When I first stumbled across the announcement for this movie, I was super excited.
I mean, if there’s ever been a movie that seems to be tailored for me, this has got to be it, right?!
That said, by the time I got to the end of it – frankly, I was kind of bored and disappointed…
I mean, I like Neil Patrick Harris just as much as the rest of us, but the entire story is a flashback-style didn’t sit great with me off the bat. It took a while before I made the connection that it was basically a geeky remake of A Christmas Story, though I didn’t think it focused quite enough on the actual video games to pull it off.
There were some nuances that just bugged me, like the Power Glove being included even though it didn’t come out until later, and in the trailer there’s a scene where a janitor is describing a Black Friday stampede seemingly for the NES … only to find that in the movie, there’s a different logo on the wall because he’s actually talking about a stampede for Cabbage Patch Kids instead!
I know that they do that in movie trailers from time to time in an attempt to maintain surprises – in Avengers: Endgame, the part in the trailer where Captain America is arm wrestling Thanos shows only a couple of Infinity Stones in the gauntlet, whereas in reality that was at the end of the movie and he had collected all of them except for the Mind Stone.
I get it, but I don’t really like it.
As for the disappointment at the end – *** SPOILER ALERT *** I was really cheesed that we didn’t even get a big moment with him unwrapping an NES and going crazy on Christmas morning because it felt like the whole movie had been building to that, only to decide at the 11th hour that they wanted to end on a completely different kind of movie. Again, thinking that video games were the focus of the movie, it was a disappointment to instead have a story about a kid who played video games but also did a bunch of other stuff.
I think that trying to make a new Christmas movie in particular is a challenge because so much of what we love about the classics is nostalgic … just like those games themselves, a lot of them aren’t really very good movies these days, yet they transport us back to a simpler time when we were kids and that’s half the reason why we get such a kick out of revisiting them year after year after year.
So I guess it’s tough for a movie that’s made for my generation to really hit when they don’t fully commit to the concept, whether they set out to make a video game movie and just slipped on the proverbial icy patch along the way or if the Nintendo was really just a prop in an otherwise father and son tale all along.
I think they could’ve done the NES a lot better than this.
I’ve really missed a Christmas light display like this since Disney got rid of the Osborne Family Lights at Hollywood Studios a few years ago, so when I saw that the Give Kids the World Villagewas putting on this new event again, I jumped on picking up tickets for us right away!
I was immediately impressed to find that the event had all of the best parts of the Osborne Lights, but without the heavy theme park crowds because there was clearly a lot more space to work with, so whereas the Osborne Lights were almost always elbow to elbow, here at Give Kids the World the streets were nearly empty with just small groups casually taking photos and enjoying the presentation.
Granted, I don’t know how much of this is due to COVID – this is only their second year, so they’ve only ever existed under pandemic conditions … it’ll be interesting to see how that changes as this thing eventually dies down…
Once we got back into the sponsored part of the exhibit, the kids really loved having all sorts of things to interact with and it was neat seeing all sorts of local attractions coming together in one place for a common goal. Legoland, Universal, Margaritaville, Gatorland, and Ripley’s were some family favorites for us!
Now admittedly, and also a bit unexpectedly, parts of the evening were certainly a bit somber as we were randomly reminded of the real purpose of the Village, which is to give vacations to sick kids and their families during otherwise terrible times in their lives. There were decorations colored by some of the kids themselves, at one point we went on a tram tour that took us around the actual houses – also fully decorated – where families were currently staying.
At one point, our own kids asked if they could come stay there sometime because it looked like so much fun, and it was hard to explain that while yes, they’ve “been sick” and had hospital stays and even spent their earliest days under critical care in the NICU, it wasn’t on the same level as the kids who come here because they’re struggling withcancer or other life-threatening diseases … the kinds that people don’t necessarily “get better” from.
Still, at times it was also a quaint reminder to savor all of the smiles that our kids beamed as we explored the lights together and also spent plenty of time watching them run around with other kids on the playground in the middle of the Village. Plus, it made the prices a little easier to stomach knowing that all of the proceeds from tickets and food and merch were going to a good cause instead of simply a shareholder’s next dividend check!
