XBMC4Xbox

A project like this is something I'm looking forward to when I become an adult.

I spent another couple of days working on the farm last weekend and the floating floor is now finished and looking good even if I say so myself. Not only does it look good but is much warmer and homely like than the concrete it was prior to flooring the place. It did cost a lot of cash and took a lot of time but the finished price with me doing the labor was fairly compatible with carpet and the other alternative was to paint the floor but that was not as cheap as I expected and the place would have looked like a garage anyway. I think we took the right route.



I wanted to mount the projector screen seen here in the box but that didn't happen, not this time. I really hope it is slightly smaller than the length of the box and then I can mount it nicely between the roof beams and not have to hang it lower than then. It's a 150" motorized screen and that distance between the beams is 3 meters. When I open the box I'll see if I can fit it between or under. Fingers crossed it will fit between the beams and up flush with the ceiling if not in the ceiling. Gotta wait and see when I rip it outta the box.


Part of the design of the floor was to have a rubber insert under the door area so you can clean your shoes. This is what I can up with. I bought a cheap piece of rubber sold as a ute liner and cut it in half, one end for the front door seen here and the other for the rear door. I cut the floor to the size of the rubber and dropped it in with a hammer actually. I made it a tight fit so it wouldn't move and it doesn't.

As for the water tower tank. I needed to make the inlet pipe and set the float switches on it so they can control when to turn the pump on to fill the tank and when to turn it off so as to not over flow the tank. This is what I come up with. It has two float switches at the top and they are wired in series. Series so if one fails the other won't so twice as reliable. I really don't want the tank over flowing. When the water rises up to the level of the upper float switch it raises with the water height and opens the circuit that latches the relay on that latched when the bottom switch was original made starting the fill process that caused the relay that powers the pump to latch on via it's own contacts. The screw on lid at the top screws onto the top of the tank and seals it however there is a vent hole so the tank can breathe and not cause vapor locking.

The tank was obviously a success as I now have water pressure at the kitchen sink and the bathroom sinks...



An annoying job I had to do was tunnel under the concrete slab for the roof's down pipe and connect it to the water tank. This was part of the house that originally wasn't there, it's the kitchen / guest room extension. The down pipe was originally back at the house roof but when I extended this part of the building, I had to disconnect the old down pipe and as a result, half the house's roof wasn't going into the tank but straight onto the concrete beside the kitchen so this job was needed as to collect this water and get it into the tank.




I really needed this plumbing finished because our new 28000 liter tank we ordered in November finally arrived to supplement the 9000 liter water tank we had been using and now it needs to be placed and hooked up to take advantage of this side of the house's water we now are collecting again and I still have the workshop roof's water that needs to be hooked up. Remember, I have no town water so it is in my best interests to collect all the fresh water I can and store it in tanks for use and Australia is a dry place at times going months without rain so when it does rain, you want it in your tanks and not wasted on the ground.



It's a big bastard isn't it.

On the Sunday before I left my plant machine operator showed up after I called him during the week for some work I want him to do with his bulldozer. I'm making a few dams myself out of car tires you would be aware of but this dam which will be our biggest so far I want done with a bulldozer and that was why he was there. In this next picture you can see two tracks just down from the farm house. The dam will be going in between the two tracks and back to the forest line if pine trees. It is just a "feature dam" with no apparent use other than to look good.



He will also be removing all these tree stumps that are growing back after I chainsawed them a couple of months ago and was unable to remove them with my tractor. I nearly flipped the tractor trying and now it looks like a vineyard, stupid gum trees.


Along with most of these trees as well so as to prevent the place from burning down to the ground should and when the next bushfire or wildfire comes through. Nothing will be wasted. The stumps go towards some excellent burn off fires as does the "heads" of the trees and the trunks go towards next year's firewood for the farm house and the suburban house's woodfire heaters.

xboxprince wrote:A project like this is something I'm looking forward to when I become an adult.

