Today (well really yesterday) I learned that I really should have replaced our house iron filter some time ago. It was on my list of things to do over the last 6 months, and I finally got around to it on Saturday. It was one of those tasks that I’d never done before, so kept procrastinating on it, even though it only took 15 minutes. The filter element, the part you replace, looked like a paint roller that was drenched with some of the russet sunset we had used in the kitchen. (sorry no pics, it was disposed of before I could think of it).
As soon as it was replaced we had at least twice the water pressure in the house. I regenerated our water softener, and now our dishes are getting clean again, the shower up stairs has much more sane water pressure, and the tub faucet no longer has orange water come out of it when you first start it. Yay for that.
The last thing you want to hear at midnight is “the icecream has turned to soup” when your wife wanders to the downstairs chest freezer to get some home made icecream out. Granted, because it was boozy icecream, it was mostly a good early warning sign (everything else seemed frozen). Given that I’ve got a bunch of remote temperature sensors that my computer collects data on, Susan put one in, and I figured we’d see what things looked like in the morning.
As you can see, the trend line was not going in the right direction. 8 am this morning we realized we needed a new freezer by the end of the day if we wanted the contents of the old one to survive. We got it back to the house and installed by 10am. Susan moved everything over at noon, and the old one is no longer a freezer. So now we have an actual chest freezer again, and I’ve got a new project to figure out if the old one is fixable in any cost effective way.
While the room still has some work to do, the shelves are now complete. They’ll be full of stuff starting in a couple of days. For my first finish level of wood working, I’m pretty pleased how they turned out.
The bright sun light throws it off a bit, but that’s basically what the shelves will look like once they are done. The painting portion of this adventure starts tonight.
Also, that’s not barrel distortion, the shelves are built into a parallelogram part of the room with a 17 degree angle.
Today’s progress after taking the day off of work. That’s the minimal amount of attached parts that I need to keep it the right shape.
Also, I am full of / covered in sawdust.
Back of the envelope math is good to do. I’m currently working to upgrade my raid array, but due to a lack of ports on the home server, I’m using a second box to build and initialize the new array.
1.2 Terrabytes / 100 Mbs network = 26 hours at theoretical peak performance. I’m getting about 80% of peak, so just over 30 hours. Ooof.
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.
On October 21, 2008 · Comments Off
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.
On June 19, 2008 · Comments Off
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.
