Soda Fountain, installed and working

The soda fountain is installed, and up and running.  Still lots of finishing and tweaking left to do, but the general workings of it are done.  Yay.  Had my first glass of coke!

Things that still need doing:

1) Need to check for leaks, and move the tower all the way back down the counter.
2) I'm not happy with the connection between the RO line and the water inlet for the carbonator.  I need to find a better connection fitting.  Be aware if you do this, the tubing is not compatible at all.
3) I'd like to get a pressure gauge on the water line to verify I have the right pressure.
4) I think the upper cabinet will need to be vented.  That coldplate generates way more heat than I would have imagined.
5) Need to get ahold of syrup.  It came with a single 2.5g box of coke, which was handy, as it allowed me to set it all up and test on the first day.  Sprite will be easy.  I originally wanted A&W root beer, but that is starting to look very unlikely.  As far as I can tell, nobody sells it.

More on syrup later. For now, YAY soda in my kitchen!

Here, you can see the tower, which is close to it's final location.  I need to push it back about a foot eventually.  For now, it's sitting forward so I can make sure there are no leaks in the syrup/soda lines coming out of it.
 

 

The coldplate, and carbonator, installed in their final resting place. The carbonator has a single clear tubing lime coming out the side.  I'm not sure what it's for. Just in case it's something zany, I have it running into a cup for now.  It appears to not be spitting out water though, so I should be good.

  

The syrup lines needed to be extended by about 5 feet to reach the pumps, splices were added.

The CO2 canister, and my one, lonely box of coke.  More to come.

And finally, the syrup pumps all wired up.  Interestingly, these run purely off CO2.  No power needed.  I thought for sure they would be electric, but nope.  Oddly, the tower IS electric, so it needed power.  Also worth noting, they vent CO2 right out the side when operating, so, umm, hrmm.  Not sure yet how to handle that.

Saturday - Drill holes, unbox

On saturday I spent about 7 hours making holes in my house, and running wires and cables for the system.  Tons of work to be done.  There was an electrical outlet/switch next to the sink that would have been covered up by the tower.  This needed to be moved about a foot up so you could still turn the sink light on. 

The icemaker (remote coldplate) is pretty big.  Big enough that it will not fit under the sink because of the sink piping and the garbage disposal.  Boo.  This means the only place it would fit is in the cabinet over the fridge.  That means the tubing for it needs to run through the wall, and then out the side next to the sink.

Unwrapped the components

 Here, you can see the tower, assorted bits, the carbonator, and the syrup pumps.  All in all, it's a pretty nice setup.  No complaints.

The chiller/coldplate

 The chiller/coldplate is "interesting".  It's basically a hacked-up icemaker, with a coldplate jammed into it.  It has a mess of tubes coming out of it.  Everything was clearly labeled though, so no worries there.

 This outlet is the badguy in question.  He needs to be moved about 1 foot up, so the tower doesn't obstruct it.

 And here, we can see said outlet, moved vertically.  Annoyingly, there was a stud there, which apparently they notched to fit the one below it.  1 hour later with saws, drills, and chisels, the stud was notched.

 This is the cabinet above the fridge.  It's here that the coldplate will live. 

 The remote coldplate needs power.  So does the carbonator, that will also live up here.  Since I already have an outlet torn open on the side, I ran wires down to it, and wired this outlet into that one.  In the lower left corner, you can see a big hole drilled.  This is to run the syrup and soda water lines from the coldplate into the tower.  They will run inside the wall, and come out where the old outlet was.

 Needed to run the RO tubing out of the RO, and into the wall.  This meant I had to drill through the side of the cabinet, and then into the wall.  Once into the wall, it followed the same path as the soda tubing, up into the cabinet.

In the pantry, next to the fridge, I will house the CO2 canister, the syrup boxes, and the pumps.  Simply mounted the pump onto the wall. It's very nice that they supplied a little mounting bracket and everything for it.  I'm pretty happy with it.  3 screws, and done.

 This is where the syrup boxes will live, and eventually, the CO2 tank.

 Coldplate test-fitted up into the cabinet.

 Needed to drill a hole into the cabinet from the pantry for the syrup lines.  Done.

The original outlet, all torn up.  There are two separate circuits here.  How annoying.

Opening up the boxes

The soda parts arrived thursday.  Took approximately 2 weeks from the day I ordered it from sofaparts.com until arrival.  Here is a brief "unboxing":

Three massive boxes.  Not shown, is the 2.5 gallon box of Coke they also sent.

