Measuring Energy

Not sure why the picture shows cost in £. The device is
equally happy to display cost in our native R.

One of the best birthday presents I've ever received was an Energy Monitor given to me by one of my sons this year. Electrical Energy Monitor, to be more accurate, since I hardly see it measuring the other myriad forms of energy. It's one of those that plugs in to the AC supply, and in turn provides a plug for some appliance, allowing you to measure the consumption of that specific device.

As part of the Solar Project, I know to within a gnat's pubic hair width how much electrical energy we consume overall on a month to month, season to season basis, but nailing down the detailed usage of specific appliances has long been a problem – just not a high enough priority to justify running out to buy a monitor. But having been given one,... well, now I'm measuring every electrical device in sight.

I started, predictably, with my PC. My PC is switched on pretty much all day, every day, since it's a Work Device, and although I have been quite conscious about buying lower-power motherboards that actively manage fans and power to the various components, a more efficient (and probably not coincidentally a much quieter) Power Supply, energy efficient CPU and so on, but have nevertheless remained quite in the dark about exactly how much power this beastie draws. I am not so terribly interested in the specific consumption of something like the motherboard or the disks, but of the entire cluster of equipment; the PC box and all it contains, the monitor, all those trickle drain devices hanging off various USB hubs... they're all on at once, and that's what I most needed to get a handle on.

Amazingly, it turns out that my estimates were surprisingly accurate. At a "quiet" level of operation – the stuff we do most of the time: reading emails, browsing the web, typing blog posts and so on – the entire cluster draws around 105W. That's surprisingly little for what is, I confess, quite a decently powerful machine. Well,... it serves me perfectly doing some reasonably heavyweight software development, running the usual array of server applications, development tools and debuggers. I have, of course, avoided getting any sort of serious graphics cards. For a start I have little to no interest or skill in graphic work, and for another I'm not into any level of seriously graphic intensive gaming. (I could probably get into that world quite easily, but I fear – with some justification – getting sucked into a black-hole for time.) So: pleasant to find that my energy conservation efforts were not entirely in vain.

Power draw does surge up as high as about 150 to 170W in times of more intensive CPU use, but those are pretty transient events. Stuff like my Development Environment starting up and doing a whole bunch of work for perhaps ten or fifteen seconds. I also note that the consumption increases in proportion with the ambient temperature in the office – fans have to work a little harder to cool the electronics when the weather is hot. Some day any decade now I shall get around to installing the long planned for Solar Chimney in the roof as part of the the Whole House Passive Cooling System.

What is disturbing is that the Computer Cluster, much to my consternation, unexpectedly draw around 4.5W when it is "off". What the hell is that? I surmise that it is some parts of the motherboard sitting quietly waiting to be awakened by the ring of the telephone, or some incoming network packets, these all being pretty stock features of most motherboards. I have a Raspberry Pi computer currently doing service as a household network server that only draws 3W at peak, so 4.5W when allegedly "off" is atrocious and unacceptable. I believe I will install a master power switch somewhere on the desk so that I can completely sever the electricity connection at night, thus solving the problem. I need, in any case to do this as part of my Lightning Mitigation Strategy; currently (forgive the pun) I run around unplugging all devices when ever a thunderstorm rolls to near. I've lost many thousands of Rands-worth of kit over the years to lightning induced surges.

So it's been great fun, and quite educational, using the Power Monitor so far. I plan on monitoring the computer for about a week to give me a good estimate of its power use, then I'll move on to the other part of the Compute Centre, the DSL Router, RasPi and associated wall-warts and supporting devices. I don't expect their consumption to amount to very much, but they have the attribute of being always on which is an important factor when sizing the battery pack for a PV Solar setup.

Spring Planting has Begun

Hopefully slightly more relevant than my last post about The Crooked Car Dealer.

At long last. The first seeds of the season have been sown.

