Starlink Install

The only Internet option available to us for the last year has been T-Mobile home Internet. It's been barely adequate-to-unusable.  For the most part it's about 5 Mbps down / 1 Mpbs up, although it seems to have improved more recently. The problem is that it seems to cut-out almost entirely at unpredicatable times, especially when we're trying to watch movies in the evening. And when there are weekend crowds at Stevens Pass. 

The Home LTE hotspot is located in the bunk room window on the second floor -- a less than ideal location, since the Google Mesh and Lutron controllers are sitting next to it in the window sill. I was able to sign-up for the Starlink beta in April, and they finally green-lighted me in September. The dish arrived 2 weeks ago. 

Starlink requires a clear view of a fairly wide section of the sky, especially to the north. KnArrow Haus is surrounded by mountains to the North and South, and a handful of tall trees to the North, South and West. I realized pretty quickly it would need to be mounted sturdily above the roof line and away from snow shedding events. 

Because I couldn't find a ready-made bracket, I made my own. After trip to Everett Steel and then to Karlin's Homemade Old-fashioned Rootbeer and Amature Welding Emporium I was on my way with an L-shaped, steel pole to bolt to the lower roof beam on the front of the house. 

Custom Starlink mounting pole.

I spent an afternoon drilling holes and grinding/smoothing the welds; then a couple coats of black paint. Unfortunately, a neighbor's 34' ladder ladder just wasn't quite tall enough to reach the roof...

With some help from a friend, I procured a 40' ladder and had him haul it up to the cabin on the weekend. I'm planning to store the ladder on the side of KnArrow Haus with a locking bracket so that we can use the ladder whenever we need it without it "walking off."

What follows are the pictures of the 40' ladder and our creative efforts to mount the post bracket and attach the Starlink satellite dish to it.

Eyeballing the task at hand.

Colin heading up with Abbie, Richard and myself steadying the ladder.

With one bolt securing the bracket to the beam,
rotating it upright proved more involved than
we anticipated, especially at the dizzying heights.
Colin's brother was on the roof pulling on the rope.

Pic taken inside the bunkroom.

The post mounted, we gently hauled
the Starlink dish up on a line.

Colin anchored the top of the ladder to the beam
with some webbing. Then he anchored himself in his
climbing harness to the ladder so that he could lean
back comfortably to set the dish on top of the pole. 

The finished installation. 

For now, I let the cable hang down and ran it under the garage door. Getting it running couldn't have been easier. Plug in the cable from the dish to the power box, then plug the box in to the wall, and wait a few minutes. The Starlink dish automatically points itself skyward, and starts to deliver bandwidth after about 10 minutes, which gradually improved over the next 15 minutes. 

In the monitoring app, we didn't experience any outages longer than a second, but I'll have to wait for at least 12 hours to figure out if the the trees are out of the field of service enough that it will be reliable long-term.

I don't think the Starlink dish improves the KnArrow Haus aesthetic much, but it definitely improves the bandwidth. Movies in hi-def from now on...

Bandwidth test after about 15 minutes.

Next week I will run the cable and secure it down the side of the house and in to the laundry/utility room.  Unfortunately, the conduit I ran to route Internet Cat-5 cable from the outside in to the utility room is only half-inch, and the Starlink cable needs a 3/4" hole... I'll have to figure out a new route in to the laundry room through the garage.

Garage door cleanup

The garage door has been asking for some final trim for a while now. I had a few pieces of Ipe' left over that I was able to use, and literally just enough screws to get all the boards attached. 

Garage door trimmed in ipe'.

After the drywall was installed 2 years ago, I realized I'd forgotten to insulate above the garage door so I sprayed some foam in. It was November and cold when I did that, and the foam lay dormant over the winter. Then when things warmed up, the spray foam expanded and bent the drywall out so that it prevented the garage door from opening. We've been limping by for a year now by pulling on the top of the door before pulling up.

I pulled off the drywall above the garage door and sawed off the excess foam.

Spray foam sawed off above garage door.

Pine installed over the foam above the garage door.

I have some blue pine left over from the interior window walls and basement ceilings that worked nicely to cover the insulation above the door. The garage door opens without coaxing now. Now I just need to wash down the outside -- it's filthy, dusty. 

Fireplace mantel and speaker bar

Installing the fireplace mantel was more work than I was hoping. I bought one of the fany new floating shelf brackets that supposed to be easy to install and hold over 200 lbs. The mantel isn't that heavy, but I wanted to make sure it was stable. 

After sanding and finishing the exterior, I proceeded to route out the back to receive the male part of the bracket. That was a lot of work. An inch wide and three-quarters of an inch deep. The female bracket on the wall also needed to be perfectly straight on the wall. It took several attempts for Abbie, Colin and me wrestling to get it on.

Fireplace mantel and speaker installed.

Sideview of the floating mantel.

I angle trimmed and sanded the end of the mantel to prevent anyone coming down the stairs from getting caught up on it -- it's right at an adolescent head height. 

While I was at it, I got a Samsung speaker bar with subwoofer. The TV's sound just wasn't quite sufficient.

Summer Maintenance

Summer is the time to get all the maintenance stuff done. Schneewagen was in desparate need of an oil change, and the transmission has been causing problems. not getting in to gear smoothly. I borrowed a trailer from one friend, a trailer hitch from another friend, and a pickup truck from a third friend to retrieve Schneewagen and bring it to the lowlands for service.

Retrieving Schneewagen for service in the lowlands.

It turns out that the oil change fixed the transmission issues as well. Because its a wet transmission and the snow tracks take extra effort to turn, they encouraged me to change the oil more frequently. Problem solved. Set for the winter. (Thanks to friends.)