Part I

I have trees. Lots of trees. Very tall. They tend to litter up the roof with a fairly heavy leaf load, and it all ends up in the rain gutters. So, along comes iRobot and provides me a gizmo that *claims* to be the ticket to clean gutters...
And of course (being the Gizmodo Dragon) I plunk down a wad of dough and say "ship it." iRobot Looj PS do NOT pay $130. find them on eBay brand new for $60 (including shipping)

Bottom line: Looj gets a C-. Passing but barely. Also keep in mind that my place is this thing's worst case scenario... My gutters are also 30' up mostly, so *VERY* hard to clean, even with a really tall ladder.

Pros:

• gutter is clean
• probably cleaner than if I would have scooped it out.

Cons:

• Pine cones are its nemesis. It won't really flip them out of the gutter and it gets stuck on them.
  
• It took twice as long as if I would have scooped it.
• Track came off mid-way, and i had to manually retrieve it.
  
• flipped over in the gutter several times. the torque of the rotating flapper is enough to flip it, fairly easily.
  
• antenna gets stuck on gutter, and in fact in the track. antenna needs to be a lot shorter, and prb integrated.
  
• Gets high centered on pine cones, and debris in general. Make sure you let it really clear the debris before moving forward.
  
• flapper gets stuck, makes a horrible whining sound... so i backed off a bit and then went forward an inch at a time.
  

I had to watch the thing and control it from the top of the ladder (read: sprayed with gutter crap). Control from the ground at a safe distance failed miserably as it flipped and stopped several times. Clear a 4' section and then cautiously advance only a small bit at at time.

I had to move the ladder 5 times. if this had been more than a 30' gutter only 10' up, it would have been a severe pain in the butt. I am a great fan of automation, and robotics, and this little device is sort of neither. I am probably going to keep it but modify the flappers so they are a bit smaller (less flip-over torque) and probably remove the (mostly useless) brushes. BTW don't drop it from over 5'. (it fell off the ladder) it will survive but mine bent the flapper spindle, and i had to correct it (bend it back) or else it would have been off-center.

For those of you who have the Roomba, I still think it l ROCKS btw. Looj not so much...

iRobot folks if you are reading this, here are some suggestions:
brushes suck. get rid of them or make them stiffer.
flappers have too much surface area and contribute too much torque.
stuff falls on top of the device, and it just carries that stuff for the length of its ride.
when going backward, it needs a "cow-catcher" kind of thing to move debris away from the center and the tracks.

Part II

After Modifications

So I decided to try it again, this time with some mods. I wound up the antenna a bit so it doesn't get stuck going under the nails holding up the gutter. You can see in the picture that it's wound up behind the unit. Doesn't hurt reception too much, but farther away it might. The antenna actually acts a bit like the "cow catcher" that I wish they'd had. I might still make one out of a piece of wood or something and bolt it to the back end.

I made two modifications to the front end. I chopped about 1/2" off each of the ends of the rubber flappers so that it would have a bit less friction and a bit less torque. Then, I used ty-wraps to bunch and tilt forward the brushes so they don't get caught in the tread.

I tried a second gutter, (admittedly not quite as densely populated) and had success with the device. It got the flappers stuck a lot less (only a couple times actually). It didn't flip over, and it didn't loose traction. I went back and forth an inch at a time or so, just to let it flip the stuff out. There weren't any pine cones, so I don't know if it's a fair comparison to the first gutter...

What ended up happening actually is that the rotation of the flappers (rotating toward the roof) was flipping the stuff back up on the roof, where it would roll back down and get flipped again. only a small part of the leaves and needles actually got flipped OUT of the gutter and onto the ground. Not sure what one would do about this, but it seems like sort of a design flaw... If I turned the auger the other way (rotating away from the roof), it wouldn't flip anything out, because the shingles reached down actually into the gutter, and they blocked the thing throwing the leaves out. I actually had to break off a couple of the shingles over the near part of the gutter, just to get the device into the gutter at all.

So, I would recommend these small modifications to your device, as they seemed to help a bit. Good luck with your gutters...

It is currently snowing, has been since 6PM. We have exactly one inch accumulation, which means that all Seattle-area drivers will be totally paralyzed and abandon their cars in the middle of the road (again). It's likely we'll get a bit more accumulation here since it's still coming down...

be sure to check out the real-time weather here at Weather.Boal.Net to see the latest charts for temperature, precipitation, and statistical data for year-to-date.

We did see a small doe black-tail dear in the back yard earlier today as well (note the lack of white stuff covering everything). She just went about her business munching on the plants and then walked off into the forest. Such is the life of a dear apparently.

2009 is off to a bang-up start.
Cheers!

After almost 10 days of snow (ending on the day after Christmas), the snow is mostly melted off now. There's still a couple inches on the back deck (down from 12" accumulation). In all I think the total snowfall was around 18" at my place - not much considering some of the surrounding areas got three times what we did. So I'm not complaining... Michele only got her car stuck twice on our own driveway... For next winter I think I am gonna have to check into a snow plow that attaches to my lawn tractor I think, if only just to clear my loooooong driveway.

Finally today I was able to get the BMW out of the garage and on the road again. I cleared enough of the snow and ice off the driveway and the rest has pretty much melted off. There is still some snow around on the ground and on the road up my hill but it's not a problem any more. Feels nice to drive my car for once rather than the big giant truck... However, the truck did very well in the snow for me for the last couple weeks. There were only a couple days I think that it couldn't have coped with the snowfall, but I had tendonitis in my foot and couldn't hardly walk anyway those days. It's been nice to have the snow but after a couple weeks the charm wears off. So many of the stores' shelves are bare around town because people stocked up and new deliveries are backed up or can't get over the pass it seems.

It's been above freezing since before Christmas eve, but not too far. So, the snow is slowly melting - which is good since we don't want to get flooded again like '96 when we had two feet of snow and then a warm heavy rain... Now the winds are supposed to be back. Today the winds were whipping quite a lot, so am not looking forward to the predicted storms for the 30th and the first of the year. Having the power out for a couple hours on Christmas day was kind of a drag. But now I guess if I have to fire up the generator again at least I won't have to trudge through a foot of snow just to get to it. And it could probably use new fuel with Stabil and a tune-up anyway also. Fortunately the power was only out a couple of hours and I didn't have to drag the second gen out to the well house through the snow to power the water pump. We'll see what happens with the weather this week...

Trees are heavy. No. I mean REALLY heavy.

Yesterday and today I rolled a few more of the large rounds part of the way up the lawn. Mostly I wanted to move some of them so we could begin cleaning up the smaller branches underneath, and figure out what to do about the huge holes in what used to be the lawn. We'll have to make a concerted effort to spend an hour or two a day for the next few days rolling all these things up the hill so we can park them all for the winter. Looks like we'll have pretty warm weather though tomorrow... supposed to be 85. Only got up to 65 today, so that was nice and cool for log rolling.

we have at last count around 90 pieces of these, and they weigh between 40lb for the smaller ones to about 200lb for the ones from the base of the tree. I figure each round will split into about 10 decent sized pieces of firewood, so that's about 900 pieces. Should be enough from this tree alone to keep us warm for the entire winter of 2009. Not to mention that we already have a cord split from other down trees that we're burning this year, and about 2 cords more still unsplit from other trees. Hopefully we'll get to it all before the termites eat it completely.

Today we had a tree trimmer come out and do some work for us. He did a good job, taking down one tree completely and trimming limbs off another up to about the 100' height. Here we see the guy in the tree at about the 80' level, after he had taken off all the limbs for the whole tree, and cut off about the top third already.

Can you tell from the picture that the tree is actually leaning toward the house? That's the only reason we would cut down a beautiful healthy tree like this. And, it's on the south side of the house which is the direction from which the high winds always blow.

