Cory, very sorry for your loss!






Today I finished up a two day job that consisted of completely redoing a house network system. Pulled over 1200 ft of cat5 in the attic. House is 7800ish sq.ft single story so the home is insanely long which required 5 unifi Aps to properly cover it. A last minute addition to this one was to try and figure out how to get wireless into a bomb shelter 40ft underground. In the initial consultation he "forgot" to tell me about it. This brought the total to 6

Home was built in the 50s and the previous owner was obviously very paranoid. One of the most elaborate bomb shelters in the Philadelphia area the homeowners were told by a "bomb shelter inspector" it has 3 escape hatches, 1 goes to an unknown location somewhere in the neighborhood, the inspector is almost certain it comes up under a house 1/4 mile from the property. It also has a positive air pressure filtration system and water access (well)with reverse osmosis filtration. 3 2,000lb blast doors for the main entrance and 3 300 lb doors for the escape hatches.

The amount of utilities that are required to keep this shelter running is truly impressive. They can't seal it off as the house is integrated into it in numerous ways, the biggest being the air handling system. He was told he cannot shut it off as the house would have no heat or air, and to replace it would be well over 100,000k to rework the HVAC system.

He has to spend roughly 8500 a year for a shelter expert to come and maintain it quarterly. It involves replacing filters and doing routine maintenance that apparently is required.(was not disclosed to them when they bought the home)

The previous owner was extremely paranoid, the attic is/was outfitted with an elaborate motion alarm system complete with shock, noise and vibration sensors. Every door in the house has a sensor as well as a now non functioning laser sensor system similar to a bank that was installed throughout the home. There are also two safe rooms (now closets and storage)and and extremely elaborate elevator system that would take him up to the attic to allow him to move throughout the house to the two safe rooms incase of intrusion.

The house was neat but very odd. It was eye opening to see how paranoid and scared everyone was in the Cold War era. The bomb shelter in the 50's cost well over 200k to construct, which would equate to an insane amount of money to build today, nobody can figure out why there are 3 escape hatches though. 1 was standard, but 2 is literally unheard of for a residential shelter and is one of two in the US to have that. It has been turned into a gym and the security system has been replaced by a wireless dsg system.

Pretty cool though.