Tech Stuff Archives - Page 11 of 22

Kill A Watt EZ P4460 – Whirlpool ED25DQ Refrigerator

I ended up leaving the Kill A Watt on my fridge for a *lot* longer than I intended. But at least I got a pretty good representation of its consumption.

These results were a big surprise to me. I’ve always considered that the fridge should be one of the chief energy consumers in the house and was expecting these numbers to be much greater than this.

RESULTS

Elapsed time: 623 hrs (about 26 days)
Measured Consumption (Watts): 173 <– This is what I spotted when the compressor was running
Measured Consumption (Amps): 2.43
Cost –
     Actual (for duration of test): $6.04
     Daily: $0.23
     Weekly: $1.62
     Monthly: $6.94
     Annual: $84.49

Tag Galaxy

Tag Galaxy is a very cool way of visualizing tags from the Flickr-verse.

It’s a tad non-intuitive at first (at least for me). Clicking on the planets around your current tag will add those to the tag selection. Clicking the current tag selection “star” will bring up some of the pictures associated with that selection. Dragging the resulting “picture Globe” allows you to see pictures from the other sides of it.

DirecTV or not DirecTV (or Netflix is in the wings)

I received an email today from DirecTV listing the current pay per view offerings for this week and saw a movie that Michelle said she wanted to see. OK, OK it’s Mike Myers’ “The Love Guru”, call me a wuss but I’m gonna enjoy it too.

So I went to my Tivo to set it up to record and I noticed a new flag on the confirmation screen indicating that the PPV movie will expire at Noon tomorrow. Since I seldom watch a movie I’ve recorded in even the same month I recorded it much less the next day, I was somewhat perturbed.
So I went to the DirecTV website and looked this up and can see that my recording will probably last for a long time provided I don’t view it. Once I begin playing the movie, the clock starts ticking and I will have 24 hours within which to finish viewing.
There are plenty of movies that I will start to watch and then decide to finish days or weeks later. I don’t have an issue waiting to see the ending and I can remember the beginning well enough that I don’t lose anything across that gap.
What I have now is my satellite company (or, more probably, the content provider behind them) dictating how I will view my recording.
One of the reasons I use PPV is for exactly this freedom. Renting a movie from a Blockbusteresque source comes with the explicit contract that I need to return this item in a day or a week depending on popularity. But PPV has always been more ephemeral than that and the added flexibility (plus the lower cost and avoided trip to the store) have always been of great value to me.
Continue reading DirecTV or not DirecTV (or Netflix is in the wings)

Kill A Watt EZ P4460 – Testing on a Known Power Consumer

I’m quite pleased, after leaving a single 60 Watt bulb on for nearly 10 days, here are the results from my Kill A Watt EZ P4460.
They confirm that the unit appears to be functioning correctly and that my last couple of posted results are probably accurate.
I was worried that the unit was under reporting.

RESULTS

Elapsed time: 237 hrs (I left the bulb on continuously for this test)
Measured Consumption (Watts): 60 <– this is what I was a little concerned about.
Measured Consumption (Amps): .5 <– also consistent with what I would expect.
Total Consumption (kWh): 14.6
Cost –
     Actual (for duration of test): $1.55
     Daily: $0.15
     Weekly: $1.08
     Monthly: $4.65
     Annual: $56.64

This puts a concrete dollar value on “we’ll leave a light on for you”. 🙂

One 60 Watt bulb, in my neck of the woods. With power supplied by Georgia Power, just under $57 per year.

Next, I’m hooking it up to my 12 year old Whirlpool refrigerator, I am almost scared to see what I’m paying to keep that running.

Your Cisco VPN drops and you can’t reconnect

I’m running Vista Enterprise on a T60 laptop and connect to my office using Cisco’s VPN client version 5.x .

Lately I’ve been having problems with my DSL where it drops for about 15 seconds and then springs back to life (they’re sending me yet another modem to address the issue…). This is, of course, enough of an outage to cause the VPN client to drop its connection like a hot potato.

Continue reading Your Cisco VPN drops and you can’t reconnect

Kill A Watt EZ P4460 – Main Computer Results

I had the computer set up and it was showing fairly steady power consumption of around 220 watts. Again a little less than I expected. Turning off my smaller monitor drops the consumption by 19 Watts (s/b 34 Watts), the larger monitor by about 26 Watts (s/b 55 Watts).