It's been a very sullen, cold and slow Spring so far. I know that some of my neighbours have taken their chances and sown their first Summer seed a couple of weeks ago already. I refrained, but we all agree on one thing: we greatly fear a repeat of last year's oddly fucked-up season. Last year Spring sprang pretty early, so we all leapt in and planted. Then it all collapsed. Through an unusually cold and damp October and November all the baby plants went dormant, and never really caught up with the growth we'd normally expect through Summer. Yields were way down, and some of the sunlight-hungry crops - Chiles particularly - barely produced any fruit at all until well into early Winter!

So this year, despite some promising weather a couple of weeks ago, I held back with my planting. But today was so Spring perfect a day - sunny, warm, and not a breath of wind - that you'ld have to be inhuman to resist.

So the first seeds are sown. First are the most essential Chiles, Tomatoes and Eggplants, plus a tray of Lettuce for seed. Let's see how the weird weather treats us. I certainly have enough to be getting on with to prepare the beds in the meantime, and I'll follow up with more seed-sowing in a week or so.

Crooked Car Dealer

This purpose of this post is simply to get the word into Googles Enormous Engine about a particular crooked car dealer so that any poor soul searching for a used car might be lucky enough to search first and so avoid dealing with this particular cretin. Probably not very interesting otherwise.

My son bought a used car from one Anton Pretorius of CAW Auto Parts at 28 Albert Street, George, Western Cape, South Africa. The dealer ripped him off terribly, selling him a vehicle with a completely defective engine, and numerous other mechanical problems. According to all 3 diesel-engine experts who have subsequently looked it over, the engine is worthless and has to be completely replaced. The problems were concealed by the dealer liberally dosing it with very heavy, syrupy oil which masked the oil leaks and piston/ring problems until the vehicle had been driven about 1000km.

Upon confronting Pretorius about the problems and demanding a refund, Pretorius refused to refund my son's money (against all provisions of the law) nor did he make any offer to repair the vehicle. We have subsequently laid criminal charges against Pretorius and CAW Motors at the George SAPS, but do not hold out much hope that the police will pursue the case with much gusto, such being the pisspoor state of law enforcement in South Africa. We also sent a legal letter of demand to Pretorius by registered mail. It was simply ignored. To follow up with a civil suit is likely to end up cost more than repairing or replacing the vehicle. Pretorius knows this and is relying on it, just as he relied on my son's naivety and inexperience of vehicle purchase to sell him this piece of shit in the first place.

A few days ago, in conversation with my insurance broker, we discovered that this Pretorius has also ripped off other clients of this broker in the past.

If you're thinking of buying a used car, please do yourself a favour and find a more honest dealer than Anton Pretorius of CAW Motors. The man is a thief and fraudster without conscience, morals or regard for the law.

Lettuce Prey

I've been updating some of the info pages on the wiki... writing down some of the initial info (with pictures) of some of the Lettuce varieties I'm growing for seed this Autumn. The aim is to record much better notes on the habits, uses and cultivation of the numerous Lettuce varieties I grow over time. We'll see how that works out. I'm notorious for forgetting to keep those things up to date. Usually I'll notice a bunch of interesting stuff while my hands are all muddy and I'm having too much fun in the garden to go inside, wash up, fire up the computer,... so my observations get abandoned by the wayside.

Some of you may remember that I had ideas some years ago of growing organic-quality Lettuce seed as a commercial enterprise, but those plans -- indeed the Lettuces themselves -- were brought to nought by the Great Drought of 2008-10. Well, I still like the idea, and, although rain has been a little scarce in the past couple of months¹, I'm trying once again to build up my Lettuce seed stocks to the point where I can produce decently large quantities of seed. Summer is, as always, too hot, and many of the Lettuce varieties bolt to seed early from the heat and don't produce viable seed as a result. So early-Spring and Autumn are my best chance at growing Lettuce seed.

Some of the varieties are new to me: Malawi, Lital, Lavi and Vulcan. Seed was acquired from friends and barter, and started in late February, and the first-to-seed varieties are just producing flower spikes about now. Others are old friends: Forellenschluss and Cimmaron, but my current seed stocks are getting too old to be reliable, so in dire need of refreshing.

I do wish I'd had bed space for growing more varieties, but I don't so that's about as many as I can manage whilst maintaining adequate isolation distances between the varieties. I've also managed to stagger them in time where I've been forced to place different varieties rather closer together than I'd prefer, and, given that Lettuces are mostly self-pollinating, I think I'm pretty safe for keeping these varieties pure.

