Street Address and Front Entry Lights

Here's another project that has "finally" been tackled: our street address plaque.

Here's the old version that came with the house:

You can see where there used to be a security light above the plaque. It was against HOA guidelines, kinda ugly, and made it impossible to read our street address when it was on, so it was an easy choice to remove it.

I have had the numerals for our new plaque sitting in my shop for over two years now. This project was delayed again and again because I wanted our street address to be back lit or illuminated somehow. Potential solutions ranged from back lighting with LEDs, to using one or more spotlights, to using an electroluminescent panel. I finally decided to just use a length of LED strip I picked up on sale a while ago, and just get it done.

It turned out the numerals we picked up so long ago where actually meant to be set in masonry. But it was nothing a drill, a hacksaw and some superglue couldn't fix:

Here's the plaque, mounted, with the LED strip:

I'll put some silicone in the hole, and touch up the paint another (warmer) day.

Since I had my tools out, I decided to mount the rest of the LED strip under the eave of the roof along the side of the garage. It was pretty dim along the walkway to our front door before this:

Now walking to the front door after dark is a completely different experience!

Christmas Lights

It was pretty nice weather yesterday, so we worked on the outdoor Christmas decorations.

Each year, our lights get more complicated.

2014:

2015:

This year:

Icicle lights were just as much a pain in the butt as everyone said they would be. And getting the upper roofline was quite a chore. But I think it looks good!

Outdoor Smart Lights

I picked up a couple of LIFX color 1000 smart bulbs last week when they went on sale. I've been wanting to put smart bulbs in the two light fixtures bracketing the garage for a while now.

LIFX bulbs are brighter, have better color reproduction (and better whites), and are more responsive than any other smart RGB bulb I'm aware of today. However, they are are also pretty large:

The light fixtures I wanted to put these bulbs in were designed for a standard A19 bulb, and the LIFX bulbs just did not fit well. So I made 1.75" strips from scrap sheet metal, spray-painted them flat black, and dropped the light fixture down to fit the new bulbs:

It's not professional grade, but I don't think anyone will notice the extra metal strip unless they are specifically looking for it.

I did change the wiring for these lights. They used to be on a dimmer switch with the front porch light. These smart bulbs are not supposed to be on a dimmer, but beyond that, I didn't want these smart bulbs to be on a switch that we use regularly. A smart bulb on a switched power supply becomes awfully dumb when the power is off.

I came up with the following solution:

The wire coming out of the light fixture now ends in a male electrical plug. The wire coming from the front porch dimmer switch now terminates in a standard electrical outlet, top left (I need to put a label on it). A standard, always-on outlet already existed (bottom right) from a previous project. Currently, the smart bulbs are plugged into the always-on outlet, but I can easily put dumb bulbs into the light fixtures and plug them back into the dimmer switch if I ever want to.

For Halloween, I have the new bulbs on a flickering orange:

In the future, we should also be able to indicate on which side of the driveway we would prefer guests to park, maybe with a blinking green light on the appropriate side.

Sparkly Ceiling

I saw several "star shower" laser projectors last christmas while driving around.

While they look pretty cool, putting them outside and potentially spraying laser light in to air traffic lanes doesn't seem like a great idea. But I thought it would probably look awesome on a ceiling!

I kept an eye out for deals on laser projectors, but the ones with blue lasers are still well above $100 each, more than I was willing to spend. But while I was out grocery shopping, I saw a display of LED-based projectors and played with one. I wound up buying a "kaleidoscope" version with red, blue and green lights for under $20 to try out at home.

I initially set it up on a camera tripod, aimed at the ceiling. With the rest of the house lights off, it actually looked pretty good!

For a permanent set up, I bought a second projector, and mounted both inside floor lamps in the Great Room:

I had to replace the original bulb with two bulbs on a y-splitter in order to fit everything inside the lamp shade.

Here is a picture with the conventional lights on, and the projectors off:

And here's a shot with the conventional lights off and the projectors on:

And here's what the ceiling looks like:

Both projectors are plugged into a zwave switch behind the couch, so it was pretty easy to add these to the rest of home automation system.

