Pool Deck Drain Cleaning, Mechanical and Biological

Now for something completely different, a cobbled-together "solution" for a clogged pool deck drain!

Hurricanes Helene and now Milton have had their way and then some with my area of Florida. As a result, various compostable debris off my roof has found its way down onto my pool (or bacta tank, if you're that hardcore) deck and through the plastic drain. Similar to this one except the drain lives at the corner of the concrete deck and concrete block wall.

Heavy rain led to water intrusion into my garage underneath the back porch due to a compromised door threshold with rotting wood thanks to one and done sketchy, sloppy workmanship by a contractor who shall remain nameless (not out of compassion, it's just been so long I've forgotten, lucky them). 

So, inspired by madness and various other factors, and rather than pay some handyperson to do the job for me, I put together a selection of goods to handle things brutishly.

First, a wood augur, this one.

Next, a 1/2 inch hex socket to hold the augur in place.

Then, a couple of TEKTON 1/2 Inch Drive socket extensions, 24 inches each.

Next, a socket adapter to enable my cordless drill to hook up with this maniacal assembly. 

And, finally, OG Duck Tape to literally seal the deal. 

The idea here is to connect these pieces into basically a long, heavy drill bit that will see the auger power through what gunk and dirt lives in the deck drain and extract it. 

Here's the end result, Ryobi drill for scale.

Months prior to devising this thing, I deployed a liquid biological dethatcher, basically a concoction of beneficial bacteria and microbes to go after accumulated organic matter and start to break it downl. This is similar to the notion of  creating compost, where bulky leaves and branches and grass clippings and whatnot are deconstructed into humus, ideal for gardening among other things.

To help my new microbial friends do their job, I also every few weeks in added some compost accelerator to speed up and promote the bacteria's growth.

Before this enterprise, the rotting threshold saw water intrusion leading to small puddles of water collecting in the area indoors just behind the back door leading to the pool deck.

After a few goes over a couple weeks with this super-lengthened augur, proper drainage has been restored, and despite the inches upon inches of rainfall, water has yet to accumulate. This is buying me some time so that repairs can commence to the threshold once the nice, agonizingly brief spell of cool fall weather sets in.

Following drilling into the muck and seeing the auger capture and help me extract foul-smelling, increasingly soil-like gunk, I took a regular garden hose to the drain and did a once over with it down the length of it. As I did so, very fine organic matter with roughly the same dark hue (and odor) as the dethatching agent would bubble up through the drain as I went, suggesting the bacteria had well established itself and been gobbling up the stuff in advance nicely.

Not exactly within the purview of information technology, but at the same time a nice side project to pursue to take unclogging clogs into my own hands.

Gateway vs Router: T-Mobile 5G Home Internet and Wifi Network Contention

A couple of years ago T-Mobile 5G Home Internet finally became available in my area of Florida, enabling me to ditch longtime but miserly AT&T with their paltry "legacy" DSL (6 Mbps down / ~384 Kbps [!] up), for upwards of 170+ Mbps down / 3-6 Mbps up on 5G.

In the wake of the afterglow of comparatively fantastic speed, following hurricane Debby that blew through my area of Florida in August 2024, I experienced significantly decreased internet bandwidth with my wireless devices only.

Devices hardwired via ethernet cable, like my desktop PC, were unaffected, and speed tests for those showed around the expected bandwidth. My laptops (plural), tablets (ditto), and others though were definitely having issues. Why?

I called T-Mobile and they informed me that one 5G tower of theirs was down for repairs while at least one other was undergoing maintenance and awaiting parts. I proceeded to reach out over a dozen times by message back and forth with T-Mobile support via former Twitter and Facebook, tracking their progress and advising of changes on my end. My 5G gateway has been facing out a south-facing window of my home, and the nearest tower they recommended was E-SE, so I oriented the front face (where the 5G antennas live for this Sagemcom Fast 5688W gateway) as best I could in that general direction.

Now, here's the thing. When I first set up the gateway using the T-Life mobile app for Android, I configured it (innocently enough) with the same wifi SSID and password as that used by my TP-Link router (which supports the newer WIFI 6 standard, as does the 5G gateway). Therein lies the problem, as I found out with reasonable certainty. 

The wifi 6 standard among other benefits enables you to not have to create unique SSIDs to use around your house, say. Instead of creating one SSID for say each wifi extender you might have on every compass point of your home as you might have with wifi 5 and older, now you can use a single SSID to be smartly managed by the router in a mesh setup (as I delve into here).

However, as I discovered, that does NOT mean that separate wifi 6 gateways or routers play nice, wifi wise, with each other. Computers, tablets, even wifi extenders all cope nicely within the wifi 6 standard, but "royalty" in the form of gateways and routers that actually serve as upper management for your local wifi device community can clash.

I followed steps in the T-Life app to do the following:

1. From the Overview => My Wi-fi screen, create a new wifi network named TMobile (with SSID hidden).
   
   
2. From under My Networks, tap the current SSID I originally configured on both my gateway and router, let's call it DARTH.
   
   
3. Tap on DARTH, and on the Network Details screen, tap Delete Network, and confirm. Note also the reminder from T-Mobile, you must have at least one Wi-Fi network to be able to access the gateway from the T-Life app itself. 

In retrospect, that little warning T-Mobile provides turned out to be prophetic, and I wish I took the hint early on that hey, maybe dueling wifi networks are part of the problem, here. Indeed, by setting up the T-Mobile gateway to use the exact same wifi network as my router, I can only imagine the constant radio frequency duel going on between the two devices, each with the same valid credentials and security, each vying for control of the wifi devices on my LAN.

Now, having that TMobile network on the gateway, not only hidden but completely unique to DARTH which my router manages exclusively, and the T-Life app connecting by wifi from the former network's only connected device, my phone, I now am enjoying bandwidth much like my desktop PC from my laptop.

Much better! At this point the only things stifing connectivity are what you'd expect, obstacles impeding signal between the wifi extenders and the router, the relatively elderly Intel Centrino onboard adapter this particular laptop uses, etc. Not a pitched battle between gateway and router over which one serves as the official conduit for local network traffic.