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Archives for 2012

APC AP9584 Serial to USB adapter with a Smart-UPS.

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So, I ended up with a SU1400 Smart-UPS as a castoff from campus network services, and alas, it only has a serial (RS-232) port, not USB, and I’m attaching it to a Mac. So, I went online, and found out that lo, APC makes something to address that (only officially, it only works with the Back-UPS models). $37 later, I had the adapter, and plugged it in. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Neither Mac nor PC would see the adapter was there. I figured it was dead, and prepared to RMA. But, on a whim, I decided to try putting a smart-signaling cable between it, and the UPS. Viola! My Mac instantly saw there was a UPS there. So, the adapter must be getting power from the serial side, and not the USB side. Weird.

Anyway, thought I should share that piece of knowledge. So, not only do you need the adapter (AP9584), but you need a APC Smart Signaling cable (2 meters 940-0024, or 15 feet 940-1524). Or, just make your own following the info on the apcupsd site.

Temperature monitoring an iMac

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When work moved to it’s temporary home during construction, we were forced to move one of our labs to the campus library, into a room that was, not exactly lab-worthy. It’s totally enclosed, and poorly air conditioned. During fall term, the students and faculty that were in that space complained about the heat, and we worked with the library to help address it.

But, new term, and new students/faculty bring new complaints. Problem is, we didn’t really have a good grasp on the temperature in there. So, today I set about fixing that.

There are really 3 things needed to get this working.

  1. Copy of tempmonitor (found here, in /Volumes/Temperature\ Monitor\ 4.94/TemperatureMonitor.app/Contents/MacOS/)
  2. snmpd.conf (will show REAL basic one below)
  3. Script to grab temp, and report it

Really, all of this is pretty darn simple. So, here we go.

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Energy analysis for 2011

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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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