We Finally Got Some Snow

JonC — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 00:22:33 +0000

Well after watching everyone else in the country get some snow we finally got a little bit over the weekend. I don’t know how much snow actually fell in our area, but it came along with high winds and drifted quite high in the yard. In some areas around here it was blown down to where you could see the grass poking through the snow, but something about living on a hill apparently caused a lot of it to drift right up onto the property which was nice.

Unfortunately it fell on Sunday night and Monday morning and the office wasn’t closed so I didn’t get much time to ‘play’ in the snow, it was pretty much ‘clear it enough so I can get to work’. I didn’t get many pictures but I did get one of the snow blower and the roads in my area. Hopefully the next storm will either occur near a weekend OR it will be enough snow to actually shut things down. This was a good start though, hopefully the winter weather machine will keep on churning and throw some more of the white stuff our way.

The snow blower worked great as usual but I did manage to snap a shear pin on one of the augers about halfway through the job. I had a couple of spare so it only took about 15 minutes to repair, otherwise I would have been shoveling the rest. I snapped another shear pin this evening doing some extra cleanup of some spots in the driveway, but the snow is starting to take on an icy state after a day of above freezing temps so no surprise there. I’ll replace it on some day when I have daylight to work on it and also need to pick up a few extra ones. I’m not sure if they’ve just become weak over several years of use.

Review:Monitoring Power Usage With TED 5000-C Part 2

JonC — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 06:46:05 +0000

In part one of my TED Power Monitor Review I covered the installation of the TED-5000 Energy Usage Monitor. In part 2 I will cover the software features and functionality of the Footprints software included with TED. In part 3 I am going to cover the setup and usage of Google Power Meter.

Please remember that the screen shots below are taken right after I installed the meter. You can click the pictures (below) to view a large readable version of them. As time proceeds the meter will keep a log of second, hour, daily, weekly and monthly statistics for you and provide you the ability to see your power usage over time. Already I find myself wishing that TED had an additional MTU and sensor or meter for the consumption of liquid fuel, such as heating oil, or gas fuels such as Propane and Natural Gas and later on I will talk about these things in relation to the TED series of meters.

Please remember that you can click on any of the photos below to make them larger for more detail at any time while viewing this page.

This first photo before is the screen you should see when you type http://ted5000/ into your web browser once you have TED installed. That address is actually the machine name of the TED Gateway and should resolve automatically to the right IP address, if it doesn’t you may have to log into your router to find out it’s IP address.

In the screen shot above you might feel a bit of information overload, at first. In the top left you see the days left in the billing cycle and the current rate in effect, as well as the plan type. You can also see money spent since midnight on my power usage as well as money spent this month on power consumption. The system will also project the power bill for my the month. I calculated the use of energy based on my power bills, and while I’m billed once every two months I did a little math and figured it out to a kWh billing rate which should be relatively accurate over 1 or 2 months. As of now TED does NOT support bi-monthly billing, a shortcoming, but they will hopefully be fixing that soon from what I understand. I also get a report on my present voltage (more of a nerd plus-up) Low voltage can cause electrical equipment to operate improperly. Most devices are tolerant to at least +/- 10% though (12 volts over or under) but any voltage that looks way off should be investigated. Also extremely low voltages while operating high power equipment such as a stove, dryer or other device can mean there is excessive resistance in a power supply line somewhere which can mean trouble. High resistance lines result in heat which can result in a fire!

My power company does not share their billing process with me in my bills and they don’t provide a detailed billing list. I’m going to try to get them to start providing more detail on my bill. I believe power companies should provide extensive detailing on the bills so that consumers can be properly informed on their power consumption and also be able to make decisions about their electricity provider. Because of this lack of available information I used the KWh usage and bill prices to derive an average cost per kWh. I know, I know.. there’s flat rate fees and delivery charges, regulatory fees and other things but when it comes down to it, this is how much it costs me per kWh, no matter what, on average so it is what I used.

On the screen below you can see the cost screen of the TED 5000 unit. It uses the information I provide about my power service and calculates how much money I am spending on the power I’m using at any given point as well as over time. This can be another good motivator to start reducing the amount of power used. When you see your money disappearing at the rate defined by “Present Spending Per Hour” it sort of gets your attention.

