Home Automation Experimentation & Constructing a Barrel Ceiling
Rebuilding a Beautiful, Vacant Historic Detroit Home (Episode 8)
There’s something about the city — I don’t think either of us can tell you what that is, any more than we can tell you when you meet your spouse and fall in love and for some reason you just know that’s the one. That was Detroit for us. — Amy Haimerl
Air Conditioning Equipment Arrives!
Our air handler and all of its components have finally arrived to the house! Holy cow, it’s a lot of equipment too! The boxes have essentially filled our master bedroom and 1/2 the attic.
Due to our home being made of plaster walls, we have decided to leave our current steam boiler system for heating and install a fancy new High Velocity Forced-Air Mini-Duct system by Unico… This newer style of system allows us to avoid needing to install full duct work and tear apart plaster (which in this home likely contains asbestos) and instead, run tubing around the home typically through the corners of our closets and to the proper rooms of the home where we need cooling. Each tube then has a crazy muffler system on the end of it to reduce the noise of moving air from it and places small round vents that will be in the ceiling.
These systems are designed for exactly the situation we are in with our home, which has never had air conditioning before. We will then be able to control both our heat and our cooling through the same thermostat. We were planning on using a Nest thermostat, but have decided to try something new so we’ve purchased the newest ecobee3 thermostat which gives us a second temperature sensor we can install anywhere in the home we’d like and use both to control heating and cooling.
Finishing the Barrel Ceiling
Christian worked hard on recreating the barrel ceiling this week. By determining the radius of the circle needed to recreate our arch, he made an arc template that he then was able to use to cut out over 18 arches for the ribs down the length of the nook space. Spacers are used like a spine in between to ensure that spacing and twist are controlled for across the room for when we need to attach curved drywall to them down the road.
This room formerly wasn’t arced its entire length, with the room bisected originally to form a hallway from the kitchen to the dining room in front of the nook. Now with our new layout, we are making it feel more open and completely visible when you enter the home, where before it was hidden behind a wall.
More Planning
Brandon has been working hard in AutoCAD to get us closer and closer to a final kitchen layout with accurate dimensions, so that we can make decisions on lighting and electrical, as well as using it to get accurate quotes on cabinets.
We’ve also been considering building a daybed/bench at the end of the breakfast nook for a comfy seat under the window and moving the radiator to the kitchen side of the wall. So Brandon decided to sketch one out in CAD as well.
I purchased a cast-iron architect drafting table from a scratch-and-dent shop this week. I want to use it as a dining table in the breakfast nook. The current drafting wood top I plan on removing and replacing with a custom top that is the perfect dimension for our space. We haven’t decided whether we want a wood or a glass top yet, but I think these legs will make for one awesome dining room table under our new barrel ceiling when everything is finished!
I also started some shopping around for vintage lighting for our kitchen and nook space to hang under the arched ceiling above our dining table.
Hopefully we’ll have made some headway on AC, electrical, and maybe even plumbing by next week, but for now, here’s some info on smart home stuff!
This last section here is going to be all about smart home automation. So if you’re not interested in the smart tech we’re installing, or some general reviews of products we’ve tried so far, you’ll probably get bored out of your mind.
Home Automation Experimentation!
So a big plan for our home is to try and utilize as many “smart” features as we can to really bring it into the 21st Century. From Smart Thermostats like the ecobee3 or Nest to smart cameras, lights, smoke detectors, and even moisture sensors for our basement to detect flooding, there are lots of opportunities for us to update the home.
Here is what we’ve been doing research on so far:
If you’d like more in-depth information on our experience with any of these products, feel free to message me and I can give you more nuanced information.
Thermostats (Ecobee3 and Nest)
Brandon currently uses a Nest Thermostat at his home in Ohio which we enjoy, but with lots of new competitors out nowadays we’ve decided to try something different. We’ve also felt a little burned by some of Google’s products in the past and want to see what else is out there. We purchased the new Ecobee3 Thermostat which is currently waiting to be installed at the home. Once our AC is finished hopefully in a week or two, we will let you know whether we decided to go back to the Nest or not.
