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!

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

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I’ve been wanting a way to monitor my home power usage for a while and recently did a lot more research.  The folks at TED (The Energy Detective) had a selection of products which rated well and I ended up buying the TED 5000-C.

These are not installation instructions, just showing you how I installed my unit. Always follow the manufacturers instructions.

With that said, TED’s selection of products vary from the pretty basic to some pretty snazzy equipment.  I went for the TED 5000-C system which lets you monitor one set of mains power lines and includes a nifty LCD display. I searched around for other options, and there were some pretty high end units which allow per-circuit monitoring, but you pay for the price. The TED with the display was around $240/USD and as package can monitor one 240VAC circuit or 120VAC.  The most common usage is to monitor the main feeds into a persons home.

If you have an X-10 unit used to control your home lighting you may wish to check the TED support forums in advance. I’ve read that since TED uses power-line transmission for it’s data like X-10 does, it can cause erratic behavior in some X-10 switches and units, causing them to turn on and off at random times. It’s best to read the forums or contact TED and find out what the conditions are before investing in a system. I don’t run X-10 at home and have been looking at other brands of devices that don’t use power-line transmission so I am not too concerned about it.

I ordered the TED 5000-C on the Nov 14th and received it today, Nov 22, despite some possible back orders on their end. This gave me some time to read over their website and user support forums to see what sort of things I might expect to run into. As with most support forums there were a lot of requests for support with good answers, or answers found elsewhere on the forums for questions which have been asked multiple times.  My impression from just reading the forums is that they seem to be putting in an effort for supporting their customers.

Here’s what I got in the mail today. Oh sweet I can hold the LCD Panel while adjusting my thermostat!  I though it would have been cooler to push a button on the LCD display and vaporize my power bill, but it’s not going to be THAT easy. (Click pictures to embigginate them)

Open up the lid of the box and you’ll find 3 nicely packed sub-boxes. One box for the MTU components, one box for the Gateway Unit and one box for the LCD Display unit.

Taking a closer look at the components we’ll start with the MTU and the CT.  The MTU (Measuring Transmitting Unit) is a small box that will live in or near your main electrical panel if you are using it to monitor your household energy use. The MTU is relatively small and unless your electrical box is packed you should have no problem finding room for it. Additionally the MTU box also contains the two clamp-on CTs(Current Transformers) which are used to monitor your 240 volt power feed into your home.  Most often in the US and Canada a home power feed consists of two 120 volt lines which are 180 degrees out of phase with each other, so you get a clamp for each line.  The clamps have a red dot on them, the red dots face towards the incoming side of the lines(towards the power meter). As you’ll see in my photos later, I actually had them upside down. I don’t think it should technically be a problem as long as both face the same way, but I flipped them the other way as per the manufacturers specifications.

In the next box is the Gateway.  This is a rather unimpressive looking unit. The entire unit is built into shell with an Ethernet network connector, some LEDs and a 3 prong electrical plug.  The LEDs near the Ethernet port show network activity. The LED on the right side of the box shows communication status with the MTU (it should blink about once per second when operating properly) and the LED on outward facing side shows connectivity to the LCD display. If no LCD display is present, then the green light stays solid, otherwise it blinks about once per second as well.

The final package contains the LCD Display unit.  The unit is shiny and it has a base docking station with charger.  The unit is able to be removed from the base station and carried around with you. I have a blue-tooth headphone transmitter in my living room which seemed to interfere with how far away I could carry the LCD display away from the Gateway. Some experimentation may reduce the signal and improve the range and I’ll make sure to update this post with the latest information as I go.

One thing that isn’t included in the package is a two-pole circuit breaker which you may need if you’re installing the TED in some locations. It depends on what your electrical code approves of. Some electrical codes will allow you to connect the TED power supply lines to an existing 2 pole circuit breaker, others may require that you use a standalone breaker.  As I could not find the code which this was specified in, I decided to go the safe route and buy a separate breaker for the TED MTU.  The breaker cost around $15 at Lowe’s.

