Another Tick

Back on the 28th June I mentioned the front video doorbell and how it had a voracious appetite for batteries.  My plan was to hard wire the doorbell into the house 240V system via an adapter.

Today the project was finished.  I established that whilst the doorbell has four 1.5V AA batteries it wasn’t a 6V system.  There were two separate 3V circuits.  Fortunately the 240V adapter had multiple DC output voltages with one being 3V.  I had a length of lightweight speaker wire which I used as a cable run between the 240V power socket in the garage and the doorbell position.  However before running the wiring I decided to check the cable was of a sufficient size to deliver 3V at the doorbell. 

 

There didn’t appear to be any significant voltage drop in the cable so I turned my attention to the doorbell. 

The house has double brick exterior walls with an air cavity in between.  I needed to drill through the exterior brick into the cavity.  However I would need to drill in an upwards direction in order to feed the plastic” snake” up the cavity into the ceiling.  As the doorbell was mounted beside the door it meant the hole also had to angle horizontally to reach the cavity. 

After drilling the hole I fed the “snake” up the hole into the wall cavity and then into the ceiling cavity.  I also tied some blue string to the end of the snake as it would be used as a draw cord to pull the wiring back down the wall.

I’m just too old to crawl around in the roof cavity so I used my long surf casting fishing rod to snag the string and drag it into the garage.  I then pulled twice as much string as I need to create a large loop from the doorbell to the garage.  Then I taped one end of my power wire to the middle of the loop before pulling the string and wire down to the doorbell.  This has resulted in me having both the cable and a draw string between the doorbell and the garage.  Should I need to replace the wire or add another I have a drawstring.

The doorbell was modified so it would operate of the 240V converter.

 

Everything was then connected and tested.  We now have a video doorbell that is powered by the main electrical supply.

Whilst writing this blog post I noticed another boating couple are reluctantly selling their lovely narrowboat.   NB Tentatrice is for sale..  Details [here].

Jan and I went out and did a large food shop as soon as the supermarkets open this morning.  It’s not that we are low on food…. We think it’s only a matter of time before the State goes back into lock-down and we want to be prepared.  The COVID outbreak in New South Wales shows no sign of abating and it has already spread to Victoria and South Australia.  You can see the difference in strategy between Liberal and Labor State governments.  NSW is Liberal and they tend to only lock down when the infection is starting to get out of control. Whilst Labor governments go early and hard with their lock-downs.  My own opinion is it makes more economic and public healthy sense to go early and hard having a short lock-down, that go late resulting in a prolonged lock-down.

Meanwhile the vaccine rollout continues to move very slowly.  NSW has one million doses of unused Astrazeneca which will shortly time expire.  People are fearful of Astrazeneca refusing it and are prepared to wait for Pfizer.  Of course the longer it takes to vaccinate everyone, the more lock-downs we will have and the greater the economic cost.  Declining to have Astrazeneca because of a potential blood clot risk is irrational.  Life is daily full of risks which we frequently subconsciously accept.  How great is the risk of blood clots from Astrazeneca?

Statistically 4 people in a million (0.0004%) will get blood clots from Astrazeneca

The risk of blood clots from the contraceptive pill is 0.05 - 0.12%

The risk of blood clots from smoking is 0.18%

The risk of blood clots from COVID is 16.5%

The Retaining Wall

Yesterday I got very enthusiastic and ripped out the rotten timber retaining wall beside the driveway.  Then I dug a trench beside the removed wall and buried a length of 70mm diameter pvc pipe between the water meter in the driveway and the boundary fence.  We are going to remove the existing brick paver driveway and replace it with concrete.  I though a spare conduit pipe might be useful should we ever develop a leak in the water main under the concrete.

 

Then I got too silly and decided to cut up the old hardwood sleepers from the retaining wall using the bowsaw.  They are now stacked on the retaining wall ready to be disposed of weekly piece at a time into the wheelie bin.

This is when the body reminded me I’m no longer 30.