when our central heating pump went a bit feral, I grabbed the opportunity unleash my inner geek, and build some intelligence into the central heating system,to drop its energy consumption…. …The house already has thermostatic valves (TRVs) on all the radiators, which is great from an efficiency point of view, but the water pump wasn’t joining in the game. Read more →
Tag: homecamp
Saving on Standby Power
I’ve been out buying gadgets to save on standby power. The exciting one mentioned in the video is this fellow: It is a Standby Saver Energy Saving Unit – as seen on Dragon’s Den, apparently. As explained in the video, it shuts off the power to all of the sockets when the computer powers down. There is a version for for AV… Read more →
HomeCamp 2 – Saving Energy and Having Fun
HomeCamp 2 went from Wiki to reality on Saturday the 25th – A room full of people from diverse backgrounds sharing ideas on how to automate homes, monitor and reduce energy consumption and do the occasionally whacky thing like using a string of ducks that light up to monitor a virtual worlds. Rather than trying to write up exhaustive notes,… Read more →
CurrentCost Graphs – Monitoring Home Power
It might not look like it, but that is a wondrous thing. It represents the next step in home hacking with the current cost meter. It is a lead which connects the current cost meter to the serial port on a lower power PC that runs a simple Perl script that records our power usage. The PC runs a script that captures the information… Read more →
Camps and Unconferences – What and How
Over the last year or so I have been to a few dozen camps (mediacamp, socialmediacamp, homecamp, …) and unconferences, but I realised that I’ve never explained the concept or how they work. This post should straighten that out. What is a Barcamp? What is an Unconference? It is a little hard to explain, or rather it is easier to… Read more →
Home Hacking
No, not breaking into them! Automating them and reducing the power that they use… Read more →