Cameras (Logi Circle, Nestcam, and Arlo Pro)
With Cal and Christian at the house almost everyday, this has been the perfect time to test cameras! We’ve enjoyed being able to talk to Cal and Christian when they’ve run into problems that need answers, and these cameras have been awesome at allowing us to communicate more quickly when we’re out of state or at work, and allow our contractors to be more agile when problems or questions come up. We plan on using them for general security and keeping an eye on the house when we aren’t home once the project is completed.
Nest Cam by Nest (Google)
We started with the Nest Cam, which we loved for its clean interface and ease-of-use… but the cost per month was really high for some basic features we wanted ($9 per camera per month), so we decided to try a few others that had more desirable features that were included in the base price or were more affordable overall monthly.
Overall the Nest Cam was great. But with the phone app not including the full features of the webapp, the poor speaker quality for talking through the camera, and the overall expensive monthly costs to have basic features we wanted like video storage, we decided to move on.
Arlo Pro by Netgear
The Arlo Pro was the next camera we tried. A nice camera with some unique features like a siren and Li-Ion battery powered rather than wired. It included 7 days worth of video storage for free compared to Nest Cam which offers no storage of video unless you pay 9$ per camera per month.
On paper this seemed like it would be our winner, but after using the camera for a few days we realized that the ease-of-use and overall interface were too complicated and less reliable to use. You have a ton of control… but almost too much to the point where using the Arlo Pro becomes overly complicated. The battery life was also very poor from our experience. Arlo advertises at least 3 months, but from our experience we pretty much ran our after only one week (we have been hard users however). Finally, the lack of an easy interface to look back through old footage from the day was a big miss for us… so, on to the next camera.
Logi Circle by Logitech
Finally, we decided to try the Logi Circle. I have been incredibly impressed with this camera which we just happened to notice in a BestBuy but had never heard of before. You get just enough cloud stored footage for free (24 hours HD video vs 3 hours of only still images with Nest Cam), and the paid service is much cheaper than Nest’s, starting at $4 per camera per month (for 2-weeks of video storage). The app is gorgeous, super clean and pretty darn simple to use. The camera was also incredibly easy to install, the easiest of all 3 we tried.
The walkie-talkie feature of this camera has also been awesome for talking to our contractors when we or they have a question, but aren’t nearby. The other cameras have this same feature, but don’t have a loud enough speaker, and have much more of a lag which makes them hard to use to communicate. The Logi Circle also has a 3–4 hour built-in battery which makes it great for our contractors to just grab off the wall to show us something up close.
We were also sold on Circle’s Day Brief feature, which has allowed us to make quick and easy timelapses (Nest has a similar feature but only through their webapp). Overall this camera won us over very quickly… we just wish they had an outdoor version!
Lighting (Lutron Caseta Wireless)
With electrical about to begin, Brandon and I have been doing a lot of research on smart lighting systems. The Philips Hue system is obviously the most popular and well known, but the high costs of each bulb, as well as the fact that we have many original chandeliers in our home that we plan on using, (Philips doesn’t currently make a hue candelabra bulb) we decided to try something else.
We want a system that will work both with or without a phone so that whatever we install has some legacy beyond the app itself. Something that can be controlled by Apple’s HomeKit through Siri was a big plus for us. Brandon currently uses an older non web-connected Insteon system in his Ohio home and likes it, but their format is proprietary and so we decided we’d try something different. We really liked the ability to program “scenes” or “moods” into his Insteon system, which gives us control over every light in the house via one switch and allows one tap to dim and brighten all the lights to pre-set levels for any occasion.
With only a few rooms still with power currently, we bought a box of led candelabra bulbs by Cree and installed them in our master bedroom chandelier. Brandon then installed the Lutron Caseta Wireless switch and hub in the home along with an Amazon Echo Dot and we were able to control our chandelier via Alexa, Siri, our iPhone’s HomeKit, and the wall switch in about 30 min of setup. The Lutron switch worked pretty flawlessly after a little bit of a complicated setup between all of our devices. Responsiveness wasn’t super consistent but typically was extremely quick on all methods of dimming adjustment. Overall we were impressed and pleased with Lutron, but may look to try another competitor before we finalize a choice for lighting.
Our Journey isn’t over! We’ve been working hard since we purchased the home in November 2016 and are writing updates on our progress roughly every week. Make sure to check out our latest updates on our homepage!