Seriously, it had me pondering all night long why Disney never did something like this as a non-profit, although in their defense apparently they did donate a bunch of the lights and the workforce to help put them up, and they do host Make a Wish families in the parks themselves...
I don’t know – maybe in ways it’s better having something like this being a third-party, not operated by one company where the entire community can rally around it to help these kids.
By the time we were all cold enough to call it a night, I think it’s safe to say that everyone felt very much merry and bright, and it was a fantastic way to help kick off the holiday season that I wouldn’t hesitate to do again in the future. In fact, the kids asked on the shuttle bus ride back to the car if we could do it again next year, so that seemed like a pretty good sign to me!
I’m happy to report that as of this weekend, our entire family has been vaccinated against COVID-19 with the kids getting their first Pfizer shots on Saturday!
Frankly, I hate how political this vaccine has gotten and I have a hard time understanding anyone’s justification for not getting it after over five million people have died from COVID globally since this pandemic started, well, 625 days ago…
But that’s not what I wanted to focus on when I set out to write this post because if anything, having our kids vaccinated is a huge relief for my wife and I because it represents the next big step towards getting back to normal … whatever that even is anymore. A lot of our habits and things we would do as a family have changed over the last two years, although some of them are honestly just as much to blame on the age of the kids as they are on the virus itself.
Eating out, for example, certainly isn’t something that I look forward to when I have to spend most of my meal chasing kids and begging them to sit in their seats and not make a gigantic mess of everything within reach at the table!
Going to the store is something that I’ve done with the kids one-on-one, even with Matthew recently, as long as they’re being good about wearing their masks.
And of course, theme parks have been out of the question, although I think now with everyone vaccinated we’re just about ready to try hitting up Legoland on the weekend again if they can hook us up with a good enough deal this week for Black Friday! 😉
Whether we’ll still wear masks on occasion when we’re out and about is probably up in the air – I had to make a grocery run to Publix earlier today and wore mine, even though very few non-employees had them on anymore. In that scenario, it almost feels like a gesture of good faith if service workers are going to be required to wear them, going back to the mantra all along that we wear masks to protect the other people around us while they wear them to protect us.
I’ll probably write a more in depth post in the near future about lessons learned from this crazy pandemic, but if nothing else, I really hope that my kids have picked up something about being compassionate for the people around us because despite friends and family having caught COVID to varying degrees along the way, we’re very lucky that none of us directly have gotten it.
Sure, the survival rate for COVID globally has been somewhere around 98% and we know skews higher for younger people, but we mustn’t forget that the five million dead figure that I cited earlier comes from a quarter of a billion people on Earth catching COVID … “only 2%” of 250,000,000 is 5,000,000, and that’s not even taking into account cases and deaths in developing countries that may be underreported or long-term effects that we won’t know the fully impact of for years to come.
So like I said, I’m very thankful that my family was able to add this level of protection to the masking and social distancing and other measures we’ve been taking since this whole thing came to light some twenty months ago at this point. I wish that more people would get vaccinated – as we stand, the USA has roughly 59% fully vaccinated and 69% partially vaccinated – because I don’t know what it’ll truly take to move into the next phase for this thing when more than just the deniers are able to put it behind them.
But we’re doing our part, along with nearly three million other kids to date. And that’s something.
I added a few more disks to my NAS when Best Buy put them on sale earlier this month, so now we’re officially up to a whopping 20 disks including parity in my Unraid array!
Of the 122 TB in use (now out of 208 TB!), about 108 TB is for Plex, and of that the split is roughly 80 TB for TV Shows and 25 TB for Movies … it’s basically a giant DVR where nothing ever gets deleted because who knows when you might want to go back and watch The Big Sandwich episode of Wings on a random Tuesday night?!
I know that I’ll never watch half the stuff on there, but everyone needs a hobby and at least data hoarding takes up a lot less space than regular hoarding does… 😉
I like to think that I’ve come a long way since I first started noodling around with Plex back in … wow – 2014?!
