Everybody Staze…

This weekend, Tara’s family are all coming back to town for Spamalot. Should be a lot of fun, but there will once again be about 9 people in the house (including Tara and I). So, that’s a lot. In preparation for that, I installed a new shower head in the guest bathroom that’s only 1.5GPM (a handheld Waterpik EcoFlow: here). It’s not a bad shower head, though I’m not sure about the usefulness of the “mist” setting. Either way, it’s better than the 5GPM of the old head. The funny thing is, the old head was marked as low flow… obviously that was before 1992 (when the Feds said showerheads had to be a max of 2.5GPM at 80PSI). Funny thing is, my current main shower head that we use daily seems to flow at about 4GPM instead of the stated 2.5GPM… Which comes to my next item…

We have high water pressure at the house. About 96psi static (no flow), which is the same pressure in the mains in my area (due to gravity because of the water tower/tank on the top of Kelly Butte above my house). The UPC (Uniform Plumbing Code) says the max is 80psi (minimum of 25psi). I thought we didn’t have a pressure regulator valve (PRV), but in fact we do, it’s just seemingly bad (it was installed with the house, and was buried under sod, and a few inches of dirt when I found it). So, I’m looking to replace that here soon. The pressure has been at it’s current level for at least the time we’ve been in the house, but I really worry about the wear and tear on our appliances and fixtures because of the high pressure. Currently, we get about 7.5-8GPM at the hose bibs, so I’m hoping that won’t be impacted too much by the drop in pressure. Some things I’ve seen indicate the flow might not change that much due to flow restriction caused by the “friction” of the water pressure and pipe walls. We’ll see. I’m hoping it’ll be an easy change out… I just need to finish unearthing the valve, and get it out. Biggest PITA is going to be “draining” the house (when I shut off the water at the street, and remove the valve, all the water in the house pipes is going to come running out). Here’s hoping a shopvac will take care of that.

On the water side, I’m also going to put a water expansion tank on the water heater after the PRV goes in. The valve will allow for pressure relief back to the city water mains if it climbs enough, but I’d rather not get those spikes (I believe it’ll keep the pressure from climbing above 10PSI greater than the supply pressure, so basically, it’ll keep it at or below 106PSI). A thermal expansion tank should prevent that completely. While I’m putting that in, I think I’m also going to wrap the water heater. It’s currently about R-16 (2″ foam), but adding a blanket would make that about R-26, which is about as good as you can do. Biggest pain is going to be moving the water heater, but, it shouldn’t be too bad once it’s drained. I also need to replace the front sillcock, but that’ll come later in the summer if I can’t figure out how to rebuild the stem (it’s a frost-free, so it’s got a long stem instead of a “normal” valve).

My other project I’m really looking forward to working on is more of my power graphing/monitoring. A site called energycircle.com (http://www.energycircle.com/) built their own “Google Powermeter” using the Visualizations API. I’m hoping to get ahold of their code to do the same. At the least, I think I’m going to switch my data collection to a mysql backend, as that will really allow for better report generation. We’ll see. I’d really also love to build one of these so that I can have a computer monitor my TED, and put the actual receiving unit I got with the TED in another room, more easily viewable. Bitch is, I don’t know a whole lot about building circuitry from diagrams, or programming MCs. Maybe I’ll pick up that Make microcontroller set at some point… =/

Also, I found this just now off that site above, which looks awesome. Wireless, web configurable, and will look at RSS feeds. I’d love to pick one of these up… I have a couple places it’d work great. Maybe in the hall where there is a giant hole at this point, or in the living room, or bedroom, etc. They have an 8″ version too, but it’s only like $20 cheaper… it’s certainly worth that for 2″ more! I’ll post some about work crap later, but at this point, there’s not a lot to discuss.

More in a couple days!

Last weekend Tara’s family came down for Easter. It was pretty fun, but it was a lot of people in the house (9), that all stayed the night. Got to show Tara’s uncle, the hobby carpenter (a very talented one who basically completely built their house). He was quite impressed with our flooring and tiling jobs. Everyone else was impressed by the tile as well as our new pots and pans. Yes, we bought about $500 in new pots and pans that would be over $1000 retail. They’re very nice.

