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Tag: Personal
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After-Christmas-Post
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Kitchen impressions
Ok, as promised here I’m presenting pictures from our kitchen after it has arrived. These were taken on October 6th, immediately after the carpenters have finished their last screw. Even dust particles are still floating around and visible on the images. The cables for light installations are still hanging out and only a few sockets are already mounted.
As you can see we chose maple colors and modern looking handholds on the front surfaces. Overall the quality of everything is quite high, there is storage possibility on almost every place and the whole assembly has some neat functions here and there. For example:
- drawers have a soft-close mechanism, no more drawer-slamming
- doors and drawers have a quick-mount mechanism, take out and put back in within seconds
- every corner is a ‘magic corner cabinet’ so no space is wasted just without range
- the working-surface on the pitched-roof-wall has extra depth, to save your forehead and provide working area
- and lots of other little nifty stuff
On then, some comments to each photo:
On the first one (kitchen_left) you see the left side of the room starring the cooking and baking area. Nice feature of the stove are an alarm and automatic turn-off timer as well as sliding arms for the baking trays. The ceramic stove top is incredible. The hot plates are hot after three seconds latest, timed with my (afterwards burnt) palm. The hood is also equipped with auto-turnoff-timers. The sink is nothing special, perhaps to note that it’s an enlarged corner-sink. Below the sink is a rotateable waste- cleaning-stuff-storage system with several pull-out buckets for separating waste and keeping cleaning equipment together.
The middle part (kitchen_middle) features the AAA dishwasher and a customized shelf handmade by our carpenters. The diswasher is again equipped with all sorts of automatic stuff like start-timer, electronic measurements of salt- and rinse aid-status and automatic detection of how dirty the dishes are (including clean-water recycling from the last run). As said above the surface on this side has extended depth and the drawers are jumbo-sized too. The drawer on the right bottom can hold more than two trays of beer.
And on the right side (kitchen_right) there is our star: a full-sized pull-out pantry. This one commonly causes "Wow"s from visitors. Next to it the fridge and freezer. Nothing very special there, only automatic de-iceing and antibacterial surface-coating inside. On the very right border of the image there are a few milimeters of the window visible. We had to cut the window sill on the left side so that the cabinet for fridge and freezer could be placed flat on the wall. Just a few moments of fun with the angle grinder.
Well that’s been the look from late October. Today it looks even better since almost all furniture is ready and the other equipment is there.
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Another flash game
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Stealing energy
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Ambient illumination
Long ago I began thinking about how we could illuminate our rooms when they’re finished.
Of course, since I’m a science geek and care about environment, I immediately thought of lighting up using LEDs.
My only problems on my way to ultimate enlightenment were the still low light yield and the high price of LEDs at that time.
Recently these thoughts bubbled up in my mind again and I again began to investigate the possibilities of LED-illumination in my home.
It seems, that the output of LEDs has increased in the meantime so that regular light could be replaced easily. But the price for this hasn’t lowered that much and I’m unsure if the energy-savings compensate for the initial investigation.
Well, the only source for LEDs around here, although Germany isn’t quite "here" but at least it’s in Europe, I found is www.my-led.de. They even have lightbulb-replacements but I’m not willing to pay up to 60×80 for a single LED-bulb. And that’s just the price if I order 100 pieces at once. Well, they have smaller ones starting at ~10×80 for white ones but that’s still a bit high.
I would also take the adventure and buy a bulk of raw LEDs and some metal and solder together my own stylish lamp, I’m just missing some ingredients right now:
- cheap source of high-output LEDs
- description how to create a power- and control-circuit for the LEDs
If anyone can help me with one of those, please leave a comment and point me in the right direction.
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Grow Cube, grow!
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Blog is up again
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