My home network is built around a Netgear DGND3300 (all-in-one simultaneous dual-band router/NAT box/firewall/ADSL modem). It seems to do the job reliably, but due to wiring constraints it must be in an upstairs closet in a far corner of the house. Since it's range is dubious for reaching the opposite corner, I have a D-Link DAP-1522, rigged into my entertainment center, and wired through the wall to the upstairs Netgear box. The D-Link serves as a wired switch for the boxes in the entertainment center and as a 802.11g/n AP for the room around it.

DHCP and whatnot runs on the Netgear, while the D-Link is configured to be a dumb switch plus AP.

For the past few months, things have been flakey, like my computer would sometimes fail to associate with the AP and would ask me what the passphrase might be. (I'm using WPA2-Personal, AES-Only, for what it's worth.) Today, I started dorking around, and the culprit seems to be the D-Link. If I turn off its wireless, forcing everything wireless in the house to speak to the Netgear upstairs, then things seem to work, modulo the range issue.

So... my suspicion is that the D-Link has failed in some fashion, maybe it's got heat damage to the wireless section. Unknown. I could buy another one, but then I still don't solve my desire to have simultaneous dual band. The D-Link is "switchable", but in practice it works fine at 2.4GHz and is a total useless junker at 5GHz. I'd like something better.

The question is what a good replacement part might be. Ideally, I'd want a single box that was a four port switch plus simultaneous dual band AP. Gigabit is optional since nothing plugged into the switch can run that fast, and the Netgear is also only 100Mbit (see parenthetical note, below).

Another alternative would be to buy separate boxes (switch + AP), but a single-box solution would fit better in the tight quarters. Also, multiple boxes would complicate the power strip, which is fully populated.

Hypothetically, any four-port simultaneous dual-band router has the necessary hardware to do what I want, but previous ones that I've played with generally insist on running in router mode, with no way to dumb them down to being "just" a switch and AP. I suppose I could go the dd-wrt / tomato route but that seems like overkill just to get a "dumb" switch plus AP in a box.

So... great wizards of the empeg board... any suggestions on what I might do?

(Netgear has recently announced their newest DGND3700, which is essentially the same as my current Netgear but with GigE. If/when I decide to do whole-house GigE, that would be the logical thing to drop in. The only reason I might want GigE is if I were to do a proper file server, but right now I have all my disks direct-attached to my Mac tower.)

I know for certain the Apple Airport Extreme will do dual band, and work in a dumb AP only mode. My older (and since discontinued due to a lawsuit) Buffalo dual band WZR-AG300NH also would work as just an AP, with a physical switch on the back to change modes. Their newer models may have a similar feature still.

You say a router would be overkill, but how good is the router/firewall functionality on that Netgear combo box? One option might be to just let it be a modem, turn off all the firewall/routing stuff, and bridge it to a better router. I'm pleased with my Linksys WRT610N running TomatoUSB, which now supports simultaneous dual-band wifi. Keeping my 802.11g peanut butter and 802.11n chocolate on separate bands has made things a lot smoother, and the TomatoUSB firmware has a lot of goodies that your Netgear probably doesn't have (my assumption is you can't flash a combo box like that with aftermarket firmware since it's got the modem on it.)

So far, the Netgear box, even with its default firmware, seems to do everything I need, which isn't anything particularly fancy.

Why do you prefer dual band, exactly?

On that note, are the two wireless signals (D-Link and Netgear) on different channels or even on different frequency ranges (2.4 one, 5.0 the other)? If not, that may be the problem.

Dual band, I like because all our laptops support it, and you can get more bandwidth because there's more spectrum at 5GHz. However, as I discovered with the D-Link box when it was brand new, sitting right next to it with my laptop, "dual band" is meaningless unless there are dedicated antennae for both frequencies. Otherwise, they're just trying to shove a 5GHz signal through a 2.4GHz-tuned antenna, and the results aren't pretty. That's why I specifically want "simultaneous dual-band."

As to channel settings, I've got everything set on automatic. Several of my neighbors also have routers in the 2.4GHz spectrum, so hard-coding the channels seems like a bad idea.

In my recent experience, 5GHz isn't worth it. I bought a Linksys E3000 explicitly for its simultaneous dual-band support. I've found that I get less than 50Mbps throughput, and the range is miserable.

