I’m no longer quite the home improvement addict I used to be “back in the day”, but in the wintertime, I like to have at least one project to keep me busy around the house. Otherwise, I end up wasting too much time on the computer when I’m home. As I wrote earlier, I’m currently working on some home LAN upgrades. I’ve had something of an epiphany in the 3 days since that post. After waffling over where I should mount my switches and run my new wires, I did some reading and learned more about structured wiring, and now, rather than terminating my wiring at switch ports, I’m installing CAT-6 patch panels. That will give me permanent termination points for all of my existing wiring, which I can then patch into switches as needed. Right now, I’m in the process of wiring the first panel up in the basement boiler room, which will handle all of the cabling that runs through the west half of the basement. There are two existing CAT-5e cables that run from this area up to the switch in the library closet. My original plan was to run a single CAT-6 uplink and pull the two CAT-5e cables out, but now I’m going to leave the latter in place as well, and terminate them at the patch panel I intend to install in the library closet. That will let me move things around between the basement and upstairs switches as needed, just by moving patch cables around. The more I think about it, the more I understand why large enterprise LANs are wired this way. It might be overkill for most houses, but for this house with all of its wiring challenges, I think it makes a lot of sense. After I finish the basement, I’ll move on to the library closet. After that, I want to put something on the east side of the house, but I haven’t made up my mind exactly where yet.
My next project arose out of necessity. Our pool is losing water at a rather alarming rate in the winter. This year, it is down over 2 feet since we closed it. Before the big 2026 SnowCrete Apocapalypse, we took the cover off, as the water level was too low to support a snow load on the cover. That gave me an opportunity to observe the water level every day. It continued to drop for a while, and now it seems to finally have stabilized at around where the light fixture conduit enters the pool in the shallow end (the deep end conduit is a couple inches lower). This is a common place for in-ground concrete pools to start leaking, as the sealant starts to fail over time. I suspect that what sealant is still there is hardening and shrinking in the winter, causing the pool to lose water in cold weather (it doesn’t seem to lose water nearly as fast in the summer).
Today, with the pool water mostly un-frozen, I put my hip waders on, got in the pool, and pulled the shallow-end light fixture out. Then, I looked over and saw that the deep-end fixture had fallen out of its niche on its own. Not sure how or when that happened, but I’m guessing it might have been from freeze-thaw, with the water level being so low. I took a couple of photos of the shallow end niche, but after some recent rain, the conduit opening was still underwater, and it was a little hard to see how much (if any) sealant was there. Before the water leaks back down, I think I’m going to try to do a dye test to confirm that it’s leaking there. Regardless, I think it’s about time for new light fixtures. The existing fixtures still work, but they’re very old 500-watt monsters made by Paragon, a company that is no longer around.1 A company called Spa Electrics makes a nice-looking retrofit 12-volt LED fixture that I think I could use. Two lights plus a required transformer will set me back $1700 or so (nothing is cheap in the world of pools) but with the pool already partially drained, and needing to fix the leak either way, it seems like a good time to take the plunge (no pun intended).
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