What was first an install on my old desktop PC with way too many external hard drives tethered to it via USB has since grown to span several separate servers for NAS, downloading stuff, and Plex itself. Pretty much everything has disk redundancy via either RAID or Unraid, and although only a small portion of my media library itself is backed up, the rest is backed up in triplicate between images of the entire VMs themselves, local backups on the NAS, and then cloud backups to Backblaze as well.
So then why did it take me nearly a day to restore Plex when I had a random glitch earlier this week???
I’m still not really sure what happened. I came home to find that one of my two UPSes had powered down, which turned off all of my network gear but otherwise the servers themselves were still running as they’re connected to both UPSes with redundant power supplies.
Once I got the network back up, I found that Plex wasn’t responding – likely because it lost its direct connection to the NAS – so I was going to reboot it once everything was back up, except it didn’t want to respond. After waiting a while and shutting down the other VMs correctly, I finally had to kill the power to get ESXi to reboot and when it came up, Plex wouldn’t start because one file – Preferences.xml – was suddenly empty!
Of course, as you might groan along with me, that’s the file where Plex stores all of your server settings – port forwarding, tweaks to the scanning rules that I’ve made over the years.
I didn’t really want to redo everything, so I figured I’d just restore it from the backup. I use Duplicati for all of my backups and having done a few restores, it’s usually super simple. Just pick what you want to restore, where to drop the files, and you’re all set.
…except that in my previous restores, those datasets probably consisted of thousands of files whereas the backup for my Plex folder runs upwards of a million files.
😯
And apparently this is problematic because when Duplicati makes its list of files to restore from, naturally it has to traverse the entire dataset. My first two or three attempts all failed miserably because it would just spin at each of the top folders and then eventually another backup process would try to start and lock the database, thus killing everything in the process!
Once I realized to turn the other backup task off, it was A LONG WAIT in between each level, but after maybe an hour and a half just to browse to the file, the actual restore literally took maybe 2 minutes!
If Duplicati had a way for me to restore by path instead of using the GUI, it would’ve been a lot simpler.
Or if the backup files got stored by Duplicati on Backblaze in a way I could browse them remotely instead of as encrypted archive files, that would’ve worked, too.
In hindsight, I think what I need to do is write a simple script to tar up Plex’s Metadata folder before backing it up so that it’s one file instead of 600,000, and that might win me a few favors with the Duplicati gods.
I just noticed that my last blog post was a little bleak, and yet today although I’m still faced with several of the same ongoing challenges … dare I say I’m actually feeling pretty ok?
I think I attribute almost all of it to exercise, believe it or not. Last weekend I took Ollie for our first walk doing the old 3.5 mile loop around our neighborhood that Cleo and I used to take long ago before the kids were born, and even though we were both definitely dragging by the time we found our way back home about 80 minutes later, it was a profound sense of accomplishment that I haven’t felt about really anything physical in a long time!
It certainly helped that afterwards I took a dip in the pool – all by myself … in 86 degree water – which is a bit less than the 90 degrees that I’ve been enjoying with the kids during the day, but after a long walk dripping with sweat and muscles aching, it was pretty much the perfect way to wrap up an evening.
In fact, last night I did my second walk after resting for a couple of days and despite the air being a little cooler, it was still pretty freaking awesome – there was actually steam coming off of the water while I was floating around because the water itself was 85 degrees while the air was something like 65!
Anyways, one thing I realized while I was unwinding last night was all of the benefits that taking the time to do this even just a couple of days a week gave me. I’ve made a couple of chapters’ progress in the book that I’m listening to, which itself is also inspirational. It’s given me time to decompress my brain and work through problems while I’m walking. It’s also just really relaxing, with blissful quiet and the stars twinkling overhead.
Plus, needless to say Ollie loves it! Saturday night we saw some deer that really threw him off guard, and last night we saw some cranes just chilling in a pond by the sidewalk and he didn’t know what to make of them. 🙂
I think it’s helping to put me in a better headspace to take on other challenges throughout the day, as well as be more conscious about what I’m eating, which is important because I really need to lose weight at this point.
