We spent several nights last week with Praew’s mother living in BaanMae during some of the hottest days (and nights) of the year. We don’t have air conditioning in the house and we aren’t really planning on getting any. The hope was that the unique design of the house would allow it to be pleasant…
Peaceful life on the land
These last few days have been more rustic than any I can remember. Waking up in the morning and making a simple breakfast of eggs (fresh from our chickens!), sausage and toasted croissant in our little outdoor kitchen. After breakfast, we feed the dogs and make some minor repairs and upgrades around the house to…
Moving in to BaanMae
Over the Songkran holiday, we moved in to BaanMae. At the risk of being philosophical, take a moment to consider the way a piece of land gets building materials assembled on top of it and it becomes a house, and you can spend some time in this house. But then something less tangible gets added…
Prototype light switch and dimmer
I’ve been going around and putting finishing touches on the many projects that I’ve written about previously. I wrote previously about the custom solar powered LED light system that we built, but we hadn’t come up with a nice aesthetically pleasing design for a light switch and dimmer knob to control it. So we hacked…
A dead baby monitor lizard
We were busy today cleaning up and making things nicer for actually living here. Mostly just organizing and putting the construction stuff into storage boxes to organize it. But in the morning, the dogs on our land discovered a baby monitor lizard that wandered in and killed it. This little guy was about 50-60cm long…
Miscellaneous day
Today was a busy day, but not much of anything exciting. We spent the day putting the finishing touches on other projects that were mostly completed but just needed a little bit something to be “done”. We: Crimped the permanent wires and connectors needed to run the solar powered DC water pump that was previously installed….
Next test of prototype walkway lights
I wrote yesterday about hacking a 220V AC walkway light to use 4 of our 7W LEDs. After testing it, it was painfully bright. We intend to put individual dimmer circuits on each light pole, but why waste money on unneeded LEDs just to dim them? So we switched it out to a single LED…
The wire I forgot
I wrote previously about the complicated wiring I ran between the two houses, the main utility box, the walkway lights, and the pumps. It contained wires for LAN, telephone, 220V mains electricity, 24V DC, and more. As we closed up, I worried that something would come up that I forgot. Well, I forgot one. We…
DC solar powered walkway lights
We weren’t so happy with our options for outdoor DC walkway lights so we decided to try buying normal AC walkway lights and hacking it. We decided to buy this model from HomePro for hacking: (The photo here is at HomePro and shows it with an AC 220V compact flourescent bulb inside for display.) It…
An experimental gable window
On BaanRimNaam, we’ve decided to experiment with a gable window that can open for air flow. Here is a picture of the gable on the house with no window in it: Since the roof is fairly high, a window up there would need some kind of mechanism to be opened by a person standing on…
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