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.

Mushroom Culture Step 2

Shiitake mycelium in a culture
jar, cloned from a mushroom.

Our Mushroom-growing experiment progresses well, if a little slower than expected. In the first step we cloned some Shiitake cells into several Malt-nutrified agar vessels. Not unexpectedly, given the crude nature of our lab setup, some of those became infected with other, unwanted organisms and had to be tossed out. There remained two jars of clean, healthy mycelium - the "root" structure of fungi. The next stage in growing Mushrooms is to bulk these up into much larger volumes.

This is their story.

Mushroom Cloning Update

The mushroom culturing experiment is going well, though not as well as I had hoped. Still, lessons learned...

I had to chuck out three of the culture jars, as they were infected. Two of them were a sadness, because the mushroom fragments implanted in them had taken hold really well, and the mycelium was growing nicely. Alongside a green and a black mold, respectively. So out they went!

Of the remaining five jars, one has failed to do anything. No infections, but no signs of growth, either. I suspect I may have poked the bit of mushroom too deep into the agar medium. The other four have mycelium growing, with varying degrees of vigour. Obviously I will favour the most vigorous grower when it comes time (in a week or so) to expand them up into grain growing media. The mycelia are beautiful, and exactly as described in my reference. More updates as they develop...

Random Tomato

Here's an interesting mystery... a half-dozen tomato plants from seed that, somewhere along the line last year, lost their labelling, but were compelling enough to keep. They are finally ripening, and quite a nice tomato it is, too.Trouble is, I've never grown anything like it at all. Ever.

As you can see, the fruit is about 40-45mm across. The colour-balance in the picture is a little off -- the true colour is more of a peachy-orange shade, and very uniform through the fruit. Flavour is good -- fruity rather than tangy, and the tomatoes are nice and juicy. Their skin is quite tough -- almost like commercial tomatoes. I'd place them as a pretty-good (not spectacular) salad tomato, and they should be good for roasting or sauce. The bushes are smallish -- about 30-45cm tall, indeterminate, and quite sparse. Fruit set in trusses of about 6. They're not massively prolific, but not bad either, and one of the earlier tomatoes in the garden this year. Fruit are splitting quite badly, but then so are all the tomatoes! (It's the damn drought and resulting irregular and inadequate water.)

I think that this is a random cross of some sort, so I'm growing the F1 hybrid. My guess is that one of the parents -- most likely the mother -- was Moneymaker, which I grew last year (and swore never to bother with again, as the flavour was just so lackluster compared to everything else.) The other parent? We can only speculate. (Taxi? Ida Gold? Gold Nugget? Those would be the only yellow tomatoes I was growing last year, but my records are not good enough to have recorded what varieties were growing close to each other.)

Another reason to believe I'm dealing with an F1 hybrid is that the fruit are very uniform in size, shape, colour and flavour.

I still have plenty of the seed that produced this oddity, so I can grow them again for some years to come. I'm also saving seed from at least one fruit from each of the bushes for growing out next year to see what comes out in the next generation.

Unless I'm completely wrong in my guesses... ;-) (And that's not unlikely! I'm a complete n00b to the whole breeding thing, and finding the genetics and theoretical side of it quite difficult to wrap my head around.)

Hmmmm... this plant-breeding lark is quite exciting!

On the Nature of Research Gardening

Days are beginning to draw in; night comes a little too early, and Summer's really over. Winter crops – onions, garlic, cabbage tribe and a few other odds and ends – are coming up in seed trays, and I've finally made a start on clearing and composting the (ex-)Tomato beds.

Somewhere sleeting through the Universe for æons, minding its own tiny business, comes an Idea Particle...

A couple of years ago I stopped treating Chillis1 as Annuals, although that's how most people grow them. "After all," I thought, "they're true Perennials, and since we don't get any frost here, why am I ripping them out fo the ground each Autumn, and starting new plants every Spring?" Sure enough, it works brilliantly. It means I get Chillis as much as six weeks earlier than new-season plants, and its well worth it, even though the fruit gets a bit smaller each season, and the plants produce somewhat less. One Jalapeño bush is reaching the end of its third season, and still prolific enough to be worth hanging onto. So now I have Chillis on a 3-year rotation, but...

Still not satisfied. I generally sow Chillis in September, placing the seed-trays atop a warm compost heap. Chillis like a bit of bottom heat to get going, but I have on occasion cooked the seeds with my over-enthusiastic hot compost. With September sowing (I've tried August, but its a bit too early for them) I generally start harvesting around the end of January or mid-Feb. What would happen, though if I sow Chillis now -- in April!

In theory the weather is still warm enough for them to germinate and put in a bit of growth before they shut down for Winter in about mid-June. Without frost they should be fine until the weather warms up (and plants can tell these things much, much better than we!) Then they should get off to a flying start and be fruiting by early December, but with all the advantage of being "new-season" plants.

So we'll see... Remind me to report back in October or November (unless some other disaster strikes.) Today I planted a couple of dozen each of Jalapeño, Habanero, Serrano and Cherry Peppers -- all favourites of mine.

Parting Shot

One shot good quality Vodka, well chilled in the freezer.
One Serrano pepper, quartered lengthwise, but not all-the-way.

Drop the Serrano into the Vodka. Leave alone for 3 to 5 minutes if you can. Sip.

But slowly!

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[1] I know that lots of people spell it "Chile" or some other baroque monstrosity, but I can't get the hang of that.