Author Archives: markn

About markn

Mark is the owner and founder of Timesheets MTS Software, an mISV that develops and markets employee timesheet and time clock software. He's also a mechanical engineer, father of four, and a lifelong lover of gadgets.

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Eliminating Standby Power Waste with the EcoSwitch

The Ecoswitch

The Ecoswitch

As I mentioned in this entry about the Belkin Power Usage Meter I bought I’ve been monitoring the amount of power being used by the devices in this house when they are in standby mode. Eliminating the power used is simple, just turn the power off at the wall when it’s not getting used. Trouble is that the power points are hard to reach, and in one case here, impossible to reach without having double jointed shoulders.

The answer is some sort of remote switching. I’ve seen some power boards that sense the current draw by one device (say your TV) and when these drops below a certain limit they power down (via relays I imagine) the other devices on the power board. Trouble with this is that the master device is still in standby mode. The other idea I had was to put an inline switch into an extension cord and stick the extension cord somewhere that could easily be reached. Trouble with this is that it would be ugly and one of my friends would have to come and do the actual work for me because playing with 240V makes me nervous.

While reading the Whirlpool Forums last week I came across a mention of a product called the EcoSwitch. Basically it’s an extension cord with a T junction with an illuminated rocker switch at the end the leg of the T. You plug one end of the EcoSwitch into the power, the other into whatever powerboard/devices you want to control and stick the switch somewhere easily accessible. The rocker switch is illuminated when the power is on, and dark when not. Just turn off the switch at night when you’re finished with TV, Computer, or whatever. You can see a picture of one of the EcoSwitches above with the rocker switch visible at centre bottom of the image.

The EcoSwitches cost about $20 plus shipping so I ponied up for 4 (3 I needed and one spare) of them direct from the supplier. They arrived 5 days later. The EcoSwitches work exactly as advertised and even come with double sided tape to stick the switch end down somewhere that is easily reached. However, the tape is useless and in all three spots that I am using them the switch kept coming unstuck and dropping back behind whatever I was trying to switch off. Very annoying. However, it was easily fixed by using some proper 3M double sided tape we had laying around.

My three EcoSwitches are plugged into two TV/Media centers that were drawing 40W in standby mode for 20 hours day and into a PC/Laptop setup that was drawing 10W in standby mode for 8 hours a day. The EcoSwitches will prevent 321kWh of standby power being wasted annually which is about $80.25 saved on our power bill each year. Not a bad return on investment for $60 worth of EcoSwitches.

ETSA Power Meter Change Booked

I rang ETSA (Electricity Trust of South Australia) today to give them the code to open the automated front gate on our yard. ETSA own all of the power infrastructure in South Australia and with the impending installation of our rooftop PV system we need an import/export power meter to get paid for any power we feed back into the grid. I wasn’t expecting the meter changeover any time soon as all the research I had done had suggested a 2-3 month install time. Colour me surprised when I rang to give them the gate entry code as they said they could come do the changeover next Wednesday! Part of me doesn’t believe this is actually possible but we shall wait and see. Mental note to self, turn off all power points next Wednesday before going out for day just in case.

Do the Gate-A-Mation

Tomorrow a local company is coming to automate the sliding gate at the front of our new house. This will allow our kids to safely play in the front garden without fear of them escaping or anyone getting in at them. It will also provide an additional level of security because anyone breaking in is going to need to hop the front fence on the way in and out.

We’re getting a Deimos BT motor with remote relay boards that suit the spare buttons on the remote controls for our automatic garage door. The motor uses a 24V DC drive with a step down AC/DC inverter and includes a battery backup allowing the gate to open and close in the event of a power failure. Manual release for the unit (to manually open the gate) is via a key and a clutch release mechanism on the motor. Which sounds like a pain in the butt. So, I’ve asked the installer to bring along some keypads to suit the motor because the idea of getting in and out via a keypad seems like a good one.

Belkin Conserve Insight Energy Use Monitor

Belkin Conserve Insight

Belkin Conserve Insight

Given that you cannot improve what you cannot measure I decided to purchase an inline power use monitor the power consumption of various devices around the house. The idea being that I can determine what electrical devices are using the most power during the daylight ours when our planned rooftop PV system is generating power that could potentially be put back into the grid. There’s quite a few power use devices available ranging in price from just $10 right up to several hundred dollars for professional measuring equipment. I set a budget of $50 and decided on the Belkin Conserve Insight Energy Use Monitor which happened to be $49.95 from Dick Smith Electronics. You can see the read out on the Belkin above while it’s plugged into our 50″ Plasma.

