Horse Chestnut Tree Avenue

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There’s a medium-sized Horse Chestnut tree in one of the hedgerows which seems to suit the conditions quite well and I’ve been growing some seedlings from the conkers – a few of which are 3 years old and a few more which are 2 years old.

I’d marked out for a line of 9 of these either side the driveway last summer and prepared the planting holes over winter then moved them from their nursery bed in February and March. They’re just now coming into leaf; with there being so little rain I’m keeping them well watered.

It took me a while to settle on the spacing and how far back from the drive to position them. The photo makes the hedge look quite close but it’s over 50 metres away and the 9 trees are 6 metres apart and 9 metres from the drive. 6 metres is too close together for a fully-grown horse chestnut so once they get big enough for that to be a problem every other one will need taking out, leaving 5 of the 9. Can’t see that happening in my lifetime though.

So far I’ve only planted the trees on the north side of the drive; on the south side there’s more work to do to prepare the planting holes. Those will have to wait until next winter.

Outdoor WiFi Upgrade

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With thick walls, metal-coated cavity wall insulation and triple-glazed windows with Low-E coatings it was always going to be difficult for the signal from the indoor WiFi access points to reach the outside – and there is quite a lot of outside space to cover – so there are two dedicated outdoor WiFi access points – one on the West elevation and one on the East.

A pair of Ubiquiti UniFi UAP Outdoor+ units have been doing the job since 2015 but for a few months now the UniFi management console has been showing these were approaching End of Support and would not receive firmware updates after March 2021. These older APs have also never supported 5GHz WiFi, only 2.4GHz (whereas the indoor units support both): time for an upgrade.

Old Ubiquiti UniFi AP Outdoor+ WiFi Access Point

After 6 years in the sun and the rain these had weathered somewhat and it was difficult to slide them out of the support brackets but with a bit of jiggling they came free without breaking.

New Ubiquiti UniFi UAP-AC-M Outdoor WiFi Access Point

As the second photo shows, the new units are slightly smaller than the old ones, despite being more capable. The power consumption is also slightly lower – a shade under 3W rather than a shade under 4W (these are connected back to a UniFi Power over Ethernet switch which reports the power consumption of each port drawing PoE power). The new units connect at 1Gb/s rather than 100Mb/s, since in 5GHz mode they can support more than 100Mb/s.

A nice touch is several features that make these easy to install, as shown in the photos below.

Installer-friendly features on the new UAP-AC-M: built-in spirit level on the wall bracket and a strap to retain the cable-entry cover

The one respect in which the newer units are less capable than the older ones is that the new ones only have a Single wired Ethernet port whereas the old ones had two – a Primary and a Secondary, the idea being that they could be used to connect a wired device to the Secondary port which then received data over WiFi from a separate Access Point. This feature is still available from the more capable (but more expensive – literally double the price) UAP-AC-M-PRO.