It’s because we take them to McDonalds because they love it and will stop whining at us, right?

Wrong.

According to my 4 year old (going on 54)… she only wants to go because of the cool little toys.

So I asked her, if other stores had cool toys for kids, would she go there instead of McDs. “Ya! Of Course!” she replied.

So there you go… require all vegetarian and healthy food restaurants to have give away fun little kids toys with every kids size meal and obesity problem solved…

While you’re at it, every time you buy a broccoli or a bag of carrots, you should be given a toy at the register.

My daughter will be Prime Minister one day.

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So last night I tracked my consumption during Earth Hour with The Energy Detective hooked up to this webite. Here’s the graph for the hour (click for larger image). It updates approximately every 1-2 seconds.

Now I have all electric baseboard heating as well as cooking and other appliances. We don’t have any Natural Gas or oil appliances.

What I unplugged… not just turned off, but unplugged or shut off at power bar so there was no “standby” usage):

• – All “power bricked” items, mostly tech stuff. Cell charger, laptop charger, external hard drives
• – TV/Cable Box
• – Electric baseboards with no wall thermostats
• – “Dead Body” freezer

What I “turned down”:

• – All The Electric baseboard heaters

What was still on/normal (drawing 440W):

• – Our Living Room light (70W)
• – My Internet, energy and weather (for alberniweather.ca) data collection equipment (150W)
• – Stereo and Nintendo Wii were on Standby (couldn’t find the plugs in the rats nest!) (10W)
• – Fridge (200W?)
• – Other stuff(?)

That’s about it. As far as unplugging stuff. I couldn’t unplug all of my entertainment equipment because I wasn’t sure which was which and didn’t want to take the chance of unplugging my Mac Mini that was serving up the energy data. So those were on standby. Other than that, I left the living room light on… yes, many people went lights out… but personally, I see Earth Hour as a “use less” not, “go back to the dark ages”. This Hour was about realising how much power we waste. So leaving the only light on that we need is, IMHO, perfectly fine, and as you will see, if we want to make a difference on how much energy we waste, that difference won’t be from CFLs.

After we went around and turn off/down everything, I monitored the usage and noticed the spikes. We hadn’t turned down the heaters completely in the kids room.. but since they were sleeping already, we went ahead and turned those down too.

Then you’ll see the “Dead Body Freezer”… I wasn’t happy that we were still drawing 740W, so we thought for a bit and realized… THE FREEZER. We got one of those long chest type freezer for $20 when we bought the place. It’s perpetually half empty and is constantly running. It draws 300W… and probably costs us $100 a year to run.

That will be our first replacement as soon as we can afford it.

The last thing we learned was from our spare bedroom baseboard heater. I had turned all the stuff down 20 minutes before the “Hour” started. Turns out, the spare bedroom must cool down the quickest, because that heater was the first to come back on.

Here’s a comparison of Friday nights Hour and Earth Hour…

On the left is Friday Night from 8:30 to 9:30PM… we were just watching TV, doing computer stuff, and we made popcorn for a movie.

On the right is Earth Hour on Saturday night.

And Finally, You can see our daily routine for Saturday, March 28 to this morning in the graph below.

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It’s Earth Hour today at 8:30PM PDT! And just in time, Murkyview.com has been “TED enabled!” If you want to know how honest *I am* during Earth Hour tonight, you can monitor my Energy consumption right here. Check out the graph links for different times along the bottom too!

Tomorrow I will post a side-by-side comparison of Earth Hour vs. the regular 8:30PM to 9:30PM hour for me so we can see just how much difference I made!

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So for Christmas my lovely wife got me the only present I really wanted.

“The Energy Detective”

What is it?

It’s a “whole house” energy monitor. Basically, one part of it hooks into a breaker in your electrical panel and clamps onto the power lines that come into your house. (Not nearly as scary as it sounds, but if you’re not familiar with your breaker box, get a friend who is). The other part is a little box that plugs into any wall socket and you end up with a reading for how much power your house is drawing at that moment.

It’s like having a digital version of your hydro meter inside your house, and readable!

Of course, that wasn’t enough for me. And what really attracted me to this device was its ability to save data on a computer. TED provides software for Windows. It’s nice and all. But I hate Windows, and I don’t want to have to go to only one computer to be able to see the information. I want it on the web (like I have done with my Vantage Pro weather station at www.alberniweather.ca).

So… what you see at the top of the blog is the fruits of my labour.

I found a wonderful little “python” script called “ted.py” on the Internet. You can google it and it will come up. It got me started.

I added the ability for it to talk to mySQL and sqlite databases.

And now it archives to both, locally on my Mac Mini and remotely to my database online.

This could be run on Linux, Unix, and I believe Windows supports the needed python libs as well).

Feel free to download the two scripts and modify at will:

The “TED.PY” script reads from TED and stores into a database. It is stand-alone as it need not rely on network connectivity so hopefully you get as much data as possible archived since TED itself doesn’t archive any data (aside from monthly highs and things)

http://www.murkyview.com/ted.py (start with: sudo python ted.py /dev/tty.usbserial-A7007fWm &)

The TEDmySQL.PY script lives in the same directory. You only need to run this if you want to archive your TED data to a mySQL database. mySQL is more commonly used by webhosts than sqlite, so this is why this script is provided…

http://www.murkyview.com/tedmysql.py

I also obtained the Serial API specification from the makers of TED. This helped me to get to know where to get the data.

Unfortunately, I’m not entirely sure how to get all the data off of it, specifically the “Totals”. If anyone sees this blog and might have any ideas how I can go about retrieving these bits from the serial stream I’d greatly appreciate it. You’ll notice my Totals above just don’t look right. I will keep trying to figure them out.

In the meantime. I hope this script is useful to others. If you have any questions feel free to ask. I however will not be held responsible you happen to do to your house, your computer, or your sanity by using that script.

Enjoy!
Chris

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So this past Wednesday it was nearly 40C (over 100F) in the Alberni Valley. We manged pretty well cconsidering, by staying inside with the blinds down… then going to Sproat lake in the aftrernoon and evening.

Since I have a personal weather station, though, and a website for it at alberniweather.ca, I got called by one of the local news channels, CH Channel 6 in Victoria, for an interview.

It was fun.

i’ve posted it below.

I think the best part was when they showed my cat!

Be Amused… (as of 8:30PST YouTube is still processing it.. it should be up within the hour).

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