FIOS failings

Some residents of west-central League City (? extent of affected area unknown) are experiencing a Verizon FIOS slow-down right now and might not even be aware that a specific problem exists (although you may have noticed some general service degradation). 

Simply put, depending on which level of service you chose, you might not be getting the connection speeds that you pay for. 

Obviously this meme is a bit out of date, but I wanted to make the point that FIOS is supposed to have such fast download and upload speeds that there's even a fan hashtag called #spoiledbyFiOS. 

Screengrabbed from this site. 

We don't know how many people are affected.  We only know that a technician said that he'd logged at least one other complaint-related call from Centerpointe Section 9, which is our part of the subdivision.

Here's what makes this event noteworthy:  It's been going on for more than two weeks, and as of today, there's still no repair in sight.


My husband signed up to receive automatic updates on the status of the fix.  Here's a screengrab of an email he received back on January 7...

...and those emails are still coming today, January 22!  My husband now has over a hundred emails from Verizon, all with new repair estimation dates. 

Over a hundred emails with new repair date/time estimations?!  What the hell is up with that?!  I never heard of such a thing!

And neither have I heard of a two-week-plus wait time for a "restoral", either.  Here's Verizon's own site for checking your connection speeds (peak hours are the most telling times to test).  I, for one, will be requesting that our bill be adjusted to reflect the service that we've actually been receiving. 

Friends don't let friends drive drunk. 

Friends don't let friends get less than they paid for, either. 

Gas meter remote readers being installed

Just FYI, you might see a Centerpoint (not Centerpointe) worker in your yard today.  Reportedly, they are installing devices to read our gas meters remotely.  I hadn't heard anything about this, but I'm often the last to know.

But between my dog alarm and our security cameras, I can usually find out what's going on in real time, at least. 

The Centerpointe Drive - West Walker construction

As I was sitting at my desk working yesterday, my goose-neck lamp was doing a subtle version of The Hamster Dance, with the bulb fixture jiggling and jumping at the end of its flexible arm. 

No, it wasn't a random swarm of 1.0 events on the Richter Scale - it was actually this:

They were laying down a short section of board road and unloading an excavator at the intersection of Centerpointe Drive and West Walker.  All that movement of heavy equipment was vibrating the ground and making a lot of noise. 

You might first guess that this has something to do with the nearby Public Safety Building construction which is now in full swing (webcam here, if you are interested), but I don't think it does.  I think it actually has to do with the new pipeline that's being installed in the Interurban easement. 

Recall this post from (coincidentally) one year ago today.  That talked about a new pipeline that was going into the "Centerpoint" (i.e., the Interurban) easement which was initially confused by some with the "Centerpointe" easement.  They appear to be just now getting around to laying that pipe, if you'll excuse the expression.  And our right-of-way intersection at Centerpointe Drive appears as if it is being developed as one of their access points.  There are fresh markers delineating some existing lines in the easement, which suggests that this project is now proceeding.

Anyway, I'll post more info as it becomes available. 

In the meantime, enjoy those hamsters.
 

Should you invest in LED lights for your home?

In my personal opinion, the answer to that title question at this point in time is a resounding NO. 

This is the type of device I'm talking about - a Light Emitting Diode (LED) retrofit bulb suitable for use in single-family homes.  They come in a variety of styles and configurations.  Photo from Wikipedia. 

My opinion is based on our experiences with the things to date, which I will explain below.

Shortly after we moved into our house, my husband got a wild hair and decided that he wanted to put LED spotlights in our kitchen ceiling.  As I've explained in other posts, our kitchen is in the center of our home, not on one of the exterior walls, so it has no windows.  Despite the substantial illuminating contributions of one behemoth and now-beautiful skylight, we use the kitchen lights almost perpetually because, during the building process, we made sure that they were situated to shine directly onto the countertops.   Therefore they are particularly convenient regardless of the time of day or presence of light from other sources (we have under-cabinet lights as well, but the overhead ones really help). 

So our kitchen lights get unusually heavy use.  Furthermore, per the original house design, they happened to end up on the same electrical circuit as a lot of other important stuff, and we wanted to minimize the overall load on that circuit.  In consuming less electricity, LEDs can help to achieve this.

To make a long story short, my husband did the math, and the math revealed that LED spotlights would be expected to pay for themselves in about four years.  So he went out and spent over four hundred dollars to buy six large bulbs for our kitchen ceiling.

That may sound like a lot of money, but the important question is never the absolute cost - it's the payback time.  And in this case, the payback time appeared to indicate that it was a sound investment, given that we intend to live in this house for much longer than four years.

However, lifespan and energy costs have not proven to be the only important considerations.  Take a look at these two photos of our kitchen lights and note carefully the subtle but important differences.

