Overdue Update

This post was originally published on golifelog.com.

So, I know, it has been a while since I’ve given you guys an update. So here it is.

For the past months, I’ve been actively working on the house. Installing the AC, buying wood to burn (for the small stove in the living room and for the main heater), getting some oil for burning (dual heating system). And in the last couple of weeks I also got a bunch of freelance projects aligned.

But let’s talk about the house first. Everything has been going relatively well so far, the AC is working great and made sleep through the summer a lot more bearable than in the Apartment. Although, the hottest days were over when we installed it, I’m quite pleased and thankful we installed it right away. As with the starting of the winter, some of my water pumps in the heating system were on strike.

Then, when I first tried to get the wood oven in the basement started, I almost blew it up right away, as it got quite hot, but as written, the pumps were striking. Well, it turns out you can “easily” open them, push them a bit to get them going again. I guess they were on strike because they haven’t been run in quite a while. So crises averted there. And luckily the AC was there to jump in.

This week I’m experimenting with starting the wood burner right in the morning, to keep the house warm solely on wood ( it’s cheaper than oil currently). And although I’ve got two massive 1000 litre hot water puffer tanks for storing the produced heat, I notice they get depleted overnight (going from about 70 to 80 °C to under 50 °C). So to fully heat the house with wood, I have to keep the burner running throughout the day, which isn’t really a problem working remote anyways. Nevertheless, it is still way more of a hassle than letting the Oil do its thing. I’m also going through wood relatively quickly, but that’s kinda expected, as the burner is from the eighties and not nearly as efficient as a new wood gas would be.

Besides that, I got the remaining radiator valves changed to new ones, so I could mount smart thermostats on them. I originally planned to also change the warm water tank, but money is limited. 🙈

On the home automation side, I got a bunch of things working nowadays. The AC turns off if I’m out of the house for a longer time, almost all lights got smart switches, and I’m preparing to install motion detectors in the hallway and office part. Touching switches is so 2000 🙈.

Next week I plan to isolate the heating pipes running in the basement, although it probably won’t bring a huge improvement, it still should prevent garage heating (which isn’t insulated) and let everything run a bit more efficient.

On the freelance side, a relatively long hosting customer called in summer, as the partner I was doing some business with didn’t respond anymore. I spent a few afternoons at the customer’s place to do an assessment of what would be necessary in the coming weeks (a few new pcs and some networking stuff). I didn’t complete the work yet, but the plan is there to finish stuff in January.

Another client contacted me later on because his wife wants to switch hosting to me, as her previous provider is now charging extra for older PHP versions. She’s got a relatively old Joomla installation, so that’s another task for the holidays.

Then, back in November, one of my clients referred a new project. A newly renovated gym which needed networking. I was there, thought, I spent an afternoon ordering the equipment and setting up one PC and two laptops. Well, it turned out I also had to take over some of the access management (the networking and setup part at least) and there are also Tablets (for POS) now. 🙈 So the last two (or three?) weeks have been packed with getting everything there online. I’m not 100% satisfied with the setup yet, so I guess it will be at least another few hours I have to spend there.

But the upside is, the electrician doing the wiring of the gym was quite pleased with my work and announced if I wanted to do more freelance networking stuff, they’d be open to refer clients. They also got a quite hefty setup on there on, which I’ll have a look at probably next year, and potentially take over.

On the YouTube / Twitch side, I did some livestreams with my brother on the Minecraft Multiplayer project that emerged, but with all things going on I have to admit, I let the whole content creator project lay on the side a bit. But I managed to put some time away to relaunch my content creator website (https://haidy777.com/), including a section for my brother (but still WIP).

I think I tackled most of the things that were going on recently (and not so recently). Oh, yes, the apartment still isn’t sold, sadly. I hope the broker finds someone in the next couple of months.

I’m not sure if I’m going to write here now more actively again, but I think it is time to get more into the habit of public diary once more. We’ll see.

PS: Another thing that just jumped into my mind, with all the ongoing things I wasn’t quite able to hit the gym as often as planned, but the time for that will be coming back. One thing, I can share tho, I managed to get my weight down from above 100 kilograms to about 90. The end goal is still below 80, but it’s quite pleasing to see eating better and regular workouts play a huge role.