But I’m trying to take it nice and slow, without expectations of trying to walk every other day or even on specific days of the week. My life in general is very dynamic right now, so if I can plan out most of my day the night before, there’s a chance it might actually turn out that way. And I figure if over the course of a week, I can fit in maybe 2-3 walks in the evenings … or even during the day once it starts getting cooler at night … once I build up a decent routine that seems like it’s working, I can always try to supplement it with some time on the elliptical or even swimming laps out in the pool.
We’ll see what happens between now and whenever I feel inspired to write my next post! 😉
It’s one of those times when the culmination of things either rumbling in perpetuity or looming in the distance have me feeling very overwhelmed and woefully unproductive. A perfect storm of anxiety and depression and a little despair, and as much as I push to just get through each day, it’s there waiting for me again whenever I finally wake up the next day…
I’m currently in the process of replacing my entire team (of 2) at work after one sadly passed away this summer and the other resigned to move on to something new. This is the first time I’ve ever hired anyone, so I’m a little apprehensive about that, but I think more so trying to figure out how my team will work going forward as I transition from experienced engineers to people who are brand new and will require a lot more hands on support from me.
On top of that, it seems like everything is breaking at work quicker than we can fix it, which is equally daunting with my last teammate leaving in just a couple of short weeks.
Next week I also have to do a sleep study, which is basically an insurance technicality to confirm that I still have the sleep apnea that was diagnosed 10+ years ago so that they’ll pay for a replacement CPAP machine for me. This has me anxious because in order for the test to be accurate, I have to go off my machine for three nights, meaning that I’m going to be tired and groggy and miserable because by now I know that I get absolute garbage sleep without it.
Seriously, as much as I hate using the thing, I know that I can’t sleep without it – even naps on the couch leave me feeling more tired than when I lay down – but it’s something that I have to endure because I’ve had just the one machine this entire time and apparently I’m lucky that it didn’t die on me years ago!
And of course, all of this has driven both my time as well as my desire for writing into the ground, which sucks because before it really hit a few weeks ago, I was just starting to make some progress on a few things again. 🙁
It hasn’t all been negative recently, however, as I’ve managed to get a handful of random projects done in an effort to distract myself from all of the other stress:
I rewired and did some necessary cable management behind the TV in our living room.
I added 10-gigabit NICs to two of my servers at home, and was reminded something important about troubleshooting in the process. “Correlation does not mean causation!”
I also crawled up into the attic and routed the cable so that I could finally mount our wifi access point to the ceiling.
I made a small, but pivotal dent in starting to clean our garage.
And I think I might’ve finally found a solution for managing our kids’ iPads to make that whole process a little less cumbersome. (more on this soon!)
We’re also just today getting a bunch of deliveries to give our playroom/Sara’s school room a much needed overhaul, so even though it’s going to mean a lot of work for me this weekend tearing down all of my old Lego shelves and putting together new bookshelves from Ikea, I’m looking forward to the end result and seeing that room transform into something a little more organized and less cluttered.
I feel like right now the best I can do is choose one or two things a day to focus on, and then in the meantime just do what I can to keep everything else at bay until such time that I can give them the attention that they actually need. I know that with some of this stuff, in particular hiring, I realistically won’t feel great about until probably six months after I hire people and build up a new rapport working with them, so some of this stress is here for the long haul.
Albeit more slowly than I would like, things will eventually get done and one by one I can start to put more of this stuff behind me … and then new things will present themselves to take their place, and we can start this whole mess all over again!
Well, hopefully not as overwhelmingly next time, mind you. 😛
Today is the first day that I’ve ever been in our attic.
Well, I’ve stood on a ladder with my head in the little hole before, typically just long enough to decide, “Nope!” and figure out something else to do that didn’t involve combining my fears of heights and enclosed spaces and falling through the ceiling and breaking any number of limbs…
But today I actually had to go inside because I wanted to finally get the cable for our wifi access point off the floor and mount it to the ceiling properly.