We had to put a bed in the office, an inflatable in the living room, and have someone on the couch to make room for everyone. Lot of people! Dinner was great, though, one of the nights we had mashed potatoes with spinach in them. I love spinach, and I love mashed potatoes, but putting them together, not great. You couldn’t taste the spinach, but you certainly got the texture. Not great. =/

Since then, we’ve been trying to keep the house clean, and doing yard work, etc. It’s been nice the past couple days, so we got a bunch of weeding done (Tara did all of that), planted some roses (that actually happened before Tara’s family came), planted a kiwi in the back, moved a blueberry, pulled up a dead Dogwood, and an ugly Mock Orange, mowed the lawns, etc. Tomorrow and Tuesday are supposed to be in the 70′s to 80′s again, so that will be nice to get some more sun, and get some more things done.

The garage needs cleaning as well, and I hope to get my radiation shield for my weather station completed tomorrow.

On the other side, and this is mainly for my own memory: one of the 3 plumeria cuttings that Tara brought back from Hawaii in January 2009 survived. The other two both got stem rot. I hope to buy a few cuttings online from Maui Plumeria next month, and get those planted, but we’ll see. The one that survived seems quite healthy. I’ve been putting it outside during the day the past couple days to get it some heat/air/sun. Here’s hoping it helps.

Oh, and in the past 2 years we’ve had a tomato in a bucket upside down, and it’s been great, but the bucket is fugly. This last week, we bought one of those Topsy Turvy’s. I’m not sure there’s enough soil held in them for a tomato to really thrive, but we shall see. It’s certainly prettier than a 5 gal bucket, and it has a pivot so that it can move in the wind (which might prevent one issue with the bucket in that, the tomato really tried to grow toward the sun). We shall see. If it works well, maybe I’ll get another one next year for Cucumbers, or Bell Peppers or something. Supposedly they work for Eggplant too. =) Will post more when I know more.

I also hope to fertilize two of the blueberries soon. Once the flowers open, I am supposed to give them each a cup of Ammonium Sulfate. We’ll see how that goes as well.

Think that’s it. I’ll try to write more later in the week.

Over the past few weeks, Tara and I (mostly Tara) have been working on tiling the laundry room. It started months ago when we installed the hardwood, and pulled up the ugly linoleum on the downstairs landing. It remained that way for months, and just recently we started the laundry room.

We went with a porcelain, cream/tan colored tile. 13″x13″. About $1.19/sq ft at the local hardware store.

After pulling out the washer and dryer, and pulling the base boards, we pulled up the linoleum. Tara scraped off most of the old glue, and we started working on caulking under the drywall to prevent the self leveler from oozing out under it. During that, we discovered that the drywall right under the washer drain spout was rotted out (well, dissolved out), probably due to the drain backing up and water pouring out and getting under the drywall. So, we cut out that bad drywall and found mold (big surprise). We cut out probably a 3′x4′ chunk, and replaced it, taped, mudded, textured. Painted (later). Looks good.

So, after that, we poured self leveler since the room wasn’t very flat. There’s kind of a “hump” in the middle of the room. After one bag worth, we saw the hump was still there, so we mixed and poured another bag worth. The hump was still there, but much better. And we didn’t want to spend another $30 on a bag that will just raise the floor even more. So, we called it good.
Tara basically did all the tiling herself. She mixed the thinset, cut the tile (with a wonderfully handy tile saw we borrowed from her uncle). She basically did it all while I was at work. Tilesaw works great… except when you don’t have the blade shield all the way down and water sprays all over the front of your pants… but I digress.

Next came grouting, which is a tedious process, but might be easier if the grout was a bit thinner. I mixed it a bit thick, so it really took some elbow grease to work in. Then you wipe it down, and seal it a few days later. All of this went pretty well. The only thing I didn’t look forward to was trimming the doors to make room for the extra 1/2 of tile, thinset, and self leveler. But, all and all, that went quite well as well.

