June 23, 2025
The electricians were up today to actually pull the cables and do the grotto ethernet cleanup.
Here’s the north wall of the elevator shaft on the upper level. The 4 gang switch from the west side, where the door will be, has been relocated. We kept the Great Room Field motion detector (far right switch in the 4 gang) becuase it can “see” us coming south and get the Great Room field lights turned on before we actually get there.
The other motion switch, at the right side, controls the Stair Overhead track lights. There’s an automation that turns the undertread stair lighting on when this goes on. Its right side is taped off so it can’t “see” anybody until they’re on the stair landing. That way, the stair lights don’t come on when someone is just walking past.
The 3 blue tubes in the middle are the smurf tubes for the elevator control wiring.
This view is looking up at the top of the north side. The electricians had to make the big cut in the bottom of the soffit so that the smurf tubes could dodge around a steel beam.
The south anchor of the Stair Overhead lights are the two round bases on the wall near the upper right side of the image.
The top of the north side on the bottom level, in the pool room. It was simply impossible to get the smurf tubes through the upper level floor at the top of the wall, so a small soffit will have to be built to conceal the tubes.
That piece of 2 x 10 board between the stud packs on the left and right that has the metal band holding the tubes down to it, is one of the blockers that had to be added for the elevator rail to fasten to.
The first part of the Grotto ethernet clean up - the new box at the right was added. There’s an ethernet cable that’s terminated in the socket at the bottom left of the box and goes over to the new box in the Lower Mechanical Room.
The ethenet cable used to run from the switch on the TV stand around the Grotto on the floor over to the Lower Mechanical room.
Now, we just run a short cable from the switch to here. Much neater!
The second part of the cleanup, the new box inside the Lower Mechanical room and the purple patch cord to the 8 port switch.
This is like Topsy, it just grew! The Hood Makeup Air Page has the schematic of most of this. All that’s been added is the HVAC Supply Air Sensor, which is actually both a temperature and a humidity sensor. Its about 8” downstream of the HVAC evaporator coil
We’ve never bothered to trim the ethernet cable over the Generac down to length.