to place an additional switch on the pole to be able to disconnect the house from the grid. To my surprise they requested to do this on Saturday. Another moment of looking at professionals doing their work.
The guy that replaced the meter said something about the old wires going to the meter, so I asked if that shouldn’t be replaced. He agreed but told me it was my responsibility. Which seemed weird to me as back in the Netherlands everything before the meter is the responsibility of the power company, so I double checked this and it turned out the wire from where the main wire reaches the house to the meter would be my responsibility. I discussed this with Henk and he said this should be 4 x 10 mm^2, which turned out to be some very expensive wire. Luckily I remembered about some large wires I had found a couple of years ago when I was cleaning up the garage and I was in luck. So I prepared this wire between the meter closet and the connection point, ready to be connected.
My new meter is a Landis & Gyr E360, which in other countries has a P1 port for local polling, but unfortunately not in Estonia. I inquired with Elektrilevi but this was not offered, so I started preparing for a backup plan and ordered some parts for the Home Assistant Glow from AliExpress.

On the attic above the bathroom was a nice place for the inverter, so I started to prepare the wall there with plaster plate. This improved the look and feel of the old attic so much that the idea came up to fully renovate the attic and make it my office. So I started covering the inside of the roof with plaster plate. I took out part of the floor to get all of it upstairs.

Last year we bought a few bags of potatoes for the winter, but the garage gets below zero, so the potatoes freeze and get inedible. So for the upcoming season I build an isolated box to prevent this from some left over polystyrene plates.

For a change the heater has some issues again. The main augur did not work anymore. I am getting to familiar with this heater as I had found the cause of the issue within a few minutes. I took out the engine and opened it up. It turned out the gears in the reduction gearbox had totally worn out. Luckily I have good contact with Pelltech and I was able to replace the augur engine quickly.

In the side garden has been a dead tree for some time already and I thought it would be good to take it out before winter. The trailer was on its way to the Netherlands and the wood storage was getting pretty empty. Marc helped out. We took it down in two parts and then cut it in 30 cm pieces, split it and pilled it up. We tried it in the sauna, but even though the tree had been dead for years and didn’t even have a crown anymore, it was still pretty wet, so I guess we’ll first start using the apple tree wood.

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