4 feet from my router:

5ghz network:
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
Sent
[ 4] 0.00-5.00 sec 102 MBytes 171 Mbits/sec
Received
[ 4] 0.00-5.00 sec 102 MBytes 171 Mbits/sec

2.4ghz network:
Sent
[ 4] 0.00-5.00 sec 43.1 MBytes 72.3 Mbits/sec
Received
[ 4] 0.00-5.00 sec 43.1 MBytes 72.3 Mbits/sec


Farther away, other side of the apartment:
5ghz network:
Sent
[ 4] 0.00-5.18 sec 5.00 MBytes 8.10 Mbits/sec
Received
[ 4] 0.00-5.18 sec 5.00 MBytes 8.10 Mbits/sec

2.4ghz network:
Sent
[ 4] 0.00-6.49 sec 2.75 MBytes 3.56 Mbits/sec
Received
[ 4] 0.00-6.49 sec 2.75 MBytes 3.56 Mbits/sec


The second test, I ran a few times, and 3.56 was the best. It was highly erratic for 2.4, stable on 5ghz. With the somewhat densely packed apartment environment, 2.4ghz is nearly worthless. My WiFi selection list shows 15 networks available. Refreshing usually shows one or two drop off, and others take their place. So for me, 5ghz is well worth the investment.

I live in a end-unit townhouse (end terrace), and my AP currently shows twenty-two 2.4GHz networks. I've seen more than that.

5GHz is still only marginally better.

Likewise. There's over 25 around me at the moment. It's one of the reasons I went with powerline for my home theater, because wireless simply wasn't reliable enough, especially between floors.

Ah, good point, didn't thing to check with the AP. 24 total that it can clearly see, and a sniffer on my iPhone is showing 3 more with hidden SSIDs.

Clearly our experiences differ quite a bit on 5ghz. I'm seeing more then double the bandwidth, even with both 2.4 and 5ghz set to use "wide channels". 4 feet from my router, and my laptop barley can receive the full speed of my internet connection (it peaks at 67=68mbit). With 5ghz, I get more room to roam and remain at the peak speed I am paying for.

2.4ghz just simply doesn't have enough spectrum to allow for that many access points close by. 1, 6 and 11 are the only non overlapping channels available for use here in the US. 5ghz has 20 non overlapping channels available.

I live in a single, detatched house. At any given time, I can only see 8-10 other networks. Four of those are from my work, which is about a mile away.

In a crowded wifi environment, I would expect "wide channels" to accomplish little other than doubling/tripling the chances of interference, which then reduces speed.

Why do so many people use wifi, and why do they leave it powered on all of the time? Big waste of precious energy resources that.

While my performance has varied over the past two years, my experience most closely matches Tom's.

Bitt, you might be looking at issues specific either to your environment or product.

The worst performance I've had with 5GHz was during a time period someone must have been using some type of wireless video monitor. Everything seems fine now over the past year, especially after moving the AP up to the second floor.

Agreed. It would be nice if you could simply switch the WiFi on/off with a simple command line command. (and preferably also without having to reboot the router). I would switch it on/off all the time then.

A schedule would also be extremely useful. Maybe time to put through a request for the Tomato firmware to support this - it already does scheduling for connection access.

I looked into it more, and it seems the Airport Extreme only runs wide channels on the 5ghz side. The checkbox didn't really indicate. Doing tests without wide channels, I'm still seeing 95-100mit performance over 5ghz, and the same ~70 on the 2.4 side.


In daily use, I have 4 devices that are WiFi only. My on call laptop from work (MacBook Air, though it could go wired with a USB adaptor), the iPad, the iPhone, and my Chumby alarm clock. The router offers no easy way to just turn wireless off and on again, and I need a 24/7 internet connection, so turning the device off all the time wouldn't be a workable solution. My router is also part of my power conservation strategy, as it allows me to keep my computer in sleep mode, and wake it when I need a resource on it via Wake on Demand. I'm all for energy conservation when possible, but not to an extreme where it also impacts my daily quality of life.

I guess that just sums it all up.

Thanks.

I'm pretty sure that applies to a lot of people, yourself included. For example, how often is your custom built MythTV box on? Why didn't you go with a much more power efficient box? Why do you have any type of media playback device for your TV in the first place? No one "needs" TV, or internet or other things we all use in our daily lives, but they do bring enjoyment (for you both in watching, and in building the devices), and raise our quality of life. Even the device that brought all of us here "needlessly" consumes energy in our cars, requiring a powered amplifier, and other devices that reduce the fuel efficiency of the vehicle. But we are here because we all at one time or another wanted to enjoy music while on the go.

WiFi for me is one of those quality of life things. I wake up in the morning, and can pick up my (very power efficient) iPad, and read about the current world news, without getting out of bed. The alternative to this a decade ago was a much more power hungry laptop. Two decades ago, and it would be a newspaper, with all the power consumption associated with cutting down a tree, turning into paper, and so on.