The spending screen is pretty informative and provides all your electrical spending information. I can’t believe I was spending $4 on electricity per day. The space heater is a large chunk of the constant power use at 1000 watts, the PC, TV, etc take up another 7-800. In reality, this is cheaper than running the oil furnace in my basement. Oil is over $3 per gallon and I know I can burn more than a few gallons a day to heat the whole house. The last 2 years my energy cost in the middle of winter have been over $100 a week just to keep the house at 55-65 degrees. By reducing the heat in my home and using space heaters to heat the active living areas I’ve been able to reduce my costs extensively!

The third page under “Present Readings” seen below is more for the tree friendly crowd. We need to love our trees. God, gods or evolution (I’m equal opportunity here) put the trees here for obvious reasons, to be our giant green air filters. As taught in high school science, trees help remove Co2 out of our atmosphere and release oxygen which we love but we also love carbon spewing coal and gas power plants, cars, fires, etc. Well, that junk has to come out of the air eventually.

So here’s my carbon footprint for my electricity down below. I just used the default calculation of 1.5 pounds per kWh as I didn’t see anything on my electrical providers page about how much carbon they generate.

OK!!! Past the tree hugger part (yay!). The next feature of TED is the History Tab. The history tab is pretty complex but easily broken down if you just focus on one piece at a time. There is the Month History which shows your usage per month. On a new system like mine there isn’t a lot of information but you have to remember that it builds over time. TED (The Energy Detective) Footprints software is kind enough to provide a comparison from this year and last year. So you have at least two years of history to compare to. You can also use these numbers to compare your bills to you TED estimated costs and see how well your configuration is doing. Do you feel empowered? You should!

You also have the Hour History, this shows you comparison of today vs. yesterday so you can compare today’s usage vs yesterday usage. I’ve included a slightly updated image since TED has been on patrol for a while now.

Huh, interesting! Power usage varies quite a bit. You can tell when I was awake because the power usage jumped. When the power is .2kWh I was asleep (with a shotgun and one eye open, so don’t try anything ) and had the heating blanket on plus my evil VAMPIRE DEVICES (oooo) powered on. Once I was up and downstairs I turned on the ‘dish heater’ which is a parabola shaped radiant heater which uses about 1000 watts, the TV which is about 300 and the computer which is another 300-700 depending on what I’m doing with it.

The next section of information is Graphing. The graphing tab provides a huge amount of information. You can break it down by the second, by the minute, by the hour, date, KWH, Cost Per KWH and a bunch of other cool stuff!

A lot of the power from the TED Footprints interfaces comes from how you set it up. The engineers at TED have spent a lot of time to set up the Utility Pricing Wizard as you can see below. TED allows you to set up your utility information to some detail. You can set your billing date (monthly only, no bi-monthly, yet) and how many seasons your provider charges you different rates for. Some utility companies (power delivery) may charge a different rate for 2-4 seasons where the rate varies depending on if its fall, winter, spring or summer. Other companies may go three ways or have a simple two or one way billing season. You need to ask your utility for EXCESSIVE DETAIL if you want to be super accurate on setting up your rates. If this seems like it can get really complex, it can, but if you can get this information from your power company it’ll go a lot easier. If not, do I what I did and average your power cost from your last years bills (I got mine online) and use the flat rate.

Once you’ve set that you need to go through the Plan Type as well which lets you choose your billing for a Flat Rate (I used this with my average), Tiered where you pay different amounts per kWh from 0-500 then 500-1000, then 1000-2000 kwh, or similar, Time of Use where the amount you pay for your energy depends on your the time of day you’re using power, such as daytime or evening. Generally evening is cheaper than daytime use. Also you may be billed on Tiered PLUS Time of Use. You need to know this information for accuracy if you don’t want to do estimated billing.

Once you’ve set up your utilities plan types you need to set your Energy Rates. These numbers will vary depending on the plan type you’ve selected but the TED engineers have made sure to add the input fields for all different types of billing plans so that most people are covered. If you’re not covered and want to use a TED system you should contact the engineers at TED and let them know!

If you’re on a tiered system for example; TED lets you define the number of tiers as well as the start and stop for each level of your power usage tier, you don’t enter your tiered rates yet, just where the tiers start and stop for each one, up to 4 tiers.

If you’ve enable Time-of-Use on you TED system you’ll need to enter the Time-of-Use ( TOU ) data as well on the following screen.

Finally after entering all of that information you get to enter the Energy Rate data. This is the information that tells TED how it much it should be calculating your energy cost. Depending on the options you’ve selected you may have to provide more or less information about your energy costs. If you’ve selected Time-Of-Use as well as Tiers you will need to enter the data shown below which is your 4 tiers, plus your peak/off-peak power usage. You’re almost there, don’t freak out!