This is one of the bulbs on the main switch.  There are five of them distributed around the kitchen.

This is the lone bulb above the kitchen sink.  Like most newer houses, ours has two switches for the kitchen lights, with the sink bulb operating independently from the rest of the suite.  You can turn on just this one, or you can hit the second switch and light up all six. 

Do you see how the over-sink bulb is a lot more yellowish than the other bulb in the picture above it?  That's because the kitchen sink bulb gets heavier use.  Very often, we don't need to turn on all six spotlights - we just need the one over the sink.

What this means 2.5 years into our ownership of these things is the following: When all six lights are turned on, five of them produce nice crisp light and one of them produces very snotty yellow overtones (in my opinion).  This discordant combination is very noticeable and is unsightly - and we paid over four hundred dollars to achieve it! 

We suspect this happened in substantial part because the bulb's transparent faceplate has discolored with time.  Note to self: In the future, always check to verify that any such light-emitting device has a glass faceplate, not plastic. 

It's also possible that the diodes themselves have degraded a bit, but the lights are only 2.5 years old - LEDs are expected to fade with time, but they shouldn't have faded this much in such a short period.

Of course, there are several potential workarounds to this issue, but none of them are appealing to me because part of me believes that if we pay over four hundred dollars for lightbulbs, we shouldn't have to be jumping through hoops to compensate for what are, in our opinions, their engineering shortcomings.  Pardon me, but that's a boat-load of money.  Not only should these things shine without a glitch, they should bloody well be rappelling themselves down from the ceiling and cooking us breakfast, for that price. 

But anyway, if you decide to buy some of these things, here are my personal suggestions:

1. Check the current price comparisons, such as this one, to see if they'd really pay off in your specific home scenario.  LED prices have probably fallen substantially in the past 2.5 years since we bought ours.  The math may be even more favorable now, and that might modify the arguments I'm making here.
2. Only buy bulbs that have glass faceplates so that you can perhaps avoid at least some of this yellowing degradation issue.  By the way, if you've had this same degradation thing happen to you and you have managed to replace your bulb's yellowed faceplate with a new one, please email me (centerpointe.blog gmail) and tell me how you did it, because I would love to know. 
3. If you use these bulbs in a kitchen scenario similar to ours, periodically rotate all the bulbs through the most heavily-used socket.  At least that way, if they get yellow, hopefully it will be a more uniform yellow and therefore not as noticeable or as ugly (in my opinion) as what we have inadvertently achieved in our kitchen.  We would have rotated ours from the outset had we been informed that this was going to occur. 

Isn't that last one a particularly fun idea??  The point in us getting bulbs that cost over four hundred dollars is so that we could save money but also save the time and effort involved in climbing up to a ten-foot ceiling to replace the danged things on a regular basis.  If instead we have to climb up for the purposes of rotating them every few months, it kinda defeats a big part of the purpose in getting them, does it not??

Happy LEDing.  Maybe. 

New water meters?

So earlier today there came a guy dressed like this in a truck that looks like this with a League City ID badge type thing strung around his neck.

Hmm....

He reported that he was here to switch out our water meter.  I said, "But the danged thing is only two years old" and he said something about League City going to a new type of meter and I should have gotten notified by mail. 

I don't remember getting notified by mail but I'm not infallible.  I do check my mail fairly closely but nothing comes to memory.

So heck, I checked the League City website for information on this issue and this is what I found:

Apparently yes, they do have some kind of program in process and it looks danged expensive.  But according to this, it is barely underway.

Screengrabbed from this page.

So these folks have just barely begun this program and I just happened to have gotten chosen for a replacement? 

Unfortunately I was busy today so I could not stalk this poor dude to see how many homes he did and in what areas.  I don't know if I was a rare case or simply a nameless faceless part of a much larger mass conversion effort.

I wondered if perhaps League City maybe thinks my existing meter is on the fritz.  I haven't said anything about this on this blog yet, but I put in a rainwater harvesting system late last year and our muni water use plummeted.  Perhaps they think they're getting hosed or something by virtue of a bad meter at my place.

Yeah, I know.  Getting hosed.  I can't help these things.

Anyway, if you're one of the lucky ones to have gotten a new meter recently, let me know if you have any stories to tell about it.  And if you happen to come home from work one evening and your faucets start burping and farting like there's a lot of air in your water line, this meter replacement thing might be your explanation.  Let your taps run for a while to clear out the gunk, particularly if your lines are PEX.

Walking in an easement wonderland

The phrase "ask and ye shall receive" comes to mind at this moment.  Either that, or the old adage "when the student is ready, the teacher will appear".

