Lots of Photos!

11 min readJan 29, 2022

Another week gone. They really are all the same lately, aren’t they? If you are somehow one of the lucky ones for whom Groundhog Day doesn’t feel like real life, congratulations! I’m jealous. I can’t really track time anymore. The weekends are different only because the alarm is off. We still generally get up about the same time — dogs cannot be turned off like alarms — but at least it’s not an apparently maudlin song in French that is waking us. (Anne is learning French, so she could possibly tell me if these songs are as sad as they sound to me. At other times of the day this particular radio station plays much more upbeat stuff, but at 7:00 am it is always acoustic tracks that sound like someone’s pet has just died.)

Anyway, once I am up and about, some things do occasionally happen. This week I single-handedly prevented all snow and ice buildup in the metro Vancouver area between now and August. “How did you do that?” I hear you ask. Simple, I installed devices to melt ice near our downspouts so they won’t clog up.

Details follow, but first I had to replace the outlet on the back of the house. Here’s what was there:

An old GFCI and its supposedly weatherproof cover

That outlet is odd because the plugs are rotated from their normal position, and that cover won’t work if you need to leave a cord plugged into the outlet while it’s raining. So I removed it all, and found this inside:

This is a good example of what I deal with in this house: a weird combination of muck. The cable in black insulation (on the right) is original to the house and thus about 61 years old. The internal black & white conductors are fine, but the ground wire is thinner gauge than the main conductors. The cable on the left is more recent Romex. It’s dirty and 25 years old, which is why it doesn’t look white.

Note the way the ground wires are bonded together: twisting. Every outlet or switch box I have opened up so far has been like this. No one bothered to wire nut the ground wires together. It’s not great, and I fix it every time I find it. I’ve taken to using Wago 221 connectors as they are easier than wire nuts, use less space in the box, and make a nice positive connection.

Anyway, here’s what the final installation of the new outlet looks like:

The new GFCI (Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter) is also an AFCI (Arc Fault Circuit Interrupter) and is properly oriented. A cord can be plugged into the outlet and sneak out at the bottom of the enclosure with the cover closed, so you can leave it in place when it is raining and not worry about water finding its way into the outlet itself.

Once that was done, I installed the heating mats. They’re all in one long line (or circuit), starting from the new outlet. The photos follow the circuit in order, and are documented below.

It was suggested that I provide a video showing this, but that would have involved climbing a ladder multiple times with a camera in hand, and I decided not to do that. As promised, here are the photo descriptions:

Row 1:

15 AMP extension cord comes out of the new outlet, goes up along the downspout (zip tied into place) and connects to the GFCI device that comes from the mat company. Out of it comes a different cord that goes around and up onto the roof. These are sheltered from the rain and should never get wet there.
Closer view of GFCI hung on the underside of the eave.
Wire looping around and onto roof

Row 2:

First heating mat. Wire comes in on the left, connects to the mat, and then another wire comes out of the mat and goes off to the next set of mats. The downspout is on the very left side of the image. These mats heat up to about 40° F, and water will flow into the downspout and off to the storm drain. The wire connectors are advertised as waterproof, but they do not want them sitting in puddles. To be sure that doesn’t happen, I set them on bricks. Yes, that first wire is almost off the brick, but that was adjusted later, after the photo was taken.
View from the first mat looking east towards the next two heated locations.
The mats around the middle downspout. This one handles the bulk of the water coming off the roof, and I wanted it heated on all sides so there are three mats here, daisy chained together with cables of various lengths. (Available lengths are 20", 10' and 25'. Because they use very specific connectors you need to make do with what they sell.)

Row 3:

The view off to the east of the last lower downspout location.
The final lower downspout and mat: power in, power out, bricks to lift the connectors, and a zip tie to keep things from moving.
The view to the south showing the cable moving off towards the next downspout coming off the upper roof.

Row 4:

Another view of the cable going up along the downspout and over the roof. Zip tied into place again.
On the upper roof. Cable comes in, connects to the mat, and goes off to the west to the final mat in the system. The hole next to the mat goes through to the scupper that connects to the downspout.
Half the wire running from the previous mat to the last one. This is done with two 25' wires connected together. They connect on top of the vent you see in the lower left.

Row 5:

The view from the area of the final mat looking east towards the previous one.
The final mat: wire in, wire out, bricks, etc.
The final wire going over the roof and hanging in front of a window in my studio. Note the subtle orange glow in the end of the cable. That light indicates the system is on and that power is getting all the way to the end. It’s there as a reminder to me that we have it on (if we see the light) and also to confirm there are no issues with connections.