Glad to give a bit of inspiration mate. This has been my dream since I left school and I am finally in a position to do it but since leaving school, (all those years ago) , I have been learning skills and trades that I am now using building this place and if I was paying others to do this work because I couldn't, it wouldn't be happening believe me. I really wish I was in this position 10 years younger because it is hard manual labor mostly and after a good couple of days at the farm, the body really knows it believe me.

As you were saying on TS the other day, that tank is a big bastard! Good to see that most of it has come together, and it looks damn good too. Well done xman!

Been a long weekend down here so 4 days down the farm with the family. My mate with the bulldozer come through nicely clearing a lot of the scrub and shit trees from around the house making a nice firebreak should a fire come in summer time. This cleared patch is the width of my suburban house block and about 3 times longer but now we're getting somewhere. Wait and see what this will turn into now that it is cleared.





It used to look like this remember......


And around the side of the house......


In the next three days the dam goes in. Just to give you some idea, the star picket is the end of the wall and my son is standing at the other end of the wall. It was laser leveled today and the tree was going but I decided, how about leaving the tree on a small island?. It will be only be just under water so a slight build up and we have an island. What a cool feature I thought.

Now the water will bank back to the bottom of the bulldozer blade, again , by laser level.


A bit of a bonus to clearing scrub is the burn off piles of logs. I now have a couple of campfires to light up.



Winter's definitely in the air. We had the woodfires burning...


This is the bar BuZz. Don't panic, it has a lot more stock than that. I had to empty it to paint inside the bar and mount the shelves. There is more than enough to level you a few weeks over, I promise...


The wife's buggy did it's first bit of work. We went out and did a bit of fence removal. Had to remove about 50 meters of star picket fence. 5 strands and a barbed top strand. I hate removing barbed fences. I feel like a pin cushion afterwards....


My modded 1000 watt inverter worked perfectly. Very happy with it. It always did the job however the small 25mm fan mounted in the end of the case sounded like a jet when the inverter was on. This standard P.C. fan mod however is silent and appears to do a better job as well.....


Next job inside the house is mounting the projector. I need a big arsed holesaw to bore a hole right in the middle of this floor. I want the projector mounted in the floor space, not hanging down so a hole in the side big enough for the lens to stick through. As you can see, it has a steel beam in there as well. This weekend I ran all the power wires from the inverter, inside the wall, connected to power points to power the fan in the heater, the motorized projector screen and finally over to the projector itself.



Well that's about is so far. It is starting to get a bit more exciting with work moving outside the house. I got my 1st load of tires down the farm this week so the 1st tire dam will be underway shortly. Thank God I have Kiwi mates that come up with ideas like building dams out of var tires aye.

you should build a moat around the house for fire protection and coolness, it is kind of hard to imagine where the dam will go it looks down hill to where your son is standing how bigger area are you damming up ?

star pickets ? id never herd them called that before "Waratahs" is the name i believe they were invented by an australian in the early in the late 1800's i did a assignment on them at school bit of useless info for you.

Yer I'll try to explain a bit better. In the previous picture, where my son's feet are and the bottom of the star picket hits the ground is the same height. The wall will go between these two points The wall will be about 1 meter high with the grass area to the left of the wall, looking towards my son will be about 1-2 meters deeper, he digs until he hits clay because the wall needs to be made of clay to seal the wall and you make the wall out of clay, not top soil. The water will bank up to the left of the wall back as far as the current location the dozer's blade is. This is probably a better picture showing where it is going...


The track to the left is the edge of the water. The dam wall goes across the tree line at the top of the picture and the track at the right is well under water. The right track is about half way to the tree that will be on the island. The interesting part is the over flow spill way that is going to be about 3 meters to the right of where I took this picture at this end of the dam. It was the best solution to avoid having water run over the new dam wall so it comes out this end. I'll have a picture so you can see what it looks like after our next visit. I also got about 50 car tires down last week so I can start on my dam I'm building down the hill in the 4 meter deep gorge that will have the fish in it. These fish are what I'll be introducing. There native to the area and at $140 per 100 fingerlings from the local hachery, I figure 200 fingerlings will kick it off nicely. They are highly desired and are illegal to sell when caught in the wild however, when bred in captivity it is perfectly legal to sell them.
http://www.nativefish.asn.au/golden.html

I can see a need for a lot more tires but it is a start. It should half build the Fish dam. I want to clear all around that gorge of scrub and leave nothing but the large trees and that will happen about August when a mate and I are going down for a full week solely to cut trees and burn off. I hope to have enough tires by then to build the vehicle crossing/ dam on the major creek that will be the source of most of our water. Once the vehicle crossing is built, I can then get vehicles all the way to the back of the property 3Kms away but until then, only quads and bikes can get past the creek that is a mere 100 meters away from the house.

do you get ducks and geese on the farm you could build a mimi for duck shooting season, is that a thing in australia?

Mums friends build an awesome lake just out of town for duck season a few hunderd meters off the main road.

They drilled under the road to supply water to his pond from a river on the other side of the road side then he decked it out with some bushes etc with a island in the middle will have to take a picture for you, i have seen them row boat into the middle dock up and sit there in the bushes.

There is also another on at the top of our road with a horse training track around it.

How are you xman? I have given up drinking and its been 5 months since...

hello, why does americans have this sistem, a tank of wather on high platform? i live in europe in a small village (i think you call it subburb) and each house has a fountain and a water pump with a small tank of 30 litters. the water is allways fresh and has a high presure.

the pump/tank looks like this:
http://www.higo.ro/product_images/w/020 ... 4_zoom.jpg

cashonly wrote:hello, why does americans have this sistem, a tank of wather on high platform? i live in europe in a small village (i think you call it subburb)

1. I doubt Xman will be too appreciative of being mistaken for an American.
2. It's a good question. Do you have a predictable supply of electricity? What happens with your instant water pump if there is an electric power failure?
3. A village is typically a self-sufficient settlement in a rural setting, a suburb is typically a part of a larger town, city or conurbation. You'll find exceptions, for example where villages have been subsumed by urban sprawl. And, of course, some villages have lost facilities in the age of cheap automated transport thus are no longer self-sufficient communities.

The different ways we get our water is quite interesting, where I live this water tower a few miles away supplies all the surrounding villages. Then we have a tank in the loft for, I think, extra pressure and if the mains fails. Although I'm fairly sure the kitchen tap is not supplied from the tank as its not considered safe to drink.
Then there's a hot water tank upstairs with a big element in it to heat the water. Trouble is the water around here is really hard so we get ridiculous amounts of lime scale which ruins heating elements.
With phase two of the extension we're ripping out most of plumbing and having on demand hot water heaters as they're meant to be more efficient, and hopefully a water softener.
You all wanted to know that didn't you

The idea of having your own water tower seems quite cool, but completely alien for this part of the world. Makes the pics here extra fascinating

spicemuseum wrote:

cashonly wrote:hello, why does americans have this sistem, a tank of wather on high platform? i live in europe in a small village (i think you call it subburb)

1. I doubt Xman will be too appreciative of being mistaken for an American.

I'm not offended being called American, I'm rather overwhelmed someone from Europe, Cashonly, and England in your case Spice and Asbo has an interest in my thread. Thank you boys for showing an interest.

cashonly wrote: 2. It's a good question. Do you have a predictable supply of electricity? What happens with your instant water pump if there is an electric power failure?

