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.

Preparations for Leaving the Grid

We always planned on a solar-power setup. It's a natural and obvious part of our attempt to live a more sustainable, eco-resilient lifestyle without forsaking all the perks of technology. When we designed the house we knew we would be unable to afford a solar-power installation off the bat, but we planned for it anyway. The design of the house reflects these plans -- the roof is pitched at exactly the right angle to optimally support solar panels at our latitude, key parts of the roof, eaves and walls are easily accessible for trunking additional wiring, the electricity distribution board is positioned close to the anticipated charge controllers and associated hardware to make upgrades relatively painless.


It's a pure application of what we software designers call the "Open Closed Principle" -- a design should be "open" for extension, despite being "closed" to internal changes.

Alternative Energies

Energy is the defining measure of sustainability. For any organism, not just for 21st Century humans.

For the past 130-odd years we've been surfing a tidal-wave of energy gathered and stored in the geological past, and the party is finally coming to and end. The chief question is how we humans will manage the coming energy descent; the emerging opportunity to redefine our relationship with the universe.

Efficiency, Water Logic, Permaculture and Chainsaws.

The first icy blast of Winter-to-come has hit. Happily it's brought a little rain - 7mm last night, and a bit more (3mm?) through the day. And a good lump of what passes for cold in these parts. Cold enough to want a fire, anyway, and we've had one burning all day.

The design of the house makes it difficult - verging on impossible - to make the house Toasty Warm, but the fire does at least keep it livable. Really this is not a problem; we optimised the house design for passive cooling rather than heating, the former being a more serious problem in our climate.

The firewood is all harvested from our own land. We have many Australian Blackwoods (Acacia melanoxylon) on the property, and they keep us well supplied with kagelhout (firewood; as opposed to braai wood forbarbequeue barbacue BBQ. Blackwood doesn't make really good coals for cooking.)

---

In general I try my best to avoid messing with petrol motors. They're smelly, noisy and dirty things that need endless maintenance and care. Really, I can't understand the attraction these things have for petrolheads.

But I will confess that, reasonably well looked after, my chainsaw is a Great Boon. I would not relish the idea of having to cut firewood by hand (even if it would warm me twice.) 30 Minutes with the chainsaw will saw up enough wood for a good number of fires and braais, and keeps us warm for many, many hours. I'll get my twice-warming from splitting the logs, anyway!

And this brings me to the subject of efficiency.

Many times I've heard and read about the terrible efficiency of small petrol engines such as power our (currently defunct) weed-eater and chainsaw. This may be (and probably is) true in the very narrow sense that the measure of work coming out of the machine, as a ratio of the energy going in (mostly in the form of refined hydrocarbons) is probably very low. But this view - being typical of linear, bounded design thinking - hides a deeper truth. A truth about Water Logic. Water Logic asks us to consider "and then what?" Water Logic demands that we think about consequences.

Just like sustainable design does. Just like Permaculture does.

So consider that a few hours with my chainsaw produces enough fuel to warm us for... pretty much an entire Winter! And consumes... perhaps 2 or 3 litres of petrol in the process. (To be honest I lack the stamina to cut more than 2 petrol-tankfuls of wood in one session. The chainsaw tank only holds about 250ml.) So 2 or 3 litres of petrol produces a full Winter's house-heating fuel.

I happen to think that's pretty efficient.

The fuel - at current prices - costs me (say) R25. About €2.5 (2.65865 at today's rates, if you care!) For a Winter's worth of Warm.

I'd call that a bargain.

Heavy Weather

Monday night saw us weathering a blazing gale-force storm.  Sadly no rain came with the wind!  Happily we had a few drops (8mm) last night and this morning; our storage had reached about 26% draw-down: one tank was almost empty after six weeks of almost no rain (2mm in that time!)

The house rocks like a Spanish Galleon in these howling winds, and it kept us anxiously awake deep into the wee hours.  The Chicken House blew right over!  Luckily there was just enough light for the boys and I to right it in time for the Chooks to get to bed and prop it up with a motley assortment of poles and ropes.  I guess we're in for a spot of repairs and rebuilding, now; opportunity to implement the design changes I've been thinking about for a looong time, now.

We lost power around 5:30 on Monday evening, and it was finally restored around 2 this afternoon -- about 45 hours.  I was getting just a bit anxious about the freezer full of Summer Tomatoes.

At least four trees came down around the place -- we're still counting.  At least we won't want for firewood anytime soon.  Thankfully Dale is home for university vac., and very good with helping out on these chores.  I'll post some pics as soon as I get some, but things have been happening so fast, and the camera is definitely not one of the things foremost in my mind.

I confess that being without power for a couple of days has given us cause to rethink some of our priorities around getting more self-sufficient.  A new fireplace (ours is rusting to shreds!) is less important than a wood-stove.  A manual/wind/solar pump to move water from the storage tanks to the header tank.  Rebuilding the Pizza Oven.  Canning/drying/pickling as a way of preserving food instead of freezing.  Building a high-efficiency freezer and/or fridge.  We are getting quite a few of things right, and I feel quite please and proud of that.  But still have a lot of gaps to fill! 

Coal-to-liquid Myths

An article over on ifenergy.com carries a quote to the effect that

SASOL, a South African energy and chemicals firm, to build two
coal-to-liquid fuel plants in China. These plants, costing $3 billion
each, are reported by the Financial Times to jointly produce 60 million
tons of liquid fuel (440 million barrels) a year.
...
raw material and capital costs of a barrel of fuel would fall under $10
and other costs would not bring total costs over $15
...
If these newspaper reports about the SASOL costs and
volumes are correct, they would indicate a breakthrough. The SASOL
costs are also far less than those of current US technology.