Overall, my total energy consumption has dropped dramatically since moving to California. I walk to work frequently, something that wasn't possible with my living situation in Austin. Due to the climate here, my heating/cooling system is on much less then it would be in Austin. I no longer even have a TV, and the associated home theater equipment drawing power.

I don't mean to turn this into an attack (and sorry if it comes across that way), but somewhere there is a line between quality of life and energy conservation. We could all do more to conserve energy, but where do we stop? Should we all just give up the modern conveniences that electricity and other sources of energy brings us? Very few people have that bar so high, but some do believe that. It's all a balance, and I do believe strongly in not wasting a ton of energy. I just think it's easier today to tackle larger energy issues, then worrying about and micromanaging the power consumption of a small consumer electronic device. Promoting the switch to more efficient lighting is still one of the best ways for a household to dramatically reduce their energy consumption. At night, my apartment usually has one 10w light bulb on to light the area I am in.

If you can convince my wife to run ethernet cable to the couch, and the kitchen table, and the kitchen counter, our bedside, the bed in the spare bedroom, and the big chair in our daughter's room, we might be able to begin a conversation about turning it off. I suppose I can see if the router has an option to turn it off over night, though.

Since you asked.. the Mythtv box here is on only when recording or doing playback. Otherwise it is "off" (not that any PC is truly "off" these days, another gripe..).

I have wired power relays to it, so that all of the ancillary gear gets fully powered off ("unplugged") when the Mythtv box is "off", reducing parasitic power draw to the minimum.

Our wifi has an on/off switch (pushbutton), and is rarely ever turned on -- we use wired ethernet (100mbit, not energy hogging gigE) through a (measured) 2.5W switch for networking gear.

I'm sitting here now with a large sweater on, and still feeling somewhat chilly because it's winter inside and out. The light bulbs are nearly all the environmentally-bad CFL style, to reduce the monthly power bill, and we just about never leave a light on when nobody is in a room.

The wall outlets above my office desk (I work mostly from home -- zero commute) all have individual on-off switches, so that the stupid parasitic power bricks can be totally "off" when not in direct use.

We choose electronics and appliances based largely on power efficiency, and generally keep everything for 5-20 years before recycling the remains and getting new stuff.

Our modestly sized cars are 13 and 17 years old now, in good repair, and easily pass the bi-yearly state-mandated exhaust tests. The computer I'm typing on is ~5 years old -- not the latest greatest gadget, but it still works extremely well.

Our cellphones go 1-3 weeks on a charge, unlike most newer fancier devices. We use rechargeable batteries in everything that won't accept a more efficient direct power source (plug), and prefer wires over (inefficient) battery-power whenever possible.

The summer garden is fertilised with natural compost from our property, and provides us with quite a bit of food as well as beauty. Right now, in the dead of winter, we enjoy salads based upon window-grown greens and sprouts.

In short, we pay very close attention to minimizing our impact on the planet, given our location as northern city-dwellers. We could do even better by moving to a warmer rural zone on the planet, I suppose, and eliminating our once-every-three years air/rail travel holiday.

Cheers

DD-WRT has wifi scheduling options, and Tomato can do it as well.

Larger gains can be had by choosing a lower power router: eg. WRT54GL rather than a power-sucking multi-band N router.

The router's CPU clock speed can be a good indicator there.

Cheers

My WiFi router (recently reverted to a WRT54G with Tomato from a WRT300N, but for less noble reasons than environment preservation: the 300N was crashing way too often) is on only when we need it.

... on the other end, one can't even conceive human beings as energy-consuming creatures using energy-consuming devices. We are ALSO that. But we are more.

To use a trivial example, if I am a creative mind and I find that for some reason it is only as I wake up that I find inspiration for my art/science by browsing the net, then the energy I consume in keeping my wifi on, to that purpose, would be used to generate art, or brilliant scientific ideas that may allow me to contribute to the creation of a very power efficient generation of electronics/photonic devices.

This is a quite simplistic example. But the principle I am trying to express is that we should probably ask ourselves what really matters and what is the value of things, for us. Keeping the wifi on for no reason is environmentally wrong. But the benefit of commodities is often way deeper than it appears. Rather than less science or technology, I'm in favor of better ones.

I am not taking sides here, but just thinking out loud.

We're not extreme environmentalists here, but the ideas are simple.

If we see a way to reduce energy consumption without reducing "quality of life", then it's really a no-brainer: turn the danged gadget off when not in use. That type of thing.

Use electronic timers for stuff where we find it too onerous to walk back and forth to a mechanical switch (eg thermostats, wifi, the Mythtv box recording schedule, etc..).