Following on the heels of this recent post about Centerpointe's outdoor walkability potential and the health benefits thereof, I resolved to summarize some of those opportunities in a separate post (namely this one). 

But immediately a question arose: are people really "supposed" to be walking in the Interurban easement?  Because that's where I've observed most of our local serious walkers (especially dog walkers) to be going. 

The Interurban easement:
Footpath to freedom in an area of otherwise jumbled up, incohesive development scheme (or lack thereof).

Somebody owns that land.  Who?  And then of course, numerous additional entities have been granted easements over that land.  Strictly speaking, is it even legal for residents to walk there?  It's neither fenced nor posted, but in our litigation-gridlocked culture, that doesn't necessarily mean anything. 

And of course, the Interurban easement is by no means the only easement where people in greater Houston frequently walk.  With a resounding and pervasive lack of urban and suburban planning, there's often no way to get from Point A to Point B on foot except by traversing someone's easement, regardless of which section of town you live in.

Lo and behold, as if on command (or request), yesterday Houston Chronicle conveniently served up at least a portion of the answer with this feature article, which discusses some of the issues surrounding the public's use of easements.

Screengrab from Houston Chronicle.
It's worth reading if you're interested in this kind of stuff.

The article describes how "no-e CenterPoint" would allow free use of their utility easements in exchange for protection from liability claims by the people using those easements, but how this measure has yet to attain a legal standing. 

Personally, I see it as a potential win-win situation:  CenterPoint might be acting especially proactive in this regard in part because they perceive how widely pedestrians and cyclists are using their easements anyway.  Given that this use will likely occur either way, they'd benefit from a clearer liability framework.  And residents would benefit from formalization of this use.

That being said, part of this issue is obviously still in limbo and seems likely to remain that way for some time to come.  So what I'm going to present below is not a recommendation of any kind.  It's just a series of observations about where and how I've seen local residents walking, especially those who are serious about walking their dogs on a daily basis.  I've traced out the pathways of these common routes, screengrabbed the traces, and estimated the mileage associated with each one using a common internet utility.  Again, these are not recommendations for you.  Just some summaries of what I've seen.  All rough measurements are taken from the intersection of Willow Pointe and Centerpointe Drive.

If you just need a quick jaunt and wish to avoid the easement, going up the sidewalk to the LCPD station and back is about one mile in length. 

Sometimes I see joggers in particular tracing that nice segment of sidewalk up and back, which is a distance of about two miles.

Unfortunately, this sidewalk doesn't connect to anything else at either end.  This is part of what I mean about lack of cohesive suburban planning.  Unfortunately, this sidewalk is like a Bridge to Nowhere. 

Remaining strictly within Centerpointe, this is about a 2-mile circuit, and I sometimes jog this route.

The PROBLEM with this kind of route, however, is that WE HAVE SO MANY RESIDENTS WHO ILLEGALLY PARK THEIR CARS ACROSS THE SIDEWALKS that it's not a pleasant journey - it's more like an obstacle course, especially on perenially-congested Walnut Pointe.  I suspect that this kind of reality is part of what drives people to walk in easements, the sentiment being "Geez, just give us a tiny bit of open space where we don't have to be dodging yet another infernal automobile literally every fifty feet." 

From Centerpointe to the United States Post Office, League City station, about a 1.5-mile circuit as shown.  If a person doesn't walk through that section of the easement to get there, it becomes necessary to go all the way up to Highway 3 and then back down FM 518 to Interurban.  But congested FM 518 is not really walkable, and neither is Interurban Street, so that's not really a viable option, not to mention the extra distance that would needlessly be involved. 

Either that, or go via West Galveston Street by way of Hwy 3, but West Galveston is a horrible unimproved street with no sidewalks and so you have to share what little degraded pavement there is with speeding cars - not safe, especially if you have kids or pets with you.

There's also a dirt barrier at the end of West Galveston, FYI.  People have made an obvious footpath around it.

Centerpointe into Pecan Forest.  This is about a 2-mile loop as shown.  As I mentioned in my post of two days ago, Pecan Forest is an interesting walk because it's an older neighborhood with magnificent trees (full of squirrels, which our dog loves to watch).

For people who live on the north and east sides of Centerpointe, it would be very difficult to get into this neighborhood without going through the Interurban easement.  The only other route is the "long way around" via Calder, which would add about another two miles to the walking circuit.  In other words, you'd have to walk over a mile before you could even get into Pecan Forest to start with.  Many walkers would find that to be too much for them.

I see people doing this 2.5-mile route, but I don't understand why they would want to.  There are neither sidewalks nor crosswalks on this segment of SH 96 (except at the Walker Street intersection), and cars whip by at up to 70 mph in close proximity to pedestrians. 