I picked this unit because of good results in several reviews I read on the cheaper units and because it has correct power factor correction calculations which is important for measuring loads into switched mode power supplies (as found in PC’s). There’s a fairly high powered PC here that is on for nearly 16 hours a day and I need to measure the power usage of it accurately.

The Belkin unit is well made and easy to use. Just plug one end into the power socket and the power cord of the device you want to measure into the other. A digital readout can give you power draw, power cost, or kilograms of CO2 being produced. Each of these can be shown as an instantaneous amount, a per month amount, or a yearly amount. I’m not quite sure how the cost of power is determined but I’ll look into that further if and when I can be bothered. The power draw is what really interests me.

As a first up test I plugged the Belkin into the smaller TV/HDD Recorder/Media Player unit we have here. It’s a 32″ LCD TV, a Panasonic HDD/DVD recorder, and a WD media player with an external HDD drive. According to the Belkin this setup draws 20W when all three devices are in standby and 100-200W while all are playing. Given that we only watch the TV for 4 hours a day that leaves 20 hours a day that it is in standby. This adds up to 146kWh per year or $36.50 potential savings by turning off the three units properly when not in use rather than leaving them in standby. I’m looking forward to using the Belkin on some other devices around the house over the coming weeks. Stay tuned for me.

Braemac Pays a Visit

We took ownership of our new house a couple of days ago and one of the multitude of tradesmen to pay us a visit in this time was an inspector from Braemac who did an inspection of our roof for a potential rooftop PV system. Half of our roof area is north facing (I’m in the southern hemisphere) which is idea for a solar install. The roof itself is “colourbond” which is a trademark name for painted galvanised iron with an orb profile and the roof surface is pitched at 30 degrees. Basically this means the install is quite simple with no need for tilted mounts for the solar panels and no need for any tedious mucking about with a tiled roof.

I’ve asked for the Sunnyboy Inverter (a 4.2KW unit) to be installed in our garage rather than on the side of the house next to the power meter. This was for two reasons, firstly it helps protect the hardware from the elements. Secondly, it stops an expensive bit of hardware being visible from the road and potentially being stolen. The Braemac inspector said this would be no problem and that the install was actually quite simple and would result in our initial cost of the system being a little lower. Lower cost is always good 🙂

Next thing for me to do is find a bluetooth dongle for my PC. The Sunnyboy Inverter (a SMA SB4000TL-20 to be exact) has built in bluetooth for remote monitoring purposes and I’d be neglectful not to be monitoring the PV system output during the day. More on this later.

Rooftop Solar Suppliers

So I’ve spent the last week evaluating different suppliers/installers of our rooftop solar panel system. Basically I drew up a shortlist based on the various experiences written about on the Whirlpool Forums and the equipment I wanted. Here was my key selection criteria:

  1. Be able to install Suntech mono-crystalline panels and a Sunnyboy inverter.
  2. Not be universally disliked on the above mentioned Whirlpool forums.
  3. Be able to explain to me in no-nonsense (ie no BS) terms what signing up for the September 30 deadline for the South Australian State Government feed in tariff (FIT) actually meant. I knew already what this meant but wanted to use this as a litmus test to detect any attempt at deception on the part of the supplier.
  4. Be able to answer (or ask) questions about roof type, roof facing, system size, and accreditation of installers

I rang about 8 companies and the winning company pretty much popped out straight away. Some companies didn’t return calls, some couldn’t (wouldn’t) supply the right equipment that I wanted, and one in particular just annoyed me with their hard sales spiel and wishy washy answers to my technical questions. So, we’ve ended up choosing Braemac (http://www.braemacenergy.com.au/), who are also a large electrical and automation company who I’ve had some dealings with back in the days when I pretended to be an engineer. Their main point of contact was very helpful and booked in a rooftop inspection for the 5th of September.

Rooftop Solar PV System

I’m moving house in a couple of weeks and will be a home owner for the first time in a while and because of this I’m planning on doing a lot of work on the new house. One of these projects is to get a rooftop photo-voltaic (PV) system installed and cut back on power costs and (hopefully) benefit by selling excess generated power back into the grid. The South Australian state government (I live in South Australia, a southern state of Australia) is offering a $0.44 per kW/h feed in tariff (FIT) for rooftop PV systems approved by 30 September 2011 and installed by the end of 2011. FIT payments are guaranteed until 2026 and power retailers may also offer up to an additional 8c / kWh giving a total of $0.52 / kWh for excess power generated by your rooftop PV system.