Secondary to that, is don't throw away perfectly good stuff just because a newer generation became available. The "old" stuff is still good enough, and should be used long enough to minimize environmental impacts of disposal and manufacturing a replacement.

And when acquiring new stuff, we look to energy efficiency as a primary decision factor, doubly so for things that will be "on" much/all of the time.

There are many people (on this very BBS, even) whose monthly energy usages approach or exceed our yearly totals, despite them living in more temperate climates. Surely there's room for improvement there somewhere?

Mark, I definitely applaud your efforts, as you do go well beyond the norm that most first world people do. There is more everyone can do, but you have a much shorter list then most people. I think John (JBjorgen) has us all beat though, in his move out of North America into Central America and his new living arrangement. :-)

If my router had a scheduling option for WiFi, I'd use it, since none of the devices I have on WiFi need constant connectivity. As for my "need" for 24/7 connectivity, this comes from my use of the ReadyNAS at home. Beyond being one central file repository for everything at home (allowing the desktop to sleep or turn off instead of being a server), it's also used for offsite backups. This board, the rest of my VPS, and my grandparents pictures all get backed up to the same NAS hiding away in the closet. It's using green power drives at their default settings, allowing them to run slower and spin down when idle. I do this with the idea that using my already in use resources at home under my control is potentially better then using even more cloud hosting services elsewhere. I'll admit I haven't run numbers here to really quantify this, and if anyone has input, I'd be curious to hear it.

One advantage Austin did have over my current place of residence was a slightly more green power company. In Austin, about 20% of the power comes from renewable sources, and 16% comes from nuclear. I can't find a good breakdown for Southern California Edison, but they claim currently 17% from green sources, and also use nuclear from a nearby generator.

For anyone looking for a similar solution to Mark's (the relays that cut power when the computer is off), there are a number of UPS solutions that offer similar. They work by having a master socket to plug the computer into, then a number of marked outlets that will lose power when the master device turns off. The APC model I have also cuts power when the computer enters sleep, as it's seen as a big enough power drop that the UPS can tell the difference.

I don't know about other people, but I have two reasons that seem pretty good to me.

1) I share my wi-fi with my downstairs neighbor, and it would not be fair to impose the scheduling of my internet usage on her.

2) My telephone service is VOIP. No router, no phone.

Even though my computer is off when I'm not sitting at the keyboard, the rest of the network (printer, neighbor, SWMBO's Macintosh [if she's using it], telephone) remain on.

tanstaafl.

Sharing wifi sounds good to me.
But why does your voip require wifi, rather than merely "internet" ?

cheers

Presumable he is using one of those small consumer grade all in one router/wireless access point with a 4 port switch in the back.

I figure his voip handset might be wifi-based.. just curious what model if so.

Cheers

Oh yeah, I keep forgetting about those, they seem far and few between. Actually I think a co-worker has one looking for a home. I'll check on that if your interested.

Cable modem --> WRT54G Router --> [my computer + SWMBO's Macintosh + HP color laser printer + OOMA VOIP phone + Neighbor's laptop + SWMBO's netbook]

Out of all of that, only the neighbor and the netbook actually use the wireless function. I didn't know what kind of setup I would have before I moved down here, so I got the WRT54G wireless router "just in case". Wireless or not, I need the router working all the time.

It would make sense to change the wireless router for a non-wireless one and drop an ethernet cable down to the neighbor... except that the floors of this building are 16" steel-reinforced concrete and making a hole would be... difficult, and I would need at least a six-port router. Better to leave well-enough alone.

In any case, the power supply for the router is rated at .5A at 12V, so it is pulling about 3 watts (figuring the router is using about 50% of the maximum capacity of the power supply) so that works out to be maybe two KWH per month. More than I would have thought, those little 3-watt loads do add up, don't they? By contrast, my refrigerator is, by my calculation, using more than 90 times that amount. [6.0A @ 127V = 762 watts averaging 8 hours per day of run time for 30 days = 183 KWH/month.] And yes, my next large household expenditure will be for a larger but more energy-efficient refrigerator!

tanstaafl.

Not that you'd want to in your case but you can disable the radio in a WRT54G from the web interface. It doesn't completely power down the radio but it does reduce consumption quite a bit.

Thanks Doug.

I feel that the WRT54G series are excellent, power-efficient routers. With DD-WRT or Tomato firmware (on capable units) one can save an extra watt by having the wifi automatically switch itself off overnight. In your case, with a shared connection, that's probably not worthwhile feasible.

Cheers!

I'm not sure it's worth turning it off for a watt; there are likely easier kills (possibly not for you Mark, given your setup is pretty optimized).

