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Energy analysis for 2011

2012/01/11 by

Another year is done, with 2011 behind us, and another year worth of power data (and for this year, I think I’ll throw in some gas usage data as well in the next post) to look at, and figure out what went well, bad, etc. Of note is that while this year is also a La Niña year, it has been much cooler than last year. We really had no summer at all (summer, by our terms, lasted a couple weeks. Tomatoes this year all ripened within a couple weeks, and late). We haven’t gotten any snow, but we certainly didn’t get many hot days (our hottest day was 91.2F), which now makes 2 years in a row where we haven’t broken 100F. Hopefully this will end after this year (La Niña is only supposed to last 2 years).

Here’s the raw numbers for electricity.

  • Total Energy used in 2011: 10,475.58KWH ($485.02)
  • Average Energy use per month: 872.96KWH ($40.42)
  • Highest energy use day (amount): 2011-12-06 (74.63KWH)
  • Highest energy use month (amount): December 2011 (1498.92KWH)
  • Lowest energy use day (amount): 2011-08-18 (9.28kWH)
  • Lowest energy use month (amount): September 2011 (543.04KWH)
  • Mean (average) energy use per day: 28.7KWH (~ $1.32/day)
  • Median energy use per day: 25.9KWH
  • Mode (most common) energy use per day: 22KWH (had to round this)
  • Highest energy use at a given time: 18.15kW (registered on 2011-02-02 8:03am)
  • Lowest Voltage Recorded: 113.5v (registered 2011-02-02 7:59am)
  • Highest Voltage Recorded: 139.4v (registered 2011-09-12 21:31am)
  • Average Voltage: 121.1v
  • Degree Cooling days greater than or equal to 90F: 2
  • Degree Heating days less than or equal to 32F: 50
  • Number of rows in DB: 525,142

The first number, since it’s largely the most important when looking at data, is the last one: number of rows. 525,142 rows. There are approximately 525,600 minutes in a non-leap year, which means given my number of rows, I have ~99.91% of possible data for the year, or about 0.09% missing. This certainly is an improvement from last year of 99.57% data.

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Filtering X10 and TED signals

2011/11/28 by

I’ve talked a bit about this subject before, but with a new experience under the belt, I thought I might add to the collective knowledge out there.

I recently (week or two ago) installed a 12V track light system that obviously uses a transformer (in this case, electric) to step down the standard 110V household current to 12V. It’s not on the same circuit as my TED, or even the same phase, but immediately when turning on the lights, my TED signal drops to 0. It must be that this transformer is putting out so much noise on the system, that it’s going all the way to the transformer at the street, and then back along the second phase. Really, no idea.

Anyway, after discovering I couldn’t move it to a different phase, I started looking at filtering options to remove all the noise it was causing on my power system. At first I thought I would just filter the offending light, and looked at X10 XPNR‘s which seem like they’re added to the offending device, and remove the noise. But THEN, I stumbled upon this! Holy cow, an actual “official” solution. And while they have them for less than $10, shipping was almost as much as the product itself. So, I went back to my trusty supplier, and got one here, for a total of $16 with shipping. When it arrived late last week, I was a bit surprised by it’s size. Yes, it says how big it is, but you don’t quite get that until you have it. It’s pretty darn big. But, using the directions posted on the TED site, I was able to wire it in (using pigtails for the red and white wires, since all three wires were far too short), and fit it in my breaker box. And afterward? TED works like a charm. I’d imagine my actual signal reliability will be higher with the filter since everything else in the house is no longer causing dropouts. The only other thing I could do would be to create a REALLY dedicated circuit for the whole TED, but that just seems excessive. Maybe if I upgrade to a 5000 I can put it all on it’s own circuit.

I’m approaching another year with the TED, so I’ll be posting back for the new year with new numbers comparing to last year, analyzing this year, etc. Stay tuned!

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Rain barrels

2011/01/11 by

This last weekend I purchased two black food grade 55gal barrels from a local rain barrel maker. Black isn’t a color he normally has, and we figured they might hide a bit better on the side of the house. They used to contain 55gals of “Nutrisound 75″, made by Agrarian Marketing Corp. I’m hoping to get some more info from them about the product, but it looks like it’s a nutritional supplement for livestock. Judging by the smell, I’d say it’s got Vitamin B in it. I can’t see what it has currently since the label has faded pretty seriously.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to kit them out with a faucet, link them together, and figure out some type of rain diverter for getting water into the barrel. I hope to create a bit of an evolving post for this so I can detail my work on the project, what works, etc. There’s a lot of info out there about making rain barrels, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of people saying “this is what I did, and while it works, this would work better”.

First work will be this weekend. At least cleaning them out and maybe drilling holes for the faucet, etc. We’ll see.

Stay tuned.

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