Blessed by the Potato

I’m sure you’re all bored of my ranting and obsessive tracking of my hydro usage, so I’ll put that at the bottom.

First, I’d like to just mention that Netbug lent Snow Crash to me over the holidaze, and I quite enjoyed it. It has me thinking now, though: you know all that crazy spam that’s been avoiding the filters lately? The ones that mostly have crappy gifs with the random gibberish in the clear? I wonder sometimes if those patterns of lines and colours in those gifs aren’t there to tell you that this really is a legitimate stock tip that you must follow up on, but are attempts to fine-tune some sort of visually transmitted virus for our wetware. Or in a similar vein, try to find a combination of colours and lines and pixelated text that is absolutely hypnotic and is vastly more effective at getting the message across. Given how cheap and plentiful spam has been, it provides a brain researcher in this area an easy way to just go about experimenting by trial-and-error rather than trying to come up with any sort of governing theory… I also sometimes wonder if it’s some terrorist or otherwise secret organization attempting to send steganographic (encoded) messages to people who are unreachable other than by general broadcast…

Anyhow, on to power issues.

I flipped the main breakers today, and the wheel in the power meter did indeed stop spinning. That’s mostly good: good, because it means the meter isn’t completely, flabergastingly broken. Of course, it also means that the easiest solution to my problems is no longer a possibility. Rather than doing stuff and recording the power use in several-hour blocks (pretty much the minimum to get any kind of accuracy from a scale with 1 kWh as the smallest unit), I looked up the method of getting power use from the rate the wheel in the meter spins (thanks to Mr. Electricity). Before I shut off the main breaker, I had one computer and a 100 W light in my room running, plus some LED xmas lights on out front and a variety of leak power (TV, clocks, and the small blower fan for the hot water heater was on too). I was using 428 W, which coincidentally, is quite close to the average power use in the apartment. There’s still a bit of unknown power to account for (again, my computers and all that other stuff were in the apartment too, and except for the light, all that was generally on all the time, so my baseline should be lower so that occasional things like cooking and having the fridge cycle could bring the total up to that point), but it’s not huge. Maybe 100-200 W or so.

Then, after I switched the power off and on again, I went upstairs, turned off the light and turned on the other computer (I should have kept it constant, I know, but I was on my way out, and the difference between the two should be pretty small), then went outside to check again. The furnace clicked on (but I don’t know if the fridge did) and my power usage jumped to 1250 W! This is closer to the usage that would rack up the crazy bills we’ve been seeing, and sort of implies that the furnace fan, beyond all expectation, is somehow drawing 800 W (or possibly, the furnace and fridge together. The fridge was off when I walked out the door, but I didn’t go back inside to check that it didn’t click on before I made it to the meter). I’ll try to track this a bit better tonight when I get home.

Calculation: For the first usage, the wheel turned in 60.5 seconds. The power, in kW = ( 3.6 * 7.2 )/time in seconds. The 3.6 is a factor to go from seconds to hours and also from W to kW. The 7.2 is a factor printed on the meter. So, P = (3.6*7.2)/60.5 = 0.428 kW (or 428 W). The second time was 20.7 seconds if you want to do the calculation yourself.