Finally, if your utility charges any additional fees, taxes or other things you can set that up in the TED 5000 system as well. Again, I just used an average number based on my bill over the last few months since my power provider doesn’t willingly provide detail billing information.

Huzzah! You’re more-nearly there, the final decision is to go to the ‘Write to Device’ and upload the data to the device. This sends all of the information to the TED Gateway and saves it. Since the TED Gateway is also the web server, all of your information is there and NEVER saved on your computer which may crash or error out. Although it’s possible to lose the information on the TED Gateway as well if you have to do a firmware update or reset it. You can back up the data before a reset though and save it somewhere safe to reminisce.

Now that you have the critical information setup, or you don’t have it setup but want to go on anyways, you should look into the System Setup Wizard A lot of the settings are covered in the manual so I’ll go to a few which I’ve found interesting.

The first part of the System Setup Wizard which you may find interesting is the Operational Settings.

TED Offers an ‘Normal Mode’ which is what you see when TED is operating normally (go figure) as well as an enhanced mode. The normal mode is what you might view on a daily basis out of interest, or maybe on a weekly basis depending on how much you want to cringe. The enhanced mode allows you to set ted to update more often and provide higher resolution data for the voltage and energy usage. You may use the advanced mode when you have a small load placed on the line that you wish to monitor or you’re trying to nitpick energy usage. Say you want to harp on the old lady for using too much power on the clothes iron or the curling iron, hair dryer, coffee pot, etc then advanced mode is for you. BE FORWARNED! Non-geeks don’t appreciate you nit-picking their power usage, keep it to yourself for your own self gratification because TED also collects information about all of the things you’re doing too! Sharing the detailed power consumption information of a hair dryer is NOT a benefit to your happy abode and may find you on the couch.

The display unit for the TED 5000-C (the -C denotes it comes with an LCD display) is a generally nice looking display unit which should fit into most homes. Apparently it communicates with a 2.4Ghz protocol though which is unfortunate as other 2.4Ghz devices in the area can interfere with it’s updates and drastically reduce it’s range. This includes WiFi and BlueTooth communications devices so you should seriously consider this in your extended purchase. I knew this in advance, not what I had that would interfere with it, but that it may be interfered with. In the end for my situation it turns out my BlueTooth Logitech headphones cause it problems. I decided to keep the LCD screen near the gateway to limit interference and it’s next to the TV so I can always keep an eye on it when my computer is in sleep (to save power) or I’m not at my computer (usually the same time as sleep mode). The range for this LCD display is also short. The box shows going to your thermostat and adjusting it to reduce your power consumption which is lame but the concept is conveyed by the picture. In reality you might not get this far, still I recommend it.

The LCD has a green light on the button which blinks each time it receives an update, so if you’re not getting a blinking green light on your TED 5000-C LCD display you should move it closer to the TED gateway until you do. I would recommend experimenting by moving the device around and finding out your true range. My personal opinion is that TED should put a much better battery in their little LCD device and include one of the many available OEM WiFi modules which is compatible with most peoples homes to transfer the data. For homes without internet connectivity they could even make a few bucks selling pre-configured routers and setups. There’s a lot of communications stuff in TED which results in interference or ease of being interfered with which could be solved by a B or G WiFi connection. Hopefully that will be in a model like TED-10000 or something.

Below is the configuration for what the TED 5000 LCD Display will show when you hold it and push it’s buttons to change screens.

Click to enlarge the above photo! Here you can set the normal and enhanced modes back-light settings. When you’re in enhanced mode on the TED 5000 it changes how the display responds by increasing back-light power. You can also set a timer to dim the TED 5000 LCD Display’s back-light as well as set a timer for the scrolling of the display information and how soon the display falls asleep. Almost finally you can set the contrast.

On top of all that you can set which displays are shown Real-Time Use, Recent Usage, Month To Date, Monthly Projections, Co2 Nature Abuser Status, Voltage, KW Detail for Today, Spending Detail for Today as well as Multi-Panel which supports multiple MTU usage if you are monitoring more than one set of power leads.

Once you’ve setup the TED 5000 LCD Display the final setting before you write them to the device is to set the Footprints Settings. I find that most of the footprint settings are adequate and adjustable on the main info displays but you may want to fine tune them, you can do that in the screen shown below.

