Home Improvement

Backyard Fiber Update 2

You ever have one of those moments where you realize that what you've actually been doing is not at all what you thought you were doing?

Yeah. I had one of those a couple weeks ago.

See, I thought I was just installing some fiber in the back yard to get my shed gear off of a lightning-prone shallowly buried cat5e connection. What I actually ended up doing is rebuilding my home network (almost) from scratch while maintaining a passable SLA. A real ship of theseus type of deal.

Backyard Fiber Update 1

Today is day one of three installation days. Yesterday they came and dug the trenches and today they're starting to put in the electrical and gas for the generator.

Tomorrow and possibly the next day are for actually hooking everything up.

When that's all taken care of I'll still be waiting on FS.com to build and ship the fiber assemblies that will go in the conduits.

Sigh.

At least I can finalize some other decisions while I wait for other people to do their thing.

Backyard Fiber

We moved into our current house in the middle of 2020. Between then and now (end of March 2023) we've experienced at least one power outage per year longer than 12 hours, the most recent of which was five days due to a historically bad ice storm. We were lucky to get a hotel room that let us stay the entire time, but we still had to discard a fridge and a freezer full of food.

Even at our old house we had been throwing around the idea of getting a whole home generator, but it was always just too expensive. This most recent event put us over the edge, though, and so now we have a generator in the yard waiting to be hooked up next week.

As part of this work, the contractors happen to be installing trenches exactly where I've wanted them since we moved in, so I'm having them put some low voltage conduit into the trenches and running it into junction boxes.