He dropped pieces of the trunk in about 10' sections (about 700Lb each). Here is one falling to the ground. It makes quite a thud (and an indent) when it hits the ground.


So, now we have about 90 pieces of tree on the lawn (ok it used to be a lawn), which at least have been cut into firewood sized rounds. However, I will mention that at the base, this tree is 31" in diameter, and I estimate that the base rounds each weigh between 150 to 200Lb... We'll have to escort each of these beauties up the hill behind the house to stack them someplace out of the way that we can cover them so they dry out until next year.

As it is visible in the background, I will mention that the treehouse is now covered with a tarp for the winter. I'll start in on it next Spring I think.

Last night as I was doing my rounds before bed, I peeked into the garage to discover that there was water flowing from the water heater out onto the garage floor. Never a good thing, but even less so at 9:30PM. I rushed to turn off the water to the water heater, and that seemed to stop the leak for the time being.

Spent the next day draining and removing the old unit, and purchasing a new one and installing it. Had to take an emergency day off work, but I managed to get it all done and actual hot water coming out the taps by about 3pm. Here's the new unit. Total cost was around $550. I could have elected to get a smaller unit (this was a 65Gal), but that was the size that was there. In hindsight I should have gone with the 50gal unit I think. Oh well, its done now. At least this unit will save us about 30% on the electricity that the old one used.

Today we decided that since it was cool enough and not raining, it might be a good time to get some of the log piles in the yard from the last few years of downed trees consolidated into a single pile (not on the lawn area). Its about 8' vertical and about 100' up the hill, but we managed to get about half of them rolled up the hill and stacked in a pile on some old plywood.
Even though it was cool, it was still a log of work to get about a thousand pounds of logs rolled up the hill and stacked... I would just have started splitting them except we already have about half a cord split and stacked... Perhaps I will look into a fireplace insert to keep the heat costs down this winter...

I decided today on a whim to check out my Alton 3.5KW generator, and see what kind of waveform it was putting out. I had read a few things online that caused me to wonder about the quality of the power it puts out for me... I hooked it up and measured it with my oscilloscope.

As I don't have a 10x probe at my disposal, I had to adjust the image so i could see the top of the waveform. It's not a sine wave, but it does have the general shape and only a few deformations. Much better than most of the UPS signals I have seen...

This is my secondary generator, the one that will run the well pump and pressure pump for the wellhouse in the event of a power outage - so I can have RUNNING WATER... I didn't get a chance to measure the output of the main gen that powers the house. Perhaps I will take a look at that in the near future, just for grins...

Today out in the blazing 80 degree heat, I managed to get the floor up to the treehouse and get it installed. The Doug fir is about 140' tall, and is 19" in diameter at the level of the floor. I figure it's around a hundred years old or there abouts.

I used two sheets of tongue-in-groove plywood, on top of the 2x4's and 2x6's that I managed to get put up last year. It was a little bit difficult to get the hole in the middle for the tree cut right... Had to refactor both the tree bark and the cutouts on both sides. It didn't turn out exactly square as I'd hoped it would... but it should be good enough. There's only a small gap in one corner that I can fix easily.

Next it's time to cut out the trap door, and figure out how to build the stairway up to it. Then, it's walls, roof and siding. More to follow...

Well, it's independence day again. Flags are flying. It's raining. Cassanova owns my shoe.
And he says "Yeah, what's your point?" So everything is pretty much normal around here.

Did finally get around to putting up a swing on the corner of the partially started treehouse. You can't see it in the picture, but it's what the ladder is leaning up against. The floor joists are all that's built, and up 9' on the doug fir. So I figured I'd hang the swing off the corner. It sure did make all the wood rock up there when my son was testing the swing. I had intended to put up a diagonal support for each of the 4 corners but hadn't done it yet. It was required for this one, and it made the corner rock solid, even when swinging. He sure likes to swing on his new swing too, so that's a bonus. Someday I will actually get to building the rest of the dang treehouse.