And we’re done! we put the washer and dryer back, all the various holes in the walls have been sealed (you know, where the valves for the washer water come through, or the dryer exhaust, etc. Hopefully the laundry room will stay a bit warmer now. Heck, we even bought nice new hoses for the washer (did you know you’re supposed to replace the hoses every 5 years???). Really, the only thing left is to finish the new baseboard, and sometime down the road, get a laundry sink/basin installed (which we’ll have a plumber do, and probably run us a few hundred).

With Tara’s family coming down this weekend, we’re now in rapid cleaning mode. I also need to install a new lav faucet in the guest bathroom, which I’ll probably do tonight. That’s easy plumbing…

So, I’ve been asked by a friend on facebook about jpgraph and my home energy use. Here’s kind of a “here’s how I did it” and an example.

Back a few weeks ago, I purchased a TED for my home. The Energy Detective has a piece that installs in my electrical panel around my main power feed (both phases), and then reads total load on my panel. It then sends that information over household wiring to the receiver in my office. It gets new info every second. It’s accurate to about 10W.

Okay, so every minute, my home server polls the TED, gets current KW use, and total KHW for the day, and writes that to a file along with date and time. Also, it grabs the current outdoor temp from my weather station and writes that to the same file. I don’t grab indoor temp because the weather station console is mounted somewhat close to the output of my server rack, so it pretty much constantly reads 68F (though, that is what I keep my house at).

Then the question is, what to do with this data? I have been messing with it in Numbers.app, but it’s slow dealing with 1400 rows of data (60 * 24 data points). And I hate excel. Plus, I’d like to make it automated. So looking around online, I found a few php suites that’ll do graphing. One uses google’s graphing API, but it’s kinda broken in that if you try to pass it 1400 data points, it breaks. =P This seems to be a problem with the google API because they’re all pushed as a HTTP GET. =/ Out of all of them, the best seemed to be jpgraph. It uses GD (which meant I had to install a copy of PHP on my server that was actually complied with GD support (thanks Apple for giving us semi-crippled software, again) (see my links for a link to the PHP install). Once that was going, I read up on jpgraph, and looked at the examples. They seem pretty cut and dry, so I pasted in a bunch of data, and lo-and-behold, it works! So, now I need to make it dynamic (you pass it a date, and it parses the energy use for that date). I got that done yesterday.

So now, you can go: http://www.staze.org/powergraph.php?date=20090407, and see a nifty graph of my power usage on the 7th of April, 2009, as well as the temperature for that time. I still need to make a page that acts as a kind of interface for this. Something that lists available dates, links to the graph, etc. I also hope to allow easy graphing of whole months, years, etc. But, that’ll take some time.

All this really came about because I’ve been graphing and tracking my energy use on a monthly basis by inputting the data off my Utility bills. Now I just have more granularity!

So, things left to do with this project are: Make an interface, get monthly graphing working (it would be a daily granularity) with average temp for that day graphed, and work out a long term file structure for the data. Right now it’s all just sitting in a directory that every night, a cronjob takes the previous day, grabs the total KWH use, and logs that and the date to a monthly file, then compresses the daily log (speaking of which, who knew there was a gzfile operator in PHP!?!)). Um, maybe change the image format from PNG to jpg, and probably make it so the image wasn’t necessarily recreated every time (check to see if it exists, and if it does, serve that up, if not, create it, and save it for next time). While I don’t see my energy logs getting a lot of traffic, it’s just good coding.

All of this REALLY makes me want to get a 3PH equivalent for work, so we can watch energy usage in the building. But, that’ll have to wait. =P

Oh, and let me know if you want raw data… I can post some. I’m also more than happy to post my PHP that’s parsing and graphing, as well as post my scripts that log the data, or the ajax I use to update the sidebar (though, those last ones you can get by viewing my page source).

Links:
jpgraph: http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/
Real PHP install file: http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/php/
TED: http://www.theenergydetective.com/index.html
Python script that I based by query off of: http://www.bananabend.net/energy_detective/ted5.py

So, I’m now collecting outdoor temp data with my power readings… might show some additional info long term.

Anywho, here it is. On a automation note, I’m working on making this whole process of graphing much more automated. Maybe I’ll also convert the temp to centigrade so as to make the graphing easier (and show how serious I am about converting to metric!)

Power Usage w/ Temp, 4/4/09