Gibbon, Cozad & Western - "The 100th Meridian Line"

[C855B]

I'm taking your suggestion seriously about putting convenience outlets within the layout and looking at it in how I am likely to use it. I think there is good middle ground to be had in adjusting the thinking towards covering the aisle space versus the peninsulas. The east and west aisles are covered adequately by wall outlets, leaving the three center aisles. I can then put a single 110V run down the peninsula with Afton Canyon, facing an outlet into the left aisle roughly in the center, and then on that same run, put another outlet facing into the right aisle near the end across from Caliente. That location faces into the aisle between Lynndyl and Cheyenne. So while not completely covered, it considerably shortens any extension cord runs.

That all said, I do have to contemplate just how much use I have for 110V within the layout. By far my most frequent tool usage during construction has been cordless, and the three main corded tools - all saws - are kept in work areas so the sawdust and materials access are better controlled. The only thing I anticipate needing 110V in terms of maintenance and actual layout construction are your mentioned vacuum, and Dremel-type tools, where the corded versions are usually lighter and smaller than their cordless brethren.

But I do think we have a reasonable vision now that won't drive up the effort too much. Thanks!

[mcjaco]

Another question is would a 110 run even fall into the code for such a project???  Every club layout I've even been involved with has 110 run somewhere down each peninsula even it's just for boosters, accessory power packs, and more likely power tools needed for projects down the line.  Those outlets were install more for need, than code and convenience.

[C855B]

You're right, like I mentioned, per-code outlet placements are not a concern since the layout is not "permanent construction". Code, however, does apply regarding the safety aspects, and as Scott alluded, the armored jacket takes care of 90% of the issues. Where guys get into trouble code-wise is running Romex down peninsulas and also connecting Romex into building power with a regular male wall plug.

The grand plan is to not have any permanent users of 110V installed in the peninsulas. Boosters and accessory power will go across the north wall, with boosters also in the southwest and southeast corners to serve the inward-facing peninsulas. This way, no power bus should be more than about 50'. JMRI computer and any other centralized control will go on shelves in that access opening north of Cima and Moapa, which is where I'm putting four quad boxes (16 outlets!). There are four separate 20A circuits serving the layout outlets, each GFCI-protected.

[C855B]

News on the layout lighting front. First, I just received a sample of the Philips Hue programmable-color bulb in the GU10 format, brand new to the US market. GU10 bulbs are those small-format spotlights normally found in track lighting. Works quite well for the effects lighting I was after, but, unfortunately, at $60 each currently there's going to be a limit to how extensively I'm going to be able to incorporate them into the lighting plan. There are other companies (Osram/Sylvania, for one) introducing programmable-color bulbs this fall, so hopefully by the time I'm ready to commit the pricing will be more palatable and there will be more choice in gamuts.

For general room lighting, where I was planning to use some manner of troffer (grid ceiling) lights with LED tubes, the prices have dropped sharply for integrated-LED troffers. New this week, Home Depot is offering pallet quantities of dimmable, insulation-contact, 5000+ lumen troffers for $90 each. That's incredible, less than half what I was looking at only a year ago, and amazingly only about a $20 premium over conventional florescents in non-insulation-contact troffer housings. Such a deal! Savings like this in the lighting budget may well fund more of those expensive Hue thingamabobs.

In other construction, as planned, the studwall extensions on the east wall were finished yesterday. Extensions on half of the north wall should start tomorrow. Interestingly, these new wall sections are built entirely of 2x4s recovered from deconstruction of the original meeting rooms and false ceilings. Insulation is moving along, although Robyn protested, "I have my work cut out for me," when she saw how much progress had been made with the extensions. Oh... she corrected me on the insulation layering. The walls in the layout room are R4+R30+R13, seriously filling the voids between the interior studwalls and the outer skin. Once I cap it off with R38 above the grid, it's gonna be quite cozy.

[C855B]

All lighting all the time at the moment.

The layout room and layout lighting plan has been keeping me up nights. It's an important - even key - issue right now because we are close enough to putting up the drywall in the layout room that I need to finalize the electrical plan for lighting. So I'll typically awaken from a light sleep, shuffle off to the office and then spend an hour or more surfing from site to site checking prices and availability, or looking around for the latest developments in networked bulb technology.

Reiterating what we've discussed before (and before somebody jumps in with "have you considered soffits?"), the layout plan is open, with no backboards and no soffits. I don't care for either, as they close the space. Visual separation when necessary will be afforded by scenery. Anyway, there are three lighting considerations - general room/safety lighting, layout lighting, and effects lighting. General room lighting is just that - illumination for entry/egress, controlled by 3-way switches at the doors. Not something normally on during operation. Up to this point, I was starting to go overboard (20 LED troffers for a total of 100,000+ lumens) for surgical-level general lighting. This on top of directed-spot layout lighting was major overkill. It was also becoming apparent that the easily available and affordable technology was not going to let me incorporate the troffers into a "house lights" situation, where they could be controlled from the master lighting panel, especially something computer-controlled or otherwise sequenced. Plus, 20 troffers is a lot of wiring, and I'm not building a cubicle farm or a supermarket. [sigh] So the thought of the moment is 6 troffers, just enough to illuminate the space to living room levels and be operable by mere mortals (a couple of 3-way wall switches), and it gets shut off when layout lighting is on.