This is what I see dog-walkers in particular doing more commonly - going down the easement to SH 96 but then doubling back, in order to avoid the road which is arguably dangerous to pedestrians.  This too is about a 2.5-mile loop.

Future posts will address these options further, if I'm able to find out more relevant information about our local walkability issues.

Fiscal electrocution

It's early in the morning and I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around this news article in Galveston County Daily News:

A 34,000 League City residences are getting "smart" electrical meters for which we will each be forced to pay FOUR HUNDRED NINETY DOLLARS?!

Not only that, it apparently might happen for us in Centerpointe quite quickly.  Here's an excerpt from the installation schedule in the article cited above: 

Oct. 10-14 — south of FM 518, east of Calder Road, west of Interuban St., North of Link Road. 

That sounds suspiciously like us. 

The article states that affected residents will receive a postcard notifying of the change.  I never got a post card.  I just re-checked my mail stack, and there's nothing. 

It concerns me that we get no say in this matter even though we are the ones paying for it.  And the cost seems ridiculously high:  my husband and I installed a TED energy monitor in our house about a year ago.  It provides much more finely-tuned measurements than what the GCDN article mentions, at a fraction of that cost!

I have to dash to work right now, so cannot research this further.  If anyone has additional insight, please contact me.

Droughtful, just droughtful

Earlier this year, I saw it being done from the ground in Galveston:

FM 3005, May 10, 2011
In lieu of natural rain, two guys in bucket trucks washing salt and debris from electrical insulators to prevent short-circuiting and resultant power outages. 

This morning I read about it being done yesterday using choppers, also on the west end of Galveston.

But it appears as if the same chopper featured in that news article is on the north side of Centerpointe as I write this:

Looking east across a yard adjacent to West Walker Street.

Looking north across the north retention pond.

One wonders how they prioritize their washing.  Salt and sand I can see as being big issues on Galveston Island and in near-coastal Texas City where outages a couple of months ago threw some major refineries offline, but do we actually have similarly-problematic debris accumulations here in League City, 25-odd miles inland??  (Obviously we're closer than that to Galveston Bay, but prevailing winds tend not to come from the direction of the bay).  Interesting.

It sure does look like hazardous work, and it can't be cheap.

Would YOU want to be that guy hanging off the side??

Yet another reason why we're all hoping for the resumption of rainfall.  For bookend and posterity, here's a grab of the most recent Texas drought map which is available here:

Water water everywhere...

...except where and when we need it to be. 

You may have gotten the email blast from the community coordinator this morning, or read the news stories about the water conservation measures being called for tomorrow, as League City replaces a main valve. 

Heck, if you're an avid reader, you may have even read recently about League City's proposed "water smart" park, and the bit of controversy surrounding its funding. 

Aaaaand if you've lived in League City for a while, you may even recall the misery of the summer of 2009, when League City began with voluntary water rationing, and then proceeded to make it mandatory, rules that it partly ignored for its own purposes, with most of us finding out only later that part of the water "shortage" was actually due to the city's own gross mismanagement of our potable water assets, specifically, the expenditure of about $1 million of our taxpayer dollars on a water distribution plant that it proceeded to forget that it had even acquired! 

All of this may have you thinking, WHAT is the DEAL with League City and water?!?!

That whole story would take me a month of Sundays and a river of blog posts to explain.  For the moment, suffice it say that League City, like every other city of its size in Texas, has a Water Conservation Plan (WCP, which it incidentally submitted to the state a year past its due date; you might be able to yank a PDF copy of it from this site if you'd like to see it).  Among other things, the WCP sets usage-discouraging billing rates, provides a promulgated framework for water rationing when conditions call for it, and defines water reduction goals, namely a 5% per capita per year reduction which, to date, I really haven't seen articulated extensively via community outreach efforts. 

That's right.  Your city has basically decided that we all should have a goal of reducing our potable water usage by 5% per year. 

Before you get all indignant about your personal consumption habits having been decided without you being consulted, bear in mind that, to my weakly-informed knowledge, this is a fairly typical reduction goal state-wide.  The issue is that the population of Texas is growing but its water resources are not.  If anything, there may be a trend toward us having fewer water resources, as climate change (whether natural or human-induced) results in increasingly-frequent droughts.

Current conditions from U.S. Drought Monitor, as lifted from SciGuy's blog post of this morning.

The bottom lines in all of this:

(1) Our water billing rates are high and could likely go higher in the future.  One news article quoted a city administrator as noting that large irrigated lots in League City's Hidden Lakes subdivision could see water bills as high as $700 per month!

(2) We will likely be asked to conserve water on a regular basis. 

What steps can we take in the face of these issues?  I'll have some suggestions in additional blog posts to follow.