I’ve watched a lot of videos of people running cabling through their attics, so I figured it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but little did I know that falling through the ceiling is only one of many things one has to worry about in the attic! The big one is, well, attics aren’t really designed for larger people to fumble about up there – between all of the insulation and air ducts and random ceiling joists, it’s not like there’s just a straight shot across the house up there and there certainly wasn’t any standing room like I’d seen on YouTube! I found tons of dividers (firewalls?) and just extremely cramped quarters and exposed nails and sharp metal to avoid, but by the time I’d mustered the nerve to get up there I was determined to see it through.
Even though I had drilled my hole from the other side and shoved a bunch of the wire through, I hadn’t thought about the insulation hiding everything so I had a hard time finding where I was supposed to be going until I finally had my wife grab a pole and tap on the ceiling where I needed to go … which at that point was almost comical because not only had I been climbing in the wrong direction in the attic, but it was literally only a couple of feet from the hole whereas I had to have been somewhere in the middle of the living room by that point.
The other end of the cable needed to run into our bedroom closet which is where all of the servers are located, which also ended up being a chore because I guess you never think about how all of these unique ledges and shapes are represented in the actual walls behind the drywall. In this case, there’s this weird “inverse ledge” in our closet where part of the ceiling is lower than the rest … which is where I had originally wanted to run the wire through because it would put it in the corner and as out of the way as possible.
It turned out, though, that I think said weird ledge is actually a wooden box inside of the wall, so again I couldn’t find the wire that I had fished through. After more tapping, Sara finally suggested that I just make a new whole a lot closer where it would be easy to find so that I could get out of the attic already and be done with it, so I listened to my wife and about five minutes later I was done!
By then I was thoroughly covered with fiberglass particles that are even now after a shower still lingering, but it’s done and I’m very glad that I don’t have to do anything else up there. In fact, I’ve got another cable running to the TV that I want to hide and I honestly think that I might just drill a hole right through the wall like I did into my office on the other side of the closet rather than deal with the attic anymore.
And when we build our next house, I’m definitely having the builders pre-wire everything with ethernet in every room at the highest grade we can to try and future proof it because if I struggled this much going into the attic at 41, I can only imagine trying to do it again at 55!!!
It’s been a while since I’ve done much tinkering with my home servers – frankly because I’ve been pretty satisfied how they’ve been running as-is!
I think it was back in 2018 that I migrated the first half of my setup to a rackmount (old enterprise) hardware, with Plex and everything else running under virtualization for the first time; and then in 2019 I added 4U of NAS boxes to move all of my media and put running on desktop hardware to an end.
For the most part, it’s been great – I’ve got a couple of beefy batteries to help endure blips with the power, and Unraid is so much better at managing disks than me shuffling stuff from one external hard drive to another … particularly when you’re looking at upwards of a dozen disks…
I actually believe I’m running 15 now and I’ll probably add more if I can find a good sale in a few months for Black Friday, but regardless…
The limitation of using old enterprise hardware is that there’s only so much you can do to upgrade them. Dell considers all of the machines that I’m running to be 11th generation, whereas currently they’re on 15th generation, so when it comes to things like processor upgrades and even drive support, there’s not a ton of wiggle room.
Not a big deal, considering that as I said they’re running pretty smoothly, but still … I guess you could say I got bored and felt like seeing what I could tweak anyways? 😛
About a month ago, I settled on three relatively simple upgrades that I could do to bulk my main server that runs my VMs up a bit to at least help prolong until I’m able to replace it with a new build altogether…
New CPUs – This sounds like a big endeavor, but I literally found a pair of matched CPUs on eBay for like $40.
Add SSDs – This is the one I just finished, and it wasn’t as easy as I had assumed!
10 gigabit ethernet – I’ll do this one later on this fall … I don’t have a 10-gig switch yet, so I figured in the short term I could run 10-gig just between the two servers and at least see some speed boosts there.
Graphics Card for Plex Transcoding – Probably my last update because A) the card alone runs about $500, and B) I have to do some other mods like replacing a riser in the case just to get the thing to fit. Still, this will be the biggest impact because it should render all Plex transcoding a walk in the park…
Swapping out the CPUs probably made me the most nervous – I mean, you’re basically doing brain surgery on your computer – but aside from a brief scare where I couldn’t find my thermal paste, but the replacement went super smoothly and it booted up no problem with the new chips a few minutes later!
I went from 4 cores each running 2.5 Ghz (16 cores total w/hyperthreading) to 6 cores each running at 3 Ghz (24 cores total), which will basically give me a little more overhead for Plex transcoding while I wait to add a real graphics card.
And now on to today’s adventure, or should we say last week’s adventure???
My Plex libraries have gotten pretty massive – think thousands of movies and TV shows across over 100 TB of media – and one recommendation that I’ve heard to improve performance as you grow bigger is to move your metadata and database over to an SSD. I guess it’s not so much the interface speed itself, but the IOPS because with the metadata you’re dealing with tons of tiny files with all of the images.
Anyways, I originally wanted to go nVME because I understand they’re by far the fastest drives available right now. Unfortunately, there was no good way to get them into my system. Sure, I could buy a card to add them, but RAID wouldn’t be supported and I’ve come to appreciate the redundancy because I know how easy it is for drives to fail…
So instead I went with just regular, old SSDs because I could fit them right into my normal drive bays and then my existing RAID controller could just manage them like normal. Easy, right?!
Well, apparently the PERC6i RAID controller that I had in my Dell R610 doesn’t like SSDs, or at least doesn’t like Western Digital Red SSDs, because it would detect the drives at startup but refuse to do anything with them, reporting failures.
I tried swapping drive bays, thinking it was a bad cable.
I tried upgrading the firmware for the card, which OMG took forever because the server is so old that the online firmware update process no longer works.
Finally I decided to try replacing the card altogether because I knew that the PERC6i couldn’t use larger drives, either … not a problem in this case, but still. I ordered an H700 off of eBay instead and waited a week, then waited another week while I tried to figure out how to backup all of my VMs just in case!
As of now, everything is up and running as expected, so luckily I didn’t end up needing those backups, but it sure was close for a minute this afternoon…
Installing the card itself was pretty easy – thanks to this video which walks through the whole process…
That said, the cables that shipped with the card that I bought weren’t long enough to route through my case correctly, so now it won’t close! I have replacements coming in a couple of days that cost me another $20 on top of the $40 I spent for the card, cables, and new battery.
Once I booted up the new card, the new SSDs showed up immediately as Online!
Not so much for the existing drives, but that was an error on my part because I missed a prompt to “Import the Foreign Array”. A second reboot to correct that showed everything and a few minutes later I was initializing the new array and doing a background initialization on the old array which finished by the time I was done with lunch.
But we weren’t out of the woods yet!
Upon booting back into ESXi, it too saw the new SSDs and I was able to create my new datastore where I wanted to move my Plex VM to … but the old array was nowhere in sight and as a result, it thought that all of my existing VMs were invalid.
That sort of made sense because I figured that the identifiers for the drives probably changed with the introduction of the new card. After a healthy amount of digging, I found that the trick was to SSH into ESXi itself and then do this…
esxcli storage vmfs snapshot list
esxcli storage vmfs snapshot mount -n -l "SNAPSHOT_NAME"
The first command confirmed that my datastore still existed and the second one mounted it so that ESXi would recognize it as usual. (this link explains it all)
From here it was simply a matter of unregistering each VM, moving them one by one to the new SSD datastore, and then re-registering them as existing VMs. Apparently the one downside of doing it this way is that the disk provisioning type for each VM changes from thin to thick, which means they take up their full disk allocation instead of only what they’re using at the time … but I’m really only using the new SSD datastore for two VMs and they’ll both probably get rebuilt eventually for OS upgrades anyways, so it wasn’t worth the hassle with vCenter/vSphere/whatever that I honestly don’t understand yet anyways.
They’re moved, they’re running again, and we’re done!
Now can I tell much of a difference???
I was hoping to see faster download speeds on the one VM, but not so much there.
For Plex itself, the interface both on my laptop, phone, and a TV locally as well as my phone over cellular data does seem a lot snappier. Artwork seems to pop onto the screen in maybe a second per page on the TV when it would take a couple to browse through pages of large libraries, so that’s a win in my book.
And again, I wasn’t exactly expecting huge gains with any of these, but aside from pounding my head against the wall for the last week about the stupid RAID card, both were fun, little upgrades that added incremental gains to the performance, so that’s cool in my book.
Next up will likely be the 10-gig upgrade because I know what parts I need and just need to get them ordered. The goal is to string the two servers together for starters, and then maybe add a 10-gig switch next year along the same time I upgrade to a new Macbook that can also support 10-gig, too!
My longer term goal, I’ve decided, is going to be to eventually build new servers myself to replace all of these ones. Still rackmount, but I want to do them myself because new enterprise gear is ridiculously expensive and I think I’m comfortable enough with it now to go at it alone. I’ve gotten a lot of inspiration from watching Linus Tech Tips and the evolution of their own server room at their office, so ideally it would wait until we build a new house in a couple of years where I can:
Install a full rack in a dedicated room (that isn’t our bedroom closet!)
Build two identical servers so that I can upgrade to a cluster to make it easier to make changes without taking Plex down
Build a replacement NAS, probably in a single 4U case
Along with a matching backup NAS
As you can see, it’ll be a big endeavor that will take some time to put together, but I’m in no rush and I think my current rig will keep us moving forward just fine until then.
We’ll see if the other two upgrades are crazy enough to warrant a blog post of their own!
This week, amid Tropical Storm/Hurricane Elsa, we did something that we honestly should’ve done years ago – added a solar heater to our pool.
Once the bad weather passed and the sun had a chance to come out for more than an hour, the effect was seriously like swimming in bath water!
Yesterday I set the pool at 92 degrees and it was almost too warm, compared to the 82-85 degrees we’ve been seeing the last couple of weeks in June since I started measuring.
Today I backed it off to 90 and at 11:30am when we first went, it was just about perfect.
I’ve found that 80+ is enough to enjoy during the summer and feels refreshing when the sun is out, but you still get that shock when you get in for the first time – particularly when the boys in your swim trunks first hit the water – and after dark once the sun is down and the kids are asleep, it’s a bit chilly to relax and unwind in.
90, on the other hand, is like stepping into a giant bathtub and brings back memories of swimming down in the Florida Keys in the middle of July … without the salt water, thankfully. I was even able to use the heater to get the hot tub up to 102 degrees during the day, which fell to around 97-98 by the time I got the kids to bed and could actually enjoy it for myself.
Considering that our spa heater has literally been broken for years, this was a nice little bonus!
The only downside that’s going to take some getting used to is that Matthew is a lot more comfortable in the warmer water, which has kept me on my toes the last couple of days. Lately I’ve been taking all three kids swimming by myself because Sara has been having problems with her ear, and I can mostly handle it because Christopher and David can usually handle themselves and Matthew would spend a lot of time playing on the pool deck, so I could relax and just catch him when he wants to jump in…
…now, however, he’s gotten a lot braver between jumping in without waiting for me and swimming over his head where he can’t make it across without assistance. He’s also been doing this thing that Christopher used to do where he can’t judge when he’s tired and needs a break, so he just keeps going and going and struggling more along the way. ☹️
Hopefully we can push him to build up his skills, just like his brothers did, to where these won’t be as big of a deal, and once Sara’s feeling better that will give me an extra set of hands, too.
Anywho, I’m really curious to see how these solar panels manage once we get out of the hottest months of the year because the selling point that we heard wasn’t so much warmer temps but a longer swimming season – as in, this should in theory add another month or two to each end of when we normally use our pool, which is typically around May – October for the kids and maybe June – September for us thin-skinned adults!
If it could keep the temps into the high 80s or even 90 for March/April and October/November, that would be amazing, but there are a lot of other factors like the position of the sun in the sky that I’m just not familiar enough to say, so we’ll see what happens.
In the meantime, though, the consensus is that solar heat is a win! 😉