The real benefit of a rooftop PV system only really comes into play when the power it generates exceeds the power used. For example, if your system is generating 10 kW/h during the day but you are consuming 12 kWh the system only offsets the power you use. My last power bill was charged at almost exactly $0.25 kWh so a PV system that generates under my average daytime use is only going to benefit me at that rate. However, a bigger system that exceeds my daily usage will benefit me at $0.52 / kWh and my return on investment in the rooftop PV system will be much better.

We’ve booked in a couple of PV installers to come take a look at our new house on September 3. I’ve not settled on a system size yet but I have settled on the components, Suntech mono-crystalline panels and a Sunnyboy Inverter. These are reputable brands that should just work. No point skimping on quality on a system that will cost multiple thousands of dollars whether a good quality or rubbish brands are used. More on this later.

Redirecting Unwanted Domains Pointing at Your Content

In the last year I’ve had people pointing unwanted domain names at my own website content. For example, let’s say I have a web site called http://www.foo.com that uses the name server reallycool.nameserver.com. If I wanted to be a pain in the butt I could point another domain (say http://www.annoyingwebsite.com) at the same content by using a custom DNS A record or a 301 redirect. It’s a pretty simple matter to work out the nameservers and IP of a site by using a tool like this.

The problem with someone doing this to your website is that search engines (like Google) see this second website as a duplicate of your own website. Now, in theory this shouldn’t be a problem because Google should determine that your website was the first listed and pretty much ignore the duplicate site. In theory anyway, but the paranoid part of me says having a copy of your website is a Bad ThingTM. Another problem is that this spurious second site will show up in search listings and also in your website referrer logs. It’s an annoying, and potentially damaging issue.

I tried a few different things to stop this from happening including messing about with .htaccess files but ended up just adding the following to the top of my global header file (which happens to be php).

	//
	//Redirect people hijacking site
	//
  if ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']!='www.foo.com' &&  $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']!='foo.com' && $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']!='localhost')
  {
   Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" ); 
   Header( "Location: http://www.google.com" ); 
  }

Note that I’ve got the localhost entry in there to allow for debugging of my websites on my local PC.

VLCStreamer on the iPad

I bought an iPad a while back with intention of developing an Online Time Clock MTS client for it. However one look at Objective-C and I ran screaming for the hills so that particular ambition was put on hold. This has relegated the iPad to being used for browsing the web while watching TV, playing the odd car racing game, and teaching our kids their times tables. I must also confess to the guilty pleasure lying in bed late at night and using the iPad with the ABC Iview app to catch up on episodes of Time Team and Good Game. This was only the real video I watched on the device as converting AVI files to watch looked painful enough to not be worth the effort, so I’d never done it.

Then last night I was poking around the App store and found that the VLCStreamer app has been re-listed. Previously it had been listed as a free app but Apple (for whatever reason) had nuked it and it was no longer available. VLCStreamer allows you to stream video files from your computer and view them on your iPad. Installing the app on the iPad was simple (as installing all apps is). To serve up video files to the iPad required me to download an install the VLC Streamer program on a computer which serves up the video files. Once this was done I could see the PC name from within the VLCStreamer app on the iPad and could navigate to the folder that contained all my video files. I selected one and hey presto I was watching the video! Setup took all of 2 minutes.

To me the iPad is the stuff of science fiction anyway, but VLCStreamer simply takes it to another level completely. Highly recommended to anyone with an iPad and digital media library.

Footnote: Reading about MonoTouch and developing iPad applications in .NET has resurrected the idea of an iPad client.

About the Author

I’m a 40 something year old male with 4 young kids, a lovely partner, and experiencing a mid-life nerdy crisis. For the last 10 years I’ve run my own mISV (micro independent software vendor) business developing and selling mostly time tracking applications. These applications were all installable Windows programs until last year when I launched a web based time clock system which was developed mainly in PHP and Javascript (Prototype and JQuery) and is hosted on a LAMP stack. My other products are Time Clock MTS, Timesheets Lite, Timesheets MTS, and Time and Attendance Plus. These programs were developed in Visual Basic 6 and right now are being ported to C# using Winforms.

I also help my partner run a collectables and hobby supplies business, write for a popular collecting weblog and maintain several different websites. Sometimes I also dabble in a bit of contract web-development mostly focused on custom WordPress solutions. For example, I built the Numismatic Association of Australia website and I’m currently developing a nifty reference site for the Perth Numismatic Society (no, I didn’t develop the website in that link). And finally, I still do the odd bit of contract programming (mostly VBA and C#) but I’m trying to stop this sort of thing because I really don’t have the time for it.

Back in the early 1990’s I managed to get a degree in mechanical engineering but haven’t actually worked as an engineer since 2006. To be honest I wasn’t all that good at it anyway so the engineering world probably doesn’t miss me.