Ideally, these cheap projectors will last a few years until the laser projectors come down in price, at which point it should be a fairly simple job to upgrade from LED to laser.

Smart Kitchen Cabinet Lights

Back before Lincoln was born, I had installed cheap, dumb, under-cabinet LEDs from IKEA in the kitchen. They worked, but they were always-on, not very bright, and had a lot of extra wire that looked messy.

Later, I installed RGB LED strips above the cabinets. These were controlled by an IR remote, but were still significantly brighter (and more fun!) than the under-cabinet lights.

Over the past couple of months, I've been upgrading the cabinet LEDs with WiFi controllers and extending the RGB strips below the cabinets.

The cabinets by the sink were fairly simple: it was a single, flat stretch of cabinets, and there was a pre-existing gap in the back corner to run the wires between the above-cabinet controller and the below-cabinet LED strip. The hardest part was mounting the flexible LED strip with screws (the adhesive backing on the strip proved to be worthless).

The cabinets on the other side of the kitchen (by the stove) were much more of a problem. There were three distinct "zones", and none of them had a great route for wires to run from the top of the cabinets to the bottom.

I eventually realized I could hide the wires with some left-over trim. I cut a groove in the trim with my father-in-law's table saw, sized for the extension wires:

I installed the LED strip, and drilled a hole through the cabinet wall near the back:

The wire ran between the cabinets, up to the top.

And I covered the exposed wire with a grooved piece of trim!

Then I repeated those steps for the cabinet on the left side of the stove:

The far-left cabinets required a single hole to be drilled:

Then I tied all the wires into the WiFi controller (the little white box), and got everything configured on the network:

And there it is!

The top and bottom lights are tied together at the controller, so they will always have the same color and brightness. But that would be easy to change if I feel like spending the money on additional controllers. Also, right now the LED strips can only be controlled from a smartphone app, but I'm hoping to tie them into the rest of my smart house controls (including voice control) in the future.

***Update 10/6/2016***

My first attempt at adding these to OpenHAB didn't work, but it turns out someone made a rudimentary on/off Alexa skill for these controllers!

Dining Room Light

Brianna likes as much light as possible, and our Great Room is a kinda dim relative to the rest of the house. So I updated the dining room light fixture from three bulbs to four.

Now the light fixture is like a shielded ball of plasma, with four LED bulbs throwing off 3200 lumens inside the central enclosure.

Garage Electrical and Lighting

I saw a deal on an LED strip and decided to add some additional light to our garage, so we could see into our trunks better.

If I were to do this again, I'd probably snap a chalk line as a guide - the LED strip kinda undulates as it is.

I had to add an outlet for this light (and re-purposed a Zwave plug) to power the LED strip. In the process, I definitively verified that the seller was lying about having a 240 volt circuit in the garage - the little sub-panel he installed in the garage is single-phase only, and the supply wiring is only rated for 15 amps! Fortunately, the washer and dryer back up against the garage, and since we switched over to a natural gas dryer, there is an unused 240 volt circuit nearby - the dream of having a high-capacity electric car charger is still alive!

The outlets in the garage all tested as having the hots and neutrals swapped, so I replaced the outlets with tamper-resistant outlets and fixed the hot/neutral issue. When I had everything buttoned up, I tested again and discovered the entire garage isn't grounded properly! Ugh. I'll have to fix that when I have more time.

150-Watt-Equivalent LED in a Single-Socket Light Fixture

The light fixture we put in our dining room only has a socket for a single bulb, and is only rated for 60 watts. We compensated by putting in a 150-watt-equivalent CFL.

That's the 150-watt-equivalent on the left (consumes 40 watts) and a 60-watt equivalent on the right (13 watts).

Unfortunately, this CFL had a long warm-up period and was not dim-able (and I couldn't find any 150-watt-equivalent, dim-able CFLs). I was ready to automate this switch, so I needed to replace the bulb. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any 150-watt-equivalent LEDs, let alone dim-able LEDs. I had to hack together my own solution.