I’m going to disengage the power meter now since I want to reconfigure things a bit as I swap in my new modem/router combo from AT&T. I’m going to hook it up to some known consumer (a light bulb) to verify if the consumption readings are accurate.

Assuming accuracy, my main computer’s consumption after 273 hours (a little over 11 days) is 51 kilowatts or $5.42. The average cost is about 47 cents per day or $3.33 per week. The predicted annual cost is about $173 per year. A bit of an eye opener really. Little things have so much power to add up when paired with the inexorable march of time.

Gravatars

In case you’re wondering what all those little silhouette icons are about, they are placeholders for folks with no avatar.

An avatar is a graphical representation you provide to give others some kind of insight into who you are. In this largely anonymous “interworld” it can provide a way to let folks know that you’re not (or maybe you are) overly serious. Or maybe you’re a cat lover… whatever you want to express.

This site supports a particular type of avatar called a gravatar. A gravatar is a globally recognized avatar. You can go to their site and register one or a few of your email addresses (they don’t have to be your primary address, just one that you’d provide to blogs and forums you frequent) and then put up your avatar image there.

Any blog or forum that supports gravatars, once you’ve provided one of your email addresses, will then show the relevant avatar sourced from the gravatar site.

You can even specify “G” through “X” so that you can have different images on differently oriented sites. My site supports up to an “R” rating.

Kill A Watt EZ P4460 – Hair drier Results

I had intended to let the Kill A Watt have a little more time with my hair dryer but I was having such gargantuan issues with my DSL today that I decided to turn off my whole computer system (UPS, Router, Modem, the works). Since this is such a rare event and, since I wanted to measure the computer system’s consumption, I figured I might as well go ahead and attach the Kill A Watt device to the computer now.

First, after a week with the hair dryer I see that I’ve only consumed .09 kilowatt hours (or about as much power as turning on a 60 watt lightbulb and leaving it lit for 90 minutes across an elapsed time of an entire week). This was surprising given that it’s such a high energy consumer. It’s rated to consume 1600 Watts but the Kill A Watt showed only 1398 Watts being consumed. So I suppose it’s a little “greener” than I thought 🙂

I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me greatly as I really don’t use the hair dryer for very long. Just enough to try to make my part somewhat stable.

No Gas here in Marietta (and my DSL service is terrible)

Went out for a late lunch, frustrated that my DSL is acting up (got a call into bellsouth and a bunch of logs showing it dropping like a rock throughout the morning) and decided to compound things by trying to get some gas as well.

I finally found some at the 6th station I passed, decided I’d get lunch and then eat it while waiting in line. But then I spotted another, bigger station (BP) that was doing brisk business.

No matter that they ran out of regular gas (at all the pumps) when I was about 2 gallons in, I was able to switch to their “silver” gas and finish up. I’ve got my fingers crossed that this won’t be abusive to my nearly 12 year old Odyssey…

At least I’ll be able to get to work tomorrow.

A few more updates on this blog

I’ve done a bit more tweaking, such as adding the somewhat more informative pagination at the bottom of this page (rather than just telling you “previous entries” you can see what’s actually in store for you).

I’ve also added a little “Comments” link to the entries so you can see if there are any comments associated with a blog posting from either the main page or from a search.

I’ve updated the site to allow folks to post without registering on the site. I don’t like having to register to post on other folks’ sites so why inflict that on you guys? I had to lock things down for a while as I was trying to move to a new SPAM protector. Everything is in place now so hopefully those spammers will be kept at bay.

I’ve added a lot more relevance to the widgets on the sidebars. Generally the top ones on either side should be germane to whether you’re reading a post, searching or just scanning the main page.

I’ve updated the feeds on the lower right sidebar so you can subscribe to the main posts only, any comments or just my flickr photo postings. Chose one or all!

You’ll also notice that posts now sport a “# views” item near the
bottom. This will look weird for a while since it has to start counting
from zero but I’m sure it will be relevant in a couple of months.

Oh, and I’ve also added an Amazon.com wishlist widget in case you all feel like buying me stuff 🙂 Just check out my “about” page.