Once you have set all of the settings to your preferences you can go into the ‘Write To Device’ tab and update the settings with your preferences. This will send all your setting to the TED 5000 gateway and to the LCD display itself.

There is another feature of TED which I haven’t gotten into yet, and I would consider this an experimental feature. They have a function called ‘Load Profiling’. If you can accurately provide information on a known load you can track it separately without needing an additional MTU. The idea is that you tell TED Footprints how many kWh or Wh a devices uses and if it’s a multi-stage unit and TED can tell when that device turns on! While it’s good in theory the execution has been mostly good but partly hit or miss.

In the screen shot above of the TED 5000 Footprints software you can see that I have setup a load profile for a Dish Heater. This is the radiant heater mentioned earlier that uses about 1000 watts. I added this to TED as well as my 6kW water heater (50 gallon) and my clothes dryer (set on ‘auto dry’). My main experience has been that it detects the dish heater mostly okay, but occasionally determines it’s a dryer if the dish heater and water heater turn on at the same time. This is not so much a problem of the TED Footprints software as it is the method that TED Footprints uses and the data it has access to. If two devices turn on near the same time which have the same power consumption as a water heater, it’s going to show as water heater on rather than dish + something else.

Overall I would have to say the load profiling on the TED 5000 has limited uses and flexibility. They’re trying to offer a solution based on limited data so the results can be not too great. If you really want to be able to monitor another device accurately you should probably just buy an additional MTU for the TED and clamp the lines you want to watch. I’m sure with some time you could get the profiler to be more effective than I did, but it would take a lot of time and an assistant running back and forth to turn the device on and off for you since the ‘auto-detect’ for the load profile setup times out fairly quickly.

Also if you have loads who’s power usage varies constantly, this may cause problems. I have an Oil Furnace and that device has two power stages. The oil pump to the burner and the inducer motor turns on before the main blower on the furnace starts. The pump and inducer run for 2-3 minutes before the main blower turns on. Unfortunately the oil pump motor is an older version and it’s power draw can vary by up to .2kW every second then the OLD blower turns on and it’s power consumption varies about the same. This can throw the TED unit even with the ability to adjust the sensitivity. The better option for detecting this current draw may be a separate MTU. I may order a couple more but I want to research the forums on multiple MTU usage first. I’d also love to see a TED 5000 oil/gaseous fuel consumption monitor as well before I go nuts.

Thank you for viewing part II of my TED 5000 review. In part III I’ll provide a final evaluation of the unit, cost analysis(simplified) and let you know if this was a worthwhile investment for the home user who wants to save power and how it may apply in real life. Please stay tuned!

Amazon.com Widgets

Still here? Did you read Part 1 of my TED Home Power Monitor Review?

Yardwork Helpers – Auto Winding Hose Reel

JonC — Tue, 19 May 2009 02:52:48 +0000

I have Rheumatoid Arthritis and was getting tired of winding the 100 foot hose back into a pile. We went to Lowe’s a while back and I was looking for a hose reel while Bryn was looking for herb seeds and such. I saw this thing and decided to spend the 75 bucks on it. My RA is bad at times and excessive work really brings it out, but I hate to quit doing things around the house because of it and will always push myself. One less workload every night after watering is great!

I was pretty sure this was a waste of 75 bucks, you always see stuff at the home center’s that looks great, but deep inside you know it’s complete junk. Well, I was wrong on this one and pretty happy with the results over the last few months. It winds 100 feet of hose in about 1 minute, pretty impresive. I put a video up with some random music for you to watch.

This particular product is of the ‘No-Crank’ brand, they come in a lot of shapes and sizes. I went for something ‘open’ so I could clean off the hose and.. well I just like to see things work. If I could buy this bad-boy in transparent plastic I would (and if they want to ship a transparent one to me, please use the contact form!) Each hose reel comes with a special code you can use and include in a link to earn credits. You’ll notice my link is a straight link without the code, I just think it’s a great product and wanted to share with some of my more challenged yard-work visitors.

Just remember, when in doubt, there’s a technology out there to make the hard stuff easier for us and I’ve been surprised with how well it works. If I run into any junk I’ll be sure to let you know.

I’ve started putting videos on YouTube, and will continue to do so, I hate to think people can’t watch the vids because it’s in some crazy ‘standard’ format.

No-Crank Hose Winder Video

Alternate video link

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We Finally Got Some Snow

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