Sean's Mental Walkabout

Back in October I had a chance to talk with some Central Hudson (our local power company) reps at an IEEE conference.  During that conversation I was disappointed to find out that there weren’t any near term smart meters coming out.  If I wanted to get access to my real time power consumption, I’d have to do it myself.

Up until this fall, the ways I found to do this myself were un appealing.  There is a device which has an optical sensor and monitors how fast your meter wheel is spinning.  There are some DIY instructions on adding per circuit monitoring, what was way more DIY than I was willing to do inside my circuit box.  Then I found The Energy Detective 5000, which just started production this fall.

The setup is pretty simple.  There are a couple of induction clamps which go around your mains coming into you circuit box.  They plug into an embedded device which connects to 2 circuit breakers for power and signaling.  All of that lives inside your circuit box.  There is then the “gateway”, which is a power bring with a network cable coming out of it.  You connect that to your home network and it presents you with a web interface for your power data.  The install took me about 10 minutes to do… and then 30 minutes to realize the statement that the gateway “should” be on the same leg as the the black wire really was a “must” instead of a should, after which point everything was working.

The TED 5000 will also accept billing rates and carbon rates for your power consumption so you can have real time translation to dollars or tons of co2 if you like.  It will connect to Google’s Power meter, so that your iGoogle environment will show your power graphs.  There is also a head unit that you can put in your living room (which sits next to our wireless weather station) that displays all that without a computer.

Pretty quickly you get a sense of what’s going on in your house, especially as you get to look at the graphs at different granularity.

This is just a quick set of annotations I was able to put into place based on my experiences in the last 24 hours.  The raw data that builds these graphs is directly accessible via xml in case you want to write your own analysis programs, which is something I’m definitely thinking about.

So far, in the 20 hours I’ve had it working, I’m quite impressed with the whole system.  Be forewarned though that the TED folks are getting a lot of press over this device, which means their 3 – 6 weeks backorder turned into 10 weeks for me, and their communication about that wasn’t great.  However, the end result is definitely worth it.

I’ve been talking about it for years, and spending the last 2 weekends staring up at the stars with binoculars on our deck made me realize that I now had a place to use this that was only 25′ from hot coffee. Not so important now, but that will be clutch in the winter.

So, it’s now been confirmed. We had a lightning strike on the dish at the house. That piece of cable was found by the tech while fixing our dish. He took the original home with him for an office souvenir, as I don’t think he really believed me that the house got hit by lightning when I first told him.

A friend of mine pointed me at Live Maps last night, which is basically microsoft’s google maps. It looks basically exactly like google maps, so I wasn’t sure why he sent me there.

Then he said “Find your house, and click Bird’s Eye view.”

Ok. The results are impressive. It’s a lot higher res than the aerial, and more current. I wish they told you the date o nthis things, as I’d find it facinating. I have some ideas by what’s laying around in our yard that this is late March / Early April last year.

When I got home tonight, things seemed a bit off, and I couldn’t figure it out to begin with. Pretty soon I realized that a lot of electronics were acting up. While a hard power reset fixed some of them, others (like our satellite receiver) didn’t recover so well. Given the storm we’d had, I decided to have a look around for a tree that had been struck. While I was out there, I noticed that one of our satellite dishes seemed to have bits hanging off of it. I know there was hail around here today so it could have been that instead.

After some resets, and digging, the comprehensive list of broken items in the house is listed below:

• Dish Network Receiver – HDMI is toast, and even over the RF to the TV downstairs it appears that it’s getting no satellite signals
• 5 port gigE switch – plug it in and no lights come on and it just gets hot
• 2 ports in the other 5 port gigE switch – 1 port that is now dead was the Dish Receiver port
• the WAN port on my FIOS router
• the gigE port on my desktop

I had another 10/100 card to throw in the desktop, and it’s back up now. Playing port plugging got enough bits working downstairs. My openwrt router came up like a champ and got me back on the internet. So the damage amounts to about $100 worth of stuff I need to replace, plus whatever the story turns out to be with Dish (who is coming out of Thursday to do the service call). I’ll try to get some pictures up on the damage, and I really should get up on the roof to see if there is any other damage up there, but that’s going to require a day of not rain.

I found myself surprised to realize that we’d been doing our memorial day sunday party What started as our house warming party 4 years ago, has now turned into our big annual event. We had another good turn out year, with ~ 35 folks, good beer, and great food. Ladder Ball was definitely the hit of the year.

Adrianne posted pictures on smugmug, check them out if you are interested.

The house monitoring project has made a little bit of progress, as I’ve now got data being collected into a rails app using backgroundrb, and can get that data back out into very pretty graphs with gruff.  (I also looked a little bit a sparklines, but that’s specifically for graphs without labels.)
 

We’re running above target temp as it’s the weekend, so the wood stove is on.  As is the furnace fan to spread the heat through the house.  I’m overloading the values for heat on an fan on to be either the bottom of the graph or a specific small value.  I need to sort out a better way to put that into the graph, which may require some hacking on gruff itself.

I definitely don’t have this anywhere near I like it, but I did manage to just dump out a bunch of info from my thermostat and turn off the fan with this script:

I need some nicer symbolic constants for state setting, and pull together a rails site just to keep track of thermostat data over the course of the day.  All this code is going on my newly registered rubyforge project.

John came over prior to the game bringing his HD-DVD Video Essentials, and given that we had some time prior to the game, we spent some time tuning the set.  Honestly, most things were pretty good, though we had to tune down the color and up the brightness just a bit.  There was one adjustment we made that I can tell immediately made a difference, which was tuning the sharpness down to nothing.  One thing that had always bothered me was how Jack’s beard in lost seemed to shimmer in odd ways, though I was never really sure what caused it.  It turns out that sharpness on digital TVs pretty much just takes the digital artifacting and makes it 10 times worse.  The image looks a little softer now, but there are no annoying random artifacts on thin lines throughout the picture.

Thanks to John for bringing that over.  I still have the kit as I’m going to do audio balancing this week (as we didn’t quite have the time to do it before people showed up).  While my living room is only so tunable, I’m still looking forward to actually trying to balance in the sub woofer in a reasonable way.  I think it will be amusing to see how off my course grained adjustments are.