bradknowles's Profile

The thing about the porch (front or back) and the front door is that the lights are there as much for security as they are for actually seeing what you are doing as you are coming through, so a motion sensor isn't necessarily helpful.

I have found that putting an auto-timer on these lights so that they only have power going to them at the times when I want the light on (i.e., dusk, night, and dawn), and then switching the incandescent lights for compact fluorescent will get me the largest amount of benefit, and adding motion sensors or photocell controllers would add a minimum of additional savings.

With regards to the other areas, I've found that the motion-sensitive switches are much larger than the old switches that would be replaced, and that makes it difficult to fit them into the electrical box. You end up having to replace the entire electrical box and cut out sheetrock to fit the larger electrical box into place, and that makes it a major pain.

Still, if you can manage it, at least for bathrooms I would replace both the fan and light switches with the motion-sensitive or auto-timer style (e.g., easily switchable between 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 45, or 60 minutes) and gang them together on the same circuit. This allows you to avoid having them on too much longer than necessary, and saves wear-n-tear on the fan as well as saving electricity.

Two issues here:

1. The APC Back-UPS RS LCD line has a display that gives you the critical information (in red instead of blue, so you don't risk ruining your night vision), and doesn't confuse you with icons that aren't relevant to the current condition. I've seen both and IMO, the APC display is much better than the CyberPower display.

2. For computers and sensitive AV gear, you really want a UPS that produces a true sine wave output. None of the budget models of UPSes will do that, although most of the more expensive APC SmartUPS models will. Otherwise, you risk causing damage to your equipment.

3. Ideally, you want something that provides at least one or two sockets that are filtered but not on UPS, for devices that would otherwise just pull too much power and suck down your battery too fast. The CyberPower units don't have this option, whereas APC units usually do.

Oh, and while we're talking about medical issues, you might also want them to check for a deviated septum -- typically the result of a nose that got broken, maybe in a fist fight. That can really hurt your ability to breathe at night.

Surgery to correct it isn't too unusual, but is downright nasty to watch -- they have to re-break the nose with a hammer and chisel, then set it properly. Oh, and the blood flow. Ew.

We have precisely the same problem in our dressing room. It is a converted bedroom, and the built-in closet wasn't big enough for all of my wife's shoes, much less her hats. Since we had taken out the master bedroom closet in the master bathroom (don't ask), we needed another "closet".

Fortunately, we had brought back with us from Belgium some modular units that we had bought over there (where they don't have built-in closets). It's constructed kind of like Ikea stuff, but much better quality. We had to have them cut down from their original 2.9m height to fit into our much lower ceilings over here, and pretty much completely filled up the dressing room.

The only design problem is that we didn't consider what would happen with the fan. D'oh!

I've looked for shorter blades. I can't find any that are shorter than the ones we already have, at least not in any local hardware stores. I will keep looking, though.

This is wonderful for those places where population density is not very high, and you can afford to own enough land to build them.

But what about those higher-density population areas? An average three or four bedroom house might be 2700-3000 sq ft, possibly two story, and not have that much yard left out of 10,000 sq ft of lot. And that would be for a place in a residential neighborhood closer-in, but still not anywhere close to the ultra-dense high-rise areas downtown.

What then?

If we force everyone to space out enough so that they'll have the land to build something like this, how much farmland would be left over?

I'm all for going green where possible, and rammed earth buildings are one excellent choice where they are feasible. But what about those cases where they aren't feasible?

I help manage the mail servers for the University where I work. We find that ~97% of all e-mail is spam.

Fortunately, that's filtered at our appliances, and we don't have to deal with that on our servers. Otherwise, that would be a truly massive amount of e-mail, since we support ~50,000 students and ~20,000 faculty & staff, and we do many millions of legitimate mail messages per day.

Laure -- I know your pain. We have three cats, and have recently installed hardwood flooring. We're not looking forward to the first major pee incident.

My dad had a real problem. His cat was older, and apparently had been missing the litterbox for months. When my mom was alive, they had sprayed all sorts of stuff to try to eliminate the odors, but all that did was cover them up -- unsuccessfully. The smell got into the air conditioning system (there was an air return right next to the litterbox), as well as into the carpet, the padding, etc....

We tried every chemical application known to man, followed by steam cleaning, etc.... In the end, the only solution that worked was to remove the carpet and carpet padding, treat and seal the concrete underneath, and then put in new flooring.

I don't want to rain on your parade -- you may be luckier than we were, so you should definitely try the other things first. Just keep in mind that you may also have to apply more extreme measures.

Good luck!

Uh, that was supposed to be "... the post by palindrome."

The system seems to have eaten my HTML. Blargh.

@boomer --

See my comments on the AT thread over at <A HREF="http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ny/security/slimline-keysafe-024793">http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ny/security/slimline-keysafe-024793</A>.

In short, the combination door locks that the US military and the US government think are sufficient for use in classified environments can be broken into in just minutes (I did it while I was working in the Pentagon, for good reason). The residential grade units are even worse.

Your best bet for security is a good Medeco or Mul-T-Lock deadbolt that is ANSI Grade 1 certified, and UL437 listed, and has features designed in to preven the "Bump Key" attack. See also my comments on the thread over at <A HREF="http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/la/security/the-unbumpable-and-self-rekeying-deadbolt-from-kwikset-044955">http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/la/security/the-unbumpable-and-self-rekeying-deadbolt-from-kwikset-044955</A>.

The US federal government and the US military frequently use a combination door lock to secure doors in classified areas, and from what I can tell they are the <A HREF="http://www.kaba-ilco.com/access_control/products/simplex_1000.aspx">Kaba Ilco 1000</A> series models.

During Desert Shield under President George Bush Sr, I was working in the Pentagon in the National Military Command Center (one of the most secure facilities within the Pentagon), providing technical support to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, J-4 Logistics Directorate, in the Logistics Readiness Center. During the first week, we went to a shift schedule, so we had multiple teams of people working, and Team Chiefs and Executive Officers for each shift. For this shift, we had a new guy who was acting Team Chief and he managed to leave his briefing slides in his office, and closed the door behind him. Only he didn't remember the combination and he was about to go brief Chairman Colin Powell. He had ten minutes to his briefing and I had five minutes to break into his office.

Three numbers, then twist the handle. You can do it about as fast as you can say "Tick-Tick-Tick-Turn". One combination every couple of seconds. I had the door open in way less than five minutes, and after I was done I told the combination to the Executive Officer on duty as well as the Team Chief on duty, and then told them that they probably wanted to change the combination now that I knew it.

Even if the box itself is strong, if there are a small number of possible combinations to get the thing open, then it's not really very secure. I can do it in just a few minutes.