 I upgraded to the 10lb bottle of CO2 for an extra $30.   I suspect I will be glad.  You can see here the syrup pumps, the carbonator, the tower itself, and the CO2 bottle.

And here we can see the chiller itself.  It's big, and it's super-heavy.  Yikes.

The first task in setting up my soda fountain was to upgrade the RO.  My old one was pathetic, and drove me nuts anyhow.  It was some GE thing, that generated like 3 GPH.  The new one is from bulk reef supply.  75 GPH, and I added a pressure pump to it to make sure it kept the tank full.  I also went ahead and replaced all the lines with 3/8" instead of the 1/4", because the carbonator needs a lot of water, and apparently a 1/4" tube will not cut it.

The first picture here, is the new RO, all installed (except for the final plumbing to the carbonator).  I added a bunch of valves to the installation, so I could easily shut off sections of it for replacement in the future.  In the past I've had to drain the entire system, shut water off, etc to do any sort of work on it.  This should fix that silliness.

Another view showing the new bits in place under the sink.  Yay.

Here is a "before" shot of the kitchen, all primed and ready for a bunch of holes to be cut in it!  The tower will sit to the left of the fridge, next to the sink.  The carbonator and chiller will hopefully be going in the cabinet above the fridge, and the CO2 and bag-in-box syrup will live in the pantry next to the fridge.

A home soda fountain

I've recently picked up a home soda fountain.  Installing this should be a ton of fun.  In order to keep my kitchen looking clean and professional, I'm going to have to cut a bunch of holes, and route lines and power all over the place.

In the next few posts of this category, I'll detail my experiences so others can benefit!

Here's hoping it all works out great.  (ha)

So, what does it look like when an A/C breaks? The graphs below tell the story.  I'm hoping I can use this data to write a script to detect this condition. I'll add more detail once I know what the actual breakage is.  Maybe it just iced up?  Those spikes are a little odd on the 1hr graph.

This is the AC trying to run, me giving up on it, and turning it to fan only.

Looks like it broke around midnight:

Now you can see below my vacation, returning, AC fires up as normal, and then clunk?

You can see the last working run, and then it starts to diverge

Here you can see vacation mode, and then the failure.

Why the Venstar T5900 is the answer to DIY HA thermostat needs

So, I recently picked up a Venstar T5900.  I've been looking for a good "high-end" thermostat for awhile now, that would work with DIY Home Automation.  I think the Venstar is about the only answer out there.

There is of course the 3M one from RadioThemostat, and yes, thats a pretty good choice.  It has an open API, and a few advanced features.  But it's not very pretty.  Old style LCD.  Meh.

Nest is cute, but they will probably never make an API.  Screw them.

The Venstar is color LCD, touch screen, tons of features, scheduling, has the web-connect interface stuff, easy to install, and best of all, a documented API.  They even did a pretty good job of documenting it.  Now admittedly, the API won't let you fiddle every single bit of the t-stat, but it's good enough for most HA uses.  It lets you fiddle the set-temps, and turn the unit on/off/auto/etc as you please.  It also lets you query the onboard sensors.

So what are the quirks?

1) The SSDP discovery routine is wonky.  It doesn't work to the spec.  Normally you send an SSDP query on the multicast, and get a direct response.  The venstar replies back to the multicast.  This can be worked around by just listening for the NOTIFY messages instead.

2) If you want to shut the unit OFF, you have to turn off the schedule first.  No big deal really.

3) If you send it too many queries too quickly it ignores them.  Just slow down your sends.

Which should you pick?

The T5800 is nice, but the T5900 is the one you should buy.  $10 more, and has a humidity sensor.  Even if you don't have a humidity system to control, for $10 you get one more sensor to read.  Yay data.  You definitely want the skyport wifi bit, without that, no API access for you.  Total cost shipped was about $225.  Took about 30 minutes to install, and 20 minutes to program locally.

The API is a simple JSOM interface for grabbing data, and a simple HTTP POST interface for changing settings.  No big deal to write code for at all. They even supply sample code in a few languages.

I've been playing with the API for the Irrigation Caddy lately, and I've discovered a few things not listed on the API page.

1) If you broadcast "Discovery: Who is out there?" to port 30303 UDP, all the irrigation caddies on the network will respond with hostname and macaddr.

2) Sending a stop=active will only stop the current zone, not the program.  So far the only way I've found to stop a program is to send a full stop then a full start.

3) The json requests are standard GET's, but all the zone fiddling, start/stop stuff is POST.

Just writing them down here for now so others can find them in the future.