Layout lighting is the easiest, and the plan has not varied from initial thinking - 2-circuit track lighting suspended to about 10' above the floor down the center of each "aisle", with spots aimed at the peninsulas. This I have real-world experience with, and it works well. A possible techno-glitch at this point is using 110V GU10 LED spots with DMX (pro stage lighting) dimmers. More research to be done there. Halogen spots are out of the question - too much heat, too much UV, too much power consumption.

Effects lighting is by far the most troubling area. This is one important (to me) LDE, the ability to stage semi-realistic day-night-day transitions, and simulate the infrequent thunderstorm - I am modeling the desert and Midwest, thankyouverymuch. I have been dithering around with two basic ideas - LED stage lights in both downlight and wall-wash styles, and new variable-color networked bulb technology. Neither are particularly cheap. Stage lights in the original concept seemed to be going OK (testing posted here many moons ago), but in the analysis there were going to be too many hotspots and shadows, only fixed by throwing more money and time at it. Wiring was not necessarily complicated, but it was going to be tedious. And they worked poorly in supplementing the general lighting (turn everything to white in daylight mode). So scratch Plan A.

Plan B, Philips Hue (and emerging competitors). Hue bulbs are expensive, and upon testing I was looking at 40-50 of the suckers. Ouch. Big pluses - they solved both the color management and the general lighting challenges, off-the-shelf freeware was meeting 95% of the application, and special effects were something I could program if need be. An accessible system, all in all. Plan was to have an additional track mounted to the layout lighting for uplighting, using the BR30 (flood-format) Hue bulbs. The additional track + fixtures were adding to the costs, but it was possible to back this off in fabricating a fixed bar with uplights for a lot less.

Downsides to Hue, other than the expense? 50 is considered to be the limit of their control system. Today there is no easy ability to have parallel control channels (Zigbee, for the cognoscenti), although there is some confidence this will be solved in the coming months. Then there is the limited gamut of Hue, with no true green. Not that green is important, but because of this blue shades are slightly lacking in depth. This promises to be solved when Osram/Sylvania is online with their RGB+W bulbs.

Enter Plan C: current-tech LED strips mounted in aluminum channel as uplights on top of the layout spots, similar to the Hue plan. SuperBrightLEDs has a collection of components that will work very well this way. Total cost is slightly less than the Hue plan. Biggest downside is much more work on my part building the fixtures and dealing with a veritable web of control wiring. Big plus is the control scheme, which can be handled via DMX channels, and addressed through a small stage-lighting controller-sequencer.

(Before one or more of you protest that "LED strips can be had from eBay for really cheap!", I'm well aware of that. Not a one of the eBay sellers will spec brightness. I could spend weeks stockpiling crap strips, find maybe one or two acceptable and then be unable to repeat the order a month or year from now. Been down that road.)

I am waffling between B and C, and at this microsecond happen to be leaning towards B. The secondary advantage of Hue/Zigbee is it is an emerging system. LED-compatible dimmers for the track lighting control is coming, or here... just haven't found them yet. The Hue GU10 bulbs were just released and I could add color-effects spots. White Zigbee-controlled bulbs are coming online at attractive prices. I would also suppose that the biggest advantage to Plan B is it is the most modifiable of any of the plans - the effects lighting would be a conventional on/off 110V circuit, no funny business, no tearing it apart when something better comes along.

Hmm. Thanks for helping me talk out a solution.

[C855B]

Insulation contractor stopped by today.

[C855B]

Quick! Round-up the lady folk and children and head for the shelters! Actual layout construction planning in this post!!!

 

Rough benchwork outlines and station locations, 1:1 on the concrete:



Nothing all that major, really. There are outlet and junction boxes to locate, relative to the layout plan. "J.B." in the upper left is the junction box for the circuit we decided needed to be run within the layout, down the center peninsula.

I need to get the boxes in and rough-wired so Robyn can finish insulation on the east half of the north wall. She has just about caught up with my carpentry. I can't promise that drywall will start in the next week or two, but the east half of the layout room is darned close to ready for it. Materials storage needs to be rearranged before we work on the west half, and there are a couple of challenges of unknown complexity on the remainder of the north wall.

[C855B]

I've mentioned a few times in discussing the layout plan the importance of locating the center peninsula so that it covers a step-down. This is what I'm talking about:



The cobbled-together ramp is so the scissor lift can go between levels. It's a fun ride up and down (NOT!). At 3" this is the "low" end of the step-down, the other end 5" or so. What I may not have mentioned is the left (west) side of the layout room is asphalt, the floor from the original building construction. The right (east) side is concrete, actually, a very nicely polished concrete.

Relative to the current layout plan, this step-down is now right in the middle of the center aisle. When things were rearranged to relocate the eastern terminus, the locations changed enough to make covering the step with benchwork a problem.