As a South African I am not inclined to believe a single word put out by SASOL.  If the figures are so good, why do we South African taxpayers continue to (involuntarily) subsidise these arseholes to the tune we do, year after year after year, despite the high price of oil?

Not to mention that coal-to-liquid tech -- no matter how good, cheap and efficient -- is still going to add to the atmospheric carbon load, continuing to drive global climate change.

The "we can continue live our soccermom-driving-4.8litre-Land-Cruisers lifestyle just by using some magically-more-sustainable energy source" propaganda machine rolls on.

A Very, Very, Very Fine House

"A Low Impact Woodland Home" tells the story of a beautiful, self-built, Earth-friendly home in Wales. I want one! :-)

When we designed and built our own house (over ten years ago, now) we were working with very tight cost, time and schedule constraints.  Probably just our own lack of imagination.  So our house is nowhere near as environmentally low-impact as we would like, and not even close to what the Woodland Home achieves.  (I remain convinced that my on-going hayfever battle stems from having moved into the house when the CCA-treated timber was still outgassing noxious poisons.)

I know of several neighbours who would rush out to replicate the Woodland House if they saw it.  And they would be missing the point completely!  One neighbour has imported several large truckloads of sandstone from hundreds of kilometres away for the house she dreams of building (but cannot afford to finance, build, maintain, heat or cool, is too large for her and her family's needs, and in every way represents the malaise of cheap-abundant-energy thinking).  She, too, has completely missed the point.  Another neighbour recently built an additional (timber-frame constructed) cottage on her property atop stilts that raise the floor of the house about 3m above the ground, so as to get a better view.  Every drop of water has to be pumped up to the house, which becomes a challenge during the not-infrequent power outages.  It must be hell in a storm, facing into the teeth of the very fierce Northwester storm winds.  And I'd hate to have to bring in the groceries or buckets of garden produce.

Here we are designing for a totally different set of problems, requirements and constraints than we would face in the Southwest of Wales or anywhere else.  We have a different fund of locally abundant materials.  The point is to make best use of what is locally available; not to import materials from hundreds or thousands of km away.  The Woodland House uses local timbers; we would also use structural timber, being in a forest area.  They use straw-bales as insulating infill for walls; here we would prefer wattle-and-daub, or perhaps cob, since strawbales are unlikely to survive the onslaught of local insects, and we sit on a deep layer of very high-grade clay just below the Earth's surface.  A sod roof is out of the question for us, since we need to harvest all our water from the sky -- no other water source is readily accessible.

So, much as I love and admire the Woodland House, I would shudder in despair if I saw someone here trying to replicate it.  Think local!  Look around you with your eyes truly open to the opportunities and gifts of The Place Where You Find Yourself.

If a Tree Falls...

If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

We are not able to answer that question definitively (though some claim to.)  However, we can definitely state that if a tree falls across the road, and there's no one there to hear it, you're sure to get an early-morning phone call from irate neighbours who are going to be late for work and school.

A tree at the bottom-end of our property has been leaning further and further for months, now, ever since the heavy rains softened the soil.  Really there are about four of these trees, stacked like dominoes waiting to be knocked over.  They are a formidable challenge to bring down, since any disturbance would set off a chain reaction.  Dangerous stuff.

An early phone call from our next-door neighbour let us know that one of the trees had finally made it down to ground-level, blocking all traffic on the road.  Off I went, chainsaw and slasher in hand, to clear the road.  A good, energetic start to the day, and we'll have plenty of firewood when I finish clearing the mess.

It's incidents like this that highlight the differences between our community of relatively-self-reliant people, and townies.  In a town or city people would be less inclined to jump in and sort out the problem; more likely to wait for the Council to send a team to sort things out.  Really the problem was quite a minor one, and it took us no more than 15 minutes to clear enough of the fallen tree that vehicles can pass normally.  If we'd waited for the Council to send someone, we'd probably still be waiting 6 hours later.

Similarly, when the road was being washed away by heavy rains, we were all out there, sodden, helping to clear a drainage ditch.  Or when potholes appear in the (dirt) road, someone eventually gets sufficiently irritated to dig some gravel from the roadside and fill the hole.  Much healthier for our own state of mind; much healthier for our relationships with our neighbours; much healither for community-building.

As soon as the rain stops I'll get out there and clear things a bit better and collect my firewood.

Irish Perpetual Motion Machine

An Irish company, Steorn, claims to have invented an energy-generation technology that operates at greater than 100% efficiency.  In other words, a Perpetual Motion machine.  They are seeking validation from respected physicists.

Now, I don't mind fools being parted from their money.  But its a bit sad that some permaculture proponents buy into this sort of bullshit.  As a long-time practitioner of permaculture design principles, I firmly believe that the basis of permaculture design is a firm and clear understanding of the fundamentals of thermodynamics.

Even if one does not have a clear grasp of energy principles, pure logic tells us that all the "free energy" machines and theories have to be a load of bollocks:  If I could build a machine that generates "free energy" (or, at least, more energy than it consumes) I would not need to "convince" anyone that it works; I would not need to "seek validation" from physicists or anybody else.  All I would need to do is build just one, and start generating energy.  Then, with the money I earn from teh first one, I would build another one.  Then another one, and another, and another.  Investors would flock to fund me because I would be showing a positive return.  In short order I would take over the world.  (Not that I want to - sounds too much like work - but I could!)

So the moment a company "seeks validation" of their Perpetual Motion machine, I don't suspect, I know: Some con-artist is looking to fleece some unwary investor.

Investor Beware.