(And in other news, I hit 5MWh of lifetime solar production today, woo!)
pvoutput.org is a free service run by a mystery man down under, which can accept solar generation as well as household consumption data, and slice, dice, and graph it just about any way you would like. Continue reading
Oh, man, this is just too cool. And sadly I just upgraded to an iPhone 4, not 4s (I am both a sucker for a deal, and normally filled with buyer’s regret). But anyway, this guy used the Radio Thermostat API (which I mentioned in my last post) together with a Siri hack to add voice control to his thermostat. How awesome is that? (The thermostat he used is the 3M-50 available at Home Depot, a rebranded version of the CT-30 available at Amazon
Looks like his code is here.
I love it when device manufacturers realize that they can do well by selling a device with documented interfaces, in the hopes that a nebulous community of hackers will invent cool new things for it. So I was pretty happy when the Radio Thermostat Company of America announced that they had an API available for their wifi thermostats (such as the 3M-50 at Home Depot or the CT-50 [amzn] at Amazon). Continue reading
Click for interactive graph
In an earlier post I had tried out a few ways to figure out if our energy-saving efforts with respect to natural gas use were paying off; I did a few bar graphs of therms per day, per heating degree day, rolling yearly averages, etc. I knew that I needed to normalize for the weather using Heating Degree Days, since natural gas is our primary heating fuel, and I probably needed to find a way to separate space heating from water heating, which have different conservation methods, and which may or may not be weather dependent. Continue reading
In my last two posts I talked a little about our utility usage for electricity and for water; last up is natural gas usage. (I don’t think I’ll ever start weighing my garbage, but who knows). Continue reading
In my last post, I talked about how I keep track of our electricity usage, to be sure that our efforts at efficiency & conservation are staying on track. But that’s just one of 3 utilities; water has been another focus in our house. Continue reading
Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Efficiency — power is ever stealing [into your home]. — Me, with apologies to Wendell Phillips, Thomas Jefferson, or whoever said it first.
Almost exactly a year ago I posted about switching my kitchen to some PAR20 LED bulbs, talking about the economics of them, given their very long (50,000 hour) expected lifetime, and 5 year warranty.
The bad news – last night one quit on me. :( Continue reading
I’ve done everything I can to eliminate incandescent bulbs from my house, relying largely on CFLs. This has helped me dramatically reduce my power bills – but with some drawbacks. Continue reading
Ever wonder what the energy flow through a net meter looks like when you have solar on your house? No? Well, if you did, take a gander at the graphs above (click for a bigger version). Continue reading