There are a few reasons I use the system I do. I don't have town power, water , sewage or gas so everything has to be supplied by me and needs to be efficient. The water tower requires power for the pump only when the water level in the tank is low. It is a 1000 liter tank, black so no algae can grow in it, (every other colour tank of that style is not human water suitable for that reason). When the level drops to about 200 liters, the pumps starts and fills the tank to about 850 liters and then switches off. There are a few conditions to that also. It will only pump in daylight hours. There is a switch to the pump's power supply that prevents the pump sucking it's power unless the solar panels are producing power so as to not drain the batteries during the night and only when the batteries are being recharged. There is an override switch but that is if you absolutely need it. I do have a "pressure pump" but locals have had bad issues with them such as-
A hole in your plumbing will fool the pump into continuous pumping till your water tanks are empty. My neighbor filled his lounge room in his house with 28000 liters of water after a copper pipe in his roof cracked when the cold froze the water inside it and cracked the plumbing. My plumbing isn't copper, it's plastic that is rated at -60c. He also told me when having a shower, the pressure pump would start up and stop repeatedly making the shower go hot and cold. That would really piss off my wife.

asbo wrote:The different ways we get our water is quite interesting, where I live this water tower a few miles away supplies all the surrounding villages.
Again boys, thanks for the interest in the post thread. I get a lot of good ideas from you guys such as making dams out of car tires etc.

watertower.jpg

Then we have a tank in the loft for, I think, extra pressure and if the mains fails. Although I'm fairly sure the kitchen tap is not supplied from the tank as its not considered safe to drink.
Then there's a hot water tank upstairs with a big element in it to heat the water. Trouble is the water around here is really hard so we get ridiculous amounts of lime scale which ruins heating elements.
With phase two of the extension we're ripping out most of plumbing and having on demand hot water heaters as they're meant to be more efficient, and hopefully a water softener.
You all wanted to know that didn't you

The idea of having your own water tower seems quite cool, but completely alien for this part of the world. Makes the pics here extra fascinating

We have very similar water tanks here Asbo however they are usually much larger and sit directly on the ground because they would weigh so much and are made of steel or concrete. They are big enough to supply the suburb for a full day and refill via pumps from a dam once a day. There are situated on a high hill around the suburb somewhere so pressure is always at a constant pressure. A few things you may like to consider when fitting your tanks in your house.
1000 liters of water weighs 1 metric tonne. Make your pipe runs from the tank down to your tap level in large pipe, I first used 13mm pipe, (1/2") and went back and changed it to 20mm, (3/4") because the pressure wasn't sufficient. That larger pipe more than doubled the pressure. This would never had been an issue in the past but modern tap mixers and toilet cystens have pressure reducers fitted in them to save water and quieten down toilets that are designed to run on full mains pressure. I had to remove these in my system after finding toilets that wouldn't refill more than a drip at a time.

Love this thread xman also here in Northumberland UK on the subject of water tanks , a flying saucer one here not far from home in Bedlington at Morwick

xman: Your build is looking great! Appreciate the bar - I'll be right over

hawsey wrote:Love this thread xman also here in Northumberland UK on the subject of water tanks , a flying saucer one here not far from home in Bedlington at Morwick

I love those flying saucer ones

There's an old brick one near me that they're converting into flats, pics here and here if anyone is interested.

Apologies for the slight hijack xman.

Anything going on with this anymore? I always enjoyed this thread

I haven't been down the farm for over 6 weeks now because of work and home based issues and that is the only reason I haven't updated the post. It will continue. Thanks for the encouragement though.

hello, if we still talk about water, here in eastern europe we hot weld the pipes (ppr pipes):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRT8eI5gCms
i see that in america (dont know about australia) the method is to glue them together. what pipes do you use?

Ooh so the pipes are sort of melted together?
From what I've seen here in the UK plastic pipes use threaded compression fittings, that might not be the norm though. In our house the pipes are all copper and brazed together.

Keen to see more xman

Yeah I was wondering what had happened.. no updates for a while....

Please please please stop putting plywood in your ceilings!!!!!! you're worrying me! - Gyproc is used to create a fire check between floors... ply is an inferno!