May 19 - progress and pondering

Both the progress and the pondering are with respect to the basement suspended ceiling. I made progress -- grid finished in the games room -- and I'm pondering the placement and number of pot lights.

Placement is an issue -- balancing the setup -- and number is an issue, which depends on the bulb wattage and type that I intend to use. The floods are expensive, especially the compact fluorescent ones, but they give more light than bare bulbs. They're about $10 each. The bare CF bulbs, on the other hand, are cheap these days, but don't throw as much light. I can make up for that, to a certain extent, by simply putting in more fixtures ... but that obviously has a limit. Too many fixtures and I'm defeating the purpose of putting in a suspended ceiling, since any panel with a light fixture is only removable from the adjacent panel. That's not the only issue either -- there will be panels with ceiling heat vents from the furnace (several) and panels (2) with vents from the dehumidifier and a couple for smoke detectors. As much as possible I want to plan things so that these share panels and I don't end up with a ceiling totally locked into place.

The other issue, of course, is that if someone comes along later and replaces CF bulbs with incandescent bulbs and starts blowing fuses ... well, if I truly follow the rules, I'd have two or three circuits dedicated to basement lighting, but that seems excessive especially if I really expect to use CF bulbs. At 15 watts each, or thereabouts, I could put in 100 and just hit the 1500 watt limit for a circuit breaker. On the other hand, if someone comes along and puts in 50 watt floods ... you get the idea ... but even at that, it would take 30 of them to blow the fuse.

I've got to do some more thinking on this one.

Before working on the ceiling I did go fishing, with no results other than a couple of bites. I went to my usual crappie spot and sat there for 1/2 hour with nothing, then moved a couple of hundred yards (meters here in Canada) between Grumblenot Island (named by the owners) and its smaller brother and immediately had a bite and lost that minnow. After I put down again I got another couple of bites but couldn't hook the fish. Oh well. When I go out again I'm going to switch to a larger hook. I don't know if that was the problem but I was using a very small snelled hook that would have been ok for catching crappie with their small mouths.

Today, it's supposed to hit 23C -- wow -- and there is no more rain in the forecast for the foreseeable future, or at least as far as theweathernetwork.com forecasts.

I'll do some more pondering in the basement shortly ... I don't want to do any more grid until I get some of it actually finished with panels in place, and that would include boxing in the small area of furnace ducting where it drops below the ceiling as it comes out of the utility room. Next up will be the bedroom, then the area at the bottom of the stairs and then, last, the darkroom. I did some quick estimates yesterday looking at the remaining grid pieces on hand and I think that I need three more main T's. I think that I have enough crossers and I did not check wall pieces. I know that I need more ceiling tiles and I'll pickup another car-full when I go into Sudbury on Sunday.

That's it ....