Questions I expect are out there:

Why do you have bricks on your roof? Those hold down the shade cloth we put over the skylights in the summer. I just leave them up there all the time.
Why are the bricks on the upper roof around the downspout entrances? Because we get a lot of maple leaves up there, and I don’t want them blocking the scuppers. The bricks stop them before they get there, so when the shade cloth comes down the bricks move.
Does this system actually work? We don’t know yet. Or rather, we know the mats heat up, but it has not snowed (or even rained) since it was installed. I assume this installation has assured there will be no more snow or ice on our roof this winter. Murphy will see to that. Once it warms up and we’re out of the danger zone for ice issues, I will take it down and store it in the garage until next winter. I bet I never actually have to turn it on this year, though.
How much power does it use? These are the smallest mats they sell. Each one draws 0.7 AMPs and we have seven mats. Thus the entire system draws 4.9 AMPs of power. The circuit it’s on has a 15 AMP breaker, so we’re not even close to a limit. There are larger mats of various kinds that draw more power, but for our case this was all we needed.
What are those mats actually designed for? Technically the company sells them for stairs. They have grommets in them so they can be secured to stairs to keep them ice free. Other mats they sell are for walkways and even driveways.
Who sells these? https://heattrak.com/ If you are interested in purchasing some, let me know. There might be a discount code I can get you that will save you more than the initial discount you get for your first purchase. Also, if you are in Canada, there were no duties on the purchase.

If you have other questions about these things, feel free to email me. I’m happy to share what I have learned. And thanks to Amy S. for recommending them.

We continue to work on the window replacement project as well. We’ve done the best we can at picking out the new windows, and now I am just trying to connect with the contractor who will do the installation. The phone might ring at any time — literally — to continue that project.

But being someone who always wants to know more than I do, I decided to buy an inexpensive infrared camera — technically an adapter for my cell phone — to let me look for hot and cold spots. There weren’t many surprises — thankfully — but here is some of what I found:

That’s our living room, and you can see the LED track lights and one window whose shade is open. The LEDs are a bit hotter than the surroundings, but nothing like what we’d see if they were halogen bulbs. Also note the slightly cooler areas in the ceiling around the beam and in the corners. There is no insulation up there at all — there is no place for it —and that is something we might consider changing in the future.

This shows the same open shade as in the photo above along with the two windows next to it that have their shades down. You can see a large difference in temperature as a result. The yellow/white at the bottom is the baseboard radiator that heats this part of the house.

This is an exterior wall downstairs. I’ve figured out how to turn on the temperature reading, as you can tell. The bright line at the bottom is because of the baseboard heating in use. Heat leaks out right where the wall meets the foundation slab.

These are the windows in our bedroom as viewed from outside. Quite a bit of heat loss there.

And that’s the back of the house. All those windows are 25 years old and need replacing. Note that the shades are down in the ones on the right, and they are still radiating a fair amount of heat away.

This is inside the recently insulated garage. The black area is where a beam goes into an exterior wall. I’m not sure why that is so cold. It will need additional investigation. The “S” shaped cool thing is a duct bringing exterior air into the closet containing the boiler and water heater.

This is also in the garage. In the lower left you see the garage door, and the yellow area above is where it rolls up. The dark areas along the top from there show cool spots along that exterior wall. More things to look into, but that is older insulation and not as good as what I put in.

This was not a surprise, but I cannot fix it yet. The dark vertical area is one chunk of uninsulated exterior wall in the closet with the boiler in it. Alas it is behind the boiler, so I can’t really fix it without burning myself on hot water pipes. It will have to wait for the spring, when the boiler is off.

And out of curiosity, this is the boiler itself. The white spot is the motor pumping hot water around. Nothing is all that hot here because the boiler had not been running all that long when I took the photo.

An interesting thing about thermal imaging: the colour range in the photos changes depending on the overall range of temperatures the camera sees. The coldest detected temperatures show up as purple and black and the hottest as white and yellow. But that is always true, even if in one photo the coldest temperature is 0° C and in another it’s 25° C. These photos provide hints at places to look, but not an absolute guide to whether or not there is a problem.

My plan is to use the camera to look at differences between old and new windows, if the weather is still cold when they are installed, and to look things over again in the summer to see where heat is coming into the house. I expect the patterns will be different, and I may find new things I can work on to improve the overall comfort of the place.

Changing topics entirely, last week I shared an article about NFTs. The very next day I found a two hour long, tour de force video tearing NFTs and cryptocurrency apart. If you have any interest in the topic, I commend this to you, but be prepared to spend a long time at it. It’s well researched, but it’s dense and technical.

FYI, I will definitely not be getting involved with NFTs.

Finally, when you have a new camera you have to share some amusing photos you took with it, right?

Well, here are the dogs: