Power on Pieter Viljoen's Blog

Getting carried away with RGB holiday lights

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 05:37:10 +0000

What started as a small project quickly snowballed; taking way more time than anticipated, going through multiple scrapped plans and hardware changes, my fingers still hurting from making cables and pushing pixels through corrugated plastic. But for all the overkill, it does look pretty.

It started when I ordered two strands of Govee RGB patio lights offered as a Black Friday special. Installed them, and they seemed to work fine, until the next night, when the lights did not return to the previous state, just white. Our holiday light outlets are powered sunset to 11pm, and although the Govee app does have an option to remember the last state, it did not work when completely powering down, only when using the soft power button, fail.

ESP32 Water and Gas Utility Meter

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 03:27:27 +0000

The recent release of Home Assistant’s energy dashboard inspired me to restore my gas and water utility meter monitors. I lost the measurements when I removed my Brultech GreenEye energy meters in favor of Sense energy monitors.

To recap, my local city and utilities do not allow any connections in any form to their utility meters, but I am allowed to install my own meters downstream, as long as the meter models are approved for local use, i.e. the exact same model as used by the local utilities. I installed the same model water and gas meters as used by the utilities but with dry-contact metering.

Abandoning GreenEye for Sense

Sat, 05 Sep 2020 23:30:28 +0000

I planned a whole house energy monitoring setup when we built our house. But in all these years I never completed the Brultech GreenEye installation, I officially called that plan abandoned, and instead installed Sense energy monitors.

First a bit of history, skip to the end if you’re not interested in my procrastination journey.

I installed my first energy monitor, circa 2009, The Energy Detective TED-5000 connected to Google PowerMeter.

Although our power utility (SCE) had installed smart meters, it took them several years, circa 2012, to enable Home Area Networks (HAN). I installed an EnergyHub Home Base, that turned out to be too unreliable due to the too long distance for ZigBee from the meter to our condo. I ordered the starter kit, that also included an energy monitoring power strip, but the power strip was unusable due to the excessively loud high frequency noise it generated.

UPS Battery Replacement Turns Into Unrecoverable Firmware Update

Sat, 15 Oct 2016 02:09:32 +0000

As the saying goes, if it is not broken do not fix it, especially when it comes to firmware.

I have a couple APC Smart-UPS’s at my house, same as the models I like to use at the office. I use the SMT750 models with AP9631 Network Monitoring Cards. The problem started when we had a short power outage, and the UPS that powers the home network switch, cell repeater, alarm internet connection, and PoE IP cameras, unexpectedly died. A battery replacement led to the opportunity to do a UPS firmware update, which led to an unrecoverable firmware update.

Electrical Power Quality

Wed, 13 Nov 2013 00:49:25 +0000

Earlier this year we moved a couple miles from Redondo Beach to Manhattan Beach, bigger house, better school district. As far as the house and area are concerned, it is definitely an upgrade, but not so for the utilities.

Monthly utilities are a lot more expensive, not so much the per unit fees, but the base service fees, not just a couple $, but three or four times what we paid in Redondo Beach. Now, if it came with better offerings, or better service, or higher quality, ok, but the opposite. Water quality is worse, specifically hardness, MB supplies its own water, RB gets water from LADWP, and that unsightly water tower that no longer serves any practical purpose, with efforts to demolish it always being thwarted. As a new resident trash collection makes me pay almost thirty $ extra per month for an extra trash can, while grandfathered-in residents keep extras for free. Now, I know it is unfair to judge a service by their employee’s actions, or is it, but the trash collection guy is a jerk, if a little dust and having to get out of the truck is going to get you agitated, you are in the wrong business, especially when compared with the pack of trash collection men in RB that were always friendly and willing to give a hand. But, I really digress, I want to discuss electrical power quality problems.

LSI turns their back on Green

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 23:02:00 +0000

I previously blogged here and here on my research into finding power saving RAID controllers.

I have been using LSI MegaRAID SAS 9280-4i4e controllers in my Windows 7 workstations and LSI MegaRAID SAS 9280-8e controllers in my Windows Server 2008 R2 servers. These controllers work great, my workstations go to sleep and wake up, and in workstations and servers drives spin down when not in use.

I am testing a new set of workstation and server systems running Windows 8 and Server 2012, and using the “2nd generation” PCIe 3.0 based LSI RAID controllers. I’m using LSI MegaRAID SAS 9271-8i with CacheVault and LSI MegaRAID SAS 9286CV-8eCC controllers.

Synology DS2411+ Performance Review

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 19:43:00 +0000

In my last post I compared the performance of Synology DS1511+ against the QNAP TS-859 Pro. As I finished writing that post, Synology announced the new Synology DS2411+.
Instead of using a DS1511+ and DX510 extender for 10 disks, the DS2411+ offers 12 disks in a single device. The price difference is also marginal, DS1511+ is $836, the DX510 is $500, and the DS2411+ is $1700. That is a difference of only $364, and well worth it for the extra storage space, and the reliability and stability of all drives in one enclosure. I ended up returning my DX510 and DS1511+, and got a DS2411+ instead.

Power Saving RAID Controller (Continued)

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:20:00 +0000

This post continues from my last post on power saving RAID controllers.

It turns out the Adaptec 5 series controllers are not that workstation friendly.

I was testing with Western Digital drives; 1TB Caviar Black WD1001FALS, 2TB Caviar Green WD20EADS, and 1TB RE3 WD1002FBYS.

I also wanted to test with the new 2TB RE4-GP WD2002FYPS drives, but they are on backorder.

I found that the Caviar Black WD1001FALS and Caviar Green WD20EADS drives were just dropping out of the array for no apparent reason, yet they were still listed in ASM as if nothing was wrong.

Power Saving SATA RAID Controller

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:37:00 +0000

I’ve been a longtime user of Adaptec SATA RAID cards (3805, 5805, 51245), but over the years I’ve become more energy saving conscious, and the Adaptec controllers did not support Windows power management.

My workstations are normally running in the “Balanced” power mode so that they will go to sleep after an hour, but sometimes I need to run computationally intensive tasks that leave the machines running 24/7.

During these periods the disks don’t need to be on and I want the disks to spin down, like they would had they been directly connected and not in a RAID configuration.