Please read the installation manual and don’t use this as installation instructions, but simply a story on how I installed and got my TED 5000 up and running. Every situation is different, however what is almost always true is that working in your electrical box can be hazardous if you are not used to working with the voltages and configurations involved. I have experience working with multi-megawatt high energy / high-voltage capacitor systems, high voltage projects, and even some limited household wiring experience as well and I know how to be safe. If you’re not sure, hire an electrician for this part.

Below is a picture of my electrical box with the panel removed. You can see the breakers, and the wires going to the breakers.  The feed lines are the big black lines at the bottom which come in from the right.  The left and right lines are the 120 Volt feeds and the center line with the white tape wrapped around it is the return which is tied to the ground and neutral bars in the breaker box. This is what’s called a combined box meaning that the main breaker and sub-breakers are in the same panel. Even when you turn the really big breaker off for a combined box, the 3 silver colored blocks that the thick leads go into will still be energized(!).

You’ll notice in my box on the left hand side that someone used a black wire and a white wire to make a 240 volt circuit, but they didn’t bother marking the white wire with black tape which I’m pretty sure is a no-no in electrical circles. In some places you’re not even allowed to do that. That was corrected before I put the panel back on but it may have to be replaced with a proper red and black wire set to make it legit.

I connected the leads to the two-pole circuit breaker in advance. The red lead to one side and black lead to the other side and made sure to screw the terminals nice and tight.  I connected the return wire (white) to the return bus bar in the box and after making sure the new circuit breaker was off I carefully installed it into the box.

With the breaker installed I installed the CT (Current transformers) around the feed lines.  This is the area you have to be very careful about in a combined box because there is always live voltage with more than enough current to roast you and kill you pretty good. Again if you don’t feel comfortable doing this, get an electrician to do it for you.  The clamps are supposed to be positioned with the red dots facing down the feed line towards the meter.  I originally had them upside down, but the readings were the same either way. TED says if they’re upside down they’ll read wrong, but I think it’s mostly important to have them both face the same way as my reading didn’t change any after I flipped them over. When in doubt just follow every word of the manual!

I mounted the TED MTU box at the top of the electrical box and connected the MTU power cable from the new circuit breaker and the cable from the CT’s into the MTU itself.  They are keyed and only go in one way. Look at the keying before you connect the box though so you don’t bend anything up.

Once that was installed I flipped on the circuit breaker and green LED on the MTU started flashing. I then proceeded into the living room, grabbed the TED gateway and plugged it in the nearest place that I had an open outlet and a network cable.  I then went to my web browser and typed in ted5000 into the URL bar and the TED Footprints interface came right up. After setting the serial number for the MTU and Display, the MTU was communicating, I was seeing power usage, all was good.  The display is another story, but I resolved that as well as you’ll see a bit further down.

Then I downloaded the latest firmware update from the TED website and sent it to the TED module.  You have to install the Gateway firmware before you install the Footprints software, which I did. Once I had updated the software the Gateway and MTU quit communicating. It drove me nuts for a bit, but then as a sanity check I grabbed the TED gateway and plugged it into an outlet near the electrical box.  Immediately the green light on the side of the TED 5000 Gateway started to flash indicating it was receiving data. I brought the Gateway back to the original plug and disconnected the power strip that was below it, which solved the problem. And I got great info like you see below!

Because the TED 5000-C uses power line transmission it is a bit sensitive to interference on the circuit it is trying to communicate with. Additionally a circuit which has filters, suppressors, UPS (battery backups / uninterruptible power supplies) are not TED friendly and can cause interference or actually filter out the power line transmissions which are used to transport data from the MTU to the TED Gateway. Apparently for some reason the TED could work on that outlet with the other devices connected with the older firmware, but the new firmware made it more discriminating and made it look like my TED 5000 was busted (oh no!).  If in doubt plug your TED Gateway into another outlet and see if the green light on the side starts flashing again.