It took forever, but I eventually found a three-socket fixture on amazon. 

Satco 90-463

I took it apart, spray-painted it silver instead of black, and rewired it. 

Today I installed it with three 60-watt-equivalent LED bulbs:

And here's how it looks now with 2400 lumens, on its own smart dimmer, and included in OpenHAB:

As a side note: it turns out I'm bad at designing experiments. After rewiring the three-socket adapter the first time, I tested it in a socket in the basement. It didn't work. I tore it apart twice trying to figure out what I had wired wrong. I eventually realized my wiring job was fine: the socket I was testing it on had a thick lip that didn't matter with a bulb, but was preventing my socket adapter from screwing in all the way and making good electrical contact. I literally could have had this project done two months ago if I had tested with a different socket.

The Trouble with LED Lights...

...is that they just don't kill bugs:

Power Outlets Above Kitchen Cabinets

I doubt this will interest anyone but me: I had some alone time with the house today, so I installed power outlets above the kitchen cabinets. This will allow us to have LED strip lighting up there without running an extension cord down to the counter.

Above-Cabinet Lights

Now that we have flowers above the kitchen cabinets, I've been wanting to put lights up there.

I managed to snag a strip of LED lights on sale on Amazon:

And just for fun, it's full RGB:

Now I need to get another strip for the other side of the kitchen.

Under-Cabinet Lights

Didn't do a whole lot tonight. I returned some left-over materials from the range hood installation (got seventeen bucks back, woo!) and then after dinner, I got the under-cabinet lights by the stove working for the first time since I painted the kitchen.

Not sure what to do about the cabinet on the right, yet. I couldn't figure out a way to run a wire over there now that the range hood is in place. 

New Cree Bulbs

Cree has started selling their third generation of consumer LED bulbs, called "4flow". I haven't seen them in person yet, but they seem like a pretty crazy departure from the old design.

Old Design:

New Design:

While the old design used a metal heatsink to keep the LED elements cool, the new design apparently relies on convection - air flows through the slots near the bottom of the bulb, over the LED elements, and out the top. 

But it seems to me that this design is only effective in a vertical configuration. And indeed, all the Cree marketing materials I've seen show the new bulbs in an up-and-down orientation. A lot of our light fixtures (the majority, now that I think about it) have the bulbs in a horizontal arrangement, or in the case of the ceiling fans, at a 45 degree angle.

But apparently the new design allowed Cree to cut the retail price by twenty percent, which is no small feat.

So, I don't know. The guys at Cree seem pretty smart, but I'm not buying any of these new ones until I hear some real-life reviews after several months of use.

The good news: Home Depot has cut the price of the old bulbs by thirty percent, presumably to clear out stock before the new bulbs arrive. So I picked up three more bulbs when I was at Home Depot today. I'm slowly clearing the old, smoke-stained, mercury-based CFLs out of my house. In fact, I think there are only nine CFLs left in the house's built-in light fixtures :-)

Samsung Induction Stove

Well, this is a neat twist on an induction cook top: LEDs surrounding the "burner" show you how high the heat is set:

I don't think I'd want a stove that looks more complicated than a VCR, though.

Here's the product page.

Upstairs Hallway Lights

So these two lights have been causing problems.

Initially, the two Cree bulbs I had in there made too much buzzing noise on the dimmer switch - enough that Brianna told me flat-out I had to do something about it.

I switched them with two other Cree bulbs, and had no problems - they were perfectly silent. I shrugged and figured the first pair of bulbs must have been from the lot of bulbs I bought from a sketchy eBay seller, and the new ones must have been from Home Depot. But, after a few weeks, the new pair started to flicker. THAT was really annoying.

Now I'm trying out a pair of Philips Slimstyle LEDs in these light fixtures (I've wanted to try out some of these for a while)

But these bulbs are some how illuminating even when the switch is OFF! Sometimes it's one bulb, and sometimes the other. It seems to happen shortly after the switch is turned off. At this point I suspect there is something wrong with the switch, but the fact that only one or the other bulb will do this illuminating-without-power trick has me flummoxed. Any ideas?