Anyway, all along I've been figuring on cleaning-up the asphalt and spreading a layer of floor patch or something like it, to deal with the handful of divots and smooth the surface in general. At worst, filling the divots and then putting down OSB with some good thick floor paint as a surface. An alternative was to lay PT joists on the asphalt to raise the level of the finished surface to match the east side. Then I started working the numbers. We're looking at about 900 square feet on this side of the room. This piecemeal approach was exceeding four figures, not to mention the hours/days of my time to make it work. Then there was the smaaaaaaaallllll (!!!) issue that the lift would crush OSB or plywood, even if it was laid flat on the not-very-level asphalt.

So it's time to get real. We're having our concrete guy quote pouring a slab to match the east half. And that's the right thing to do even though we are cringing at the cost. With as much attention to detail as is going into the rest of the building, it became counterintuitive to cobble a half-a$$ floor in half of the featured space. My hope is with the actual pour two to three weeks away we aren't going to back ourselves into a corner with the weather again this year.

Speaking of insulation, there is about a day's work left on the east side and then Robyn is done. So we're at the 50% point. I've been ripping out the old walls and internal framing on the west side, which is somewhat hampered by having to move our materials and tool storage to other areas of the building. Once the slab is ready, new studwalls go up, the advantage here being all of the walls will be new and nice and smooth and ready to accept insulation without a lot of cutting and fitting. So... fingers crossed for having fully-insulated walls by Halloween.

While we're waiting for the new floor I have a cook's list of detail tasks to tend to both in and out of the studio area, so we're certainly not going to be sitting on our hands. Especially, a bunch of rough wiring needs to be done for layout room lighting. Now that the weather is reasonable it'll be a little more civil in the upper reaches of the attic space, and once that's done I can start with the supports for the ceiling grid.

There is light at the end of this very long tunnel, and with any luck it will be a train.

[Scottl]

Is that slab floor cold in the winter?  I wonder if an alternative would be a false wooden floor with some insulation in it?  Might be a little more forgiving to stand on for long hours as well.

[C855B]

It's been hard to know that the floor is especially cold in the winter, given that we haven't been able to effectively heat that area yet. The studio floor wasn't noticeably cold(er) in last winter's extremes, but, OTOH, it was so cold and miserable everywhere else in the building we just battened-down the plumbing and didn't spend much time there.

Point taken, tho', on the false floor. We'll see how it plays this time around with everything else insulated. You've made me curious if the "Lego" floor we have in the studio helps with this. I have considered industrial runners down each aisle if things turn out to be uncomfortable that way.

[GaryHinshaw]

Asphalt, huh?  I'm pretty sure you won't regret the new slab, even if your wallet does.  How does the extra 3-5" play out elsewhere in the room, i.e. where the new slab meets the walls and doorways?

I certainly haven't minded a slab floor in the layout room, but my winter climate is substantially milder.

[C855B]

The extra floor thickness will be OK. It probably isn't clear (no photos... yet) that the walls I'm taking down in the west/asphalt half of the room are the interior false walls. The slab will go out to the bottom girt of the metal exterior - or a gap, we haven't worked the exact specs for the forms - but in either case the new interior walls will go on top of the slab.

There's only one door affected, the new door to the workshop area. Since it's still just a frame at this point I can unscrew the header, trim three studs, and move it up. I'm debating with myself about having the concrete guys do a ramp to this door, but since the necessity of a ramp (for the scissor lift) is a temporary thing, I'm thinking just do something like I did above and tossing it when we're done with the heavy stuff.

[Scottl]

I don't know about the costs, but a false floor and insulation in a continental climate makes sense as an option.  Concrete has a lot of thermal mass that you want to avoid heating in the winter.

If if was me and I was poring a floor, I would consider putting hydronic heating in while I was doing it.  Comfort is a critical issue, and I suspect investment in the HVAC will pay time and again.  Warm floors, even if they were strategically in the aisles only, would go a long ways towards making the space attractive.  You could go even cheaper and use electric heating elements in the pour.   I bet you can find a cool app to control it with the lights 

[C855B]

I hear where you're coming from, but the installation costs snowball very quickly with in-slab heating, hydronic or electric. Also, radiant systems work less well without a thermal barrier like foam sheet under the pour, and that's not an option here since the foam will make the pour too thin in the 3" area I mentioned. The tubing would compromise the slab there as well, both issues meaning the scissor lift would be out of the question during final build-out (3000 lbs. on too-small wheels - spot loads in the vicinity of 250 psi). Of course, there's the little problem that only half the room would have the heat system. I do believe the HVAC contractor considered the thermal mass issues in his calcs for the forced-air system already installed.

I think it's a "we'll see". Considering that both sides will be concrete over asphalt, there's at least some component of thermal resistance due to the layering of dissimilar materials. If the floor proves to be a comfort problem, there's the Lego tile approach we used in the studio at $2 a square foot - attractive and dead-simple to install - or I can put down 1/2" 25 psi pink foam over the slabs and cover it with OSB or plywood for half that. Fortunately there are after-the-fact options.

[Scottl]

Agreed.  You have thought it through- just trying to keep you on your toes!