Now that I had the MTU and the Gateway communicating, I had to figure out why the TED Gateway couldn’t talk to the LCD Display.  The display was powered up and sitting on my desk about 15 feet from the TED Gateway. I picked up the TED LCD Display and moved towards the Gateway and all of a sudden the LCD display came to life with the proper date and time as well as showing power statistics… when I was about 3 feet away.  Okay, that’s frustrating, what’s going on?

Since the TED Gateway links to the TED LCD Display via a wireless link the first thing I did was check my most suspicious wireless device nearby.  This is the BlueTooth headphone transmitter which I use for my computer.  I brought the LCD display back to my desk and removed it from it’s cradle and reseated it, again it lost the signal. (apparently it reconnects every time you remove it from the cradle. I’m not fond of this myself).  I then disconnected the bluetooth transmitter from the computer and the LCD display immediately picked up and noted it’s communication by flashing a little green LED on it’s button.  So finally all three components were working well together.  The MTU, the TED Gateway and the TED LCD Display.

Overall the installation didn’t go that bad, though I think it could have gone better. I understand the reason for the communication methods they use as it can be viewed as a simple and low cost for communication throughout a household without having to wire Ethernet cable up and route it, etc.  I think a WiFi capable version would be really nice, but then you would have the costs involved with building WiFi into the MTU (at minimum) and LCD Display (would be a nice bonus).

I’ve taken a bunch of screen shots of the display and footprints software and I will post Part 2 of this review tomorrow Nov 23rd or Nov 24th with information about the display, software, configurability and possible pitfalls. I can say right now that I’m pretty happy with this so far.  Once I post the next part I will include a link under this paragraph and a comment. So make sure to bookmark this page and check back tomorrow.  While your waiting please check out my other sites and pages linked to the right!

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Sorry, I didn’t get any reall testing done with this problem this weekend. Instead I spent the weekend working on a nitrogen laser. Much more fun than flushing the toilet repetively. I’ll maybe look into it somethime this week and see if I can find the cause. I don’t think anyone else in the world is having this problem with their plumbing.  Usually if I hit on a strange topic Google will send at least a few wayward people to this site, but nothing yet. That somewhat reduces my hopes for an easier answer comming through comments, but I’ll get it sorted out!

On the weather front things seem to be heating up quite a bit this week, but still those continuous thunderstorms. I can’t quite think of any time in the past years that I’ve lived in NY that we’ve gotten storms day after day. It reminds me of when I was down in florida, they had a big storm everyday, then the sun would come right back out and everything would be sunny and muggy/humid.  I think it’s supposed to be mid to upper 80′s, I was reading that my family in the NE may be getting close to 100. So hot!!!  Glad that Mom at least has an air conditioner to help her out. Though I’d trade my air conditioner if we could just get rid of the humidity here!

We put the air conditioner in the window a couple of weekends ago, it was kind of a pain in the neck because of some missing screws for the side covers of the air conditioner. In my last apartment the windows slide left to right so I didn’t need them, and promptly lost the little screws. So of course the local hardware store didn’t have anything like them in stock.  As usual every 30 minute project turns into a 3 hour ordeal.

The lawns are coming along okay. The problem with the peninsula lawn still exists, the soil is still to sandy and the nutrients wash out of it quickly and I’m sure the water probably leaches out pretty quick too, even with all that peat moss we tilled in.

If I don’t tear the lawn out and redo it again, it’s going to have to be fertilized once every 3-4 weeks to keep it growing. Otherwise it screeches to a halt and gets a little unhealthy looking. Once it’s fertilized it perks right back up and has normal growth.  Tearing it out, again would mean getting a sod cutter, cutting out all the grass and rolling it up somewhere (if we were to try and reuse it, I’d rather replant) then a) tilling in a bunch of good quality topsoil into the sand to bring it to some kind of a ‘normal’ soil level or b) removing a bunch of the topsand.. err soil and replacing it completely with new good quality topsoil which wouldn’t be cheap either and would probably require renting a BobCat for a weekend (fun, but expensive as well).

Hmm decisions decisions

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