I do need your help though!  Can anyone help me identify this beautiful Lettuce? I thought it might be "Merveille des Quatre Saisons" ("Marvel of 4 Seasons" - and ancient French² heirloom, famed for its ability to withstand a wide range of weather conditions and temperatures) but it doesn't form a head, which my online researches tell me MdQS does. Leaves are quite large and broad, rumpled, fleshy textured and delicious even when very mature. But I'm stumped for a variety name. Any ideas?

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[1] ...and as I write this, it has started drizzling. Hooray!
[2] Who woulda guessed?

Home-made No-Rinse Sanitiser

A major part of being somewhat self-sufficient is the need to safely "dispose of waste". For example, how do you "get rid" of paint thinners or leftover paint? In some parts of the world towns and cities provide places where you can take these noxious chemicals to be "safely" dumped. Out in the country (or in countries - like South Africa - where the state of recycling is less advanced) there are rarely such options. And yet, I certainly would not pour such stuff into my soil or a watercourse! It can be quite a difficult problem.

Brewing uses its share of noxious chemicals for cleaning and sanitising bottles, kegs and fermentation vessels. Industrial brewers generally favour Caustic Soda as a cheap and effective cleaner, and I, too, use it for cleaning bottles and removing their labels. Disposing of it is a headache. I don't want to pour it into a dam, as I fear that the alteration in pH would, over time, be harmful to too many organisms. Generally I dilute the hell out of it, and then pour the dilute solution onto the roots of alien weedy shrubs that I would like to see killed off. It's never yet done that, but I live in hope. I also use different disposal area each time so that no concentration builds up.

I used to use diluted Chlorine Bleach for sanitising fermentation vessels, but was always bothered by two things: you have to rinse the fermenters at least 3 times to get rid of any Chlorine taint that might threaten the beer. And if you've ever tasted Chlorine-tainted beer, you'll understand perfectly! The rinsing seems to me to defeat the whole exercise unless you happen to have a lot of sterilised (i.e. High Energy) water around to rinse with. Then, too, disposing of Chlorine is a big headache.

Lately I've been using Iodophore - a concoction of Iodine and Phosphoric acid that requires no rinsing - for sanitising fermenters, and I am quite happy to just chuck this already dilute solution onto the lawn, since I don't consider either of these chemicals to represent a hazard in the low doses and small quantities involved. In fact I'm considering pouring it into the compost heaps where the Phosphorus will make its way to plants where it can do some good.

Just the other day, though, I came across the following recipe for a Home-made No-rinse Sanitiser that I will certainly think about trying. Please note that "sanitising" is not the same as "sterilising", so this stuff would not be suitable for babies bottles or anything like that. The recipe allegedly comes from one Charlie Talley (manufacturer of Five Star Chemicals, makers of Star-San, which we can't get here.)

No-Rinse Sanitiser

Thoroughly mix 30ml of distilled white vinegar to 19litres of water. When the vinegar is well diluted, add 30ml unscented Chlorine Bleach.

The high dilution of the vinegar in the water before the bleach is added prevents any out-gassing of Chlorine from the bleach that is added at the end. The vinegar actually helps the bleach work as a better sanitiser by acidifying the solution. The high dilution also means it leaves no residual tastes behind of bleach or vinegar, making it a perfect "cheap" no-rise sanitizer.

I feel quite confident that, in such low doses, no harm will come from just pouring this solution away into the lawn, as long as I spread it around enough. The price looks pretty good, too!

Having difficulty viewing my Braamekraal Farm site?

It has been brought to my attention that some viewers (or should I say Viewer Wannabes?) might be experiencing some problems when trying to browse to my Braamekraal Farm site...

The problem seems to only exist for users of Internet Explorer 9.

All I can say is...
Get Firefox, or
Get Chrome.

Both work perfectly, and my time is too short to worry about chasing down bugs in IE's redirect handling.

When I bought my computer, the box said "Requires Windows 7 or better." I complied.