I'm still very frustrated by gear - and this includes the WRT54's that I've owned - that use a transformer vs a DCDC for the AC supply. Even aside from the efficiency issues, you're shipping a huge lump of iron around. One netgear gbit switch I got several years ago in the UK came with TWO honking bricks, one with a UK plug and one with an EU plug - you were just meant to toss one half-kilo lump away upon opening the package. That really annoyed me....

I'm at about 10kWh/day for a (small) family of four with the associated washing/drying. We really ought to get a washing line up given the weather is very conducive to drying clothes outdoors in california

"Dark power" of the house at night is <100W, most of which is the fridge/freezer; I mapped out all the systems when I moved in but still have some unaccounted-for drains. Stuff that's on in that total includes a time capsule, docsis3.0 modem, airport extreme extender with at&t microcell plugged into it, home alarm with cell signalling (2 transformers, all sensors are wireless/battery), combination boiler, hardwired smoke detectors, TED5000 power monitor, skype cordless phone, laptops/phones on charge (though fully charged, so this is <1W each), microwave, oven, baby monitor (both ends), and irrigation timer.

This list is probably too long, but over half of that is just the fridge which we got with the house and is probably not viable to replace if you're doing it just to save energy, given how much energy making a new fridge would take...

I somehow feel cheated.

Someone needs to invent a power strip that, in addition to normal AC outlets, has a built-in switched mode power supply to provide DC power for the various devices that would otherwise use wall warts.

You can already buy "universal" AC adapters that allow you to select voltage and come with a variety of barrel connectors. No reason an amped-up (pun intended) version couldn't be incorporated in a power strip.

I think the increasing prevalence of USB-powered devices will lead to exactly the sort of universal wall warts that you're talking about. You can already get stuff like this thing. Eventually, this will only get better.

The "resting" power consumption of our house is maybe 300W, which seems way too high, but I've been focusing my efforts on getting down the costs when we're home and things are on, which has led me down the (expensive) path of LED lighting. I've been surprised at how much electrical power the gas heater (and gas clothes dryer) consume. Spinning a non-trivial sized electrical motor consumes a non-trivial amount of electricity. Funny, that.

Well, I do leave my wifi routers on all the time. But then again, we generate all our own power with solar panels, so if I don't use it up, it kinda seems wasteful

Use more power! ('til the batteries run low)

Like it or not, the modern world runs on electricity, and while minimising power usage is surely beneficial, the key issue is the method used to generate the power in the first place.

IMO there should be far greater use of renewable energy to generate power both on a large (national grid) and small (individual household) scale and far more incentives to achieve this (both financial and legislative) other than the obvious environmental incentive.

Very important to monitor both ends of a baby.

Peter

I'm not saying you're doing this, since obviously you can't go without your solar panels, but the now that more and more solar panels are getting installed on houses, there's now the perverse effect where people end up installing power hungry stuff like air conditioners into their houses, or even start to heat their houses again with electrical heaters, just because "the power is there anyway". Sounds like big NO to me, but that's just me.

Also, the creation of a solar panel blows more CO2 into the air than that panel can ever lower through its entire life cycle. For this reason I'm not that big on solar panels, which all seem to be a partially government funded (well, in Belgium they are anyway) scam to me. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the government, who offers funds for the installation of solar panels now, would start to tax them in a few years, effectively reclaiming all the funds they have granted in the first place and then some. And also what to do with all those 'used up' solar panels in 20 years from now? How to recycle those? As far as I know, nothing has ever been said about that.

When we built our house, I paid special attention into lowering energy consumption as much as possible. Not only for the environment, but also -I'll be honest here- the less energy you use, the less you pay. I reached my goal more or less with several things, but one thing in particular: insulation. I put as much of the stuff as I could inside the walls, floor and roof. I also heat up the house and my hot tapwater with a geothermal heat pump (which works excellently!). A normal power use for our house, which has about 320m² of usable space, is about 1000 KWh/month. I'm really pleased with that since the power company themselves claim that normal monthly use is about 3.500 KWh - 4.000 KWh. I probably could still improve this by using some of the Mark's tips here, and I will.

They stopped shipping transformer supplies years ago, in this country at least -- all six of my WRT54GLs have modern switching-style wall warts.


Yeah, definitely for the clothesline. Ours here is used from March/April through November normally. Saves a ton of electrical power (not feasible to install a gas dryer in our specific house -- venting issues).

I often look at the wall of switches and wallwarts here, and wonder perhaps about consolidation with a single larger supply of some kind. But then that probably wouldn't be too efficient with only two or three things running off of it at a time.

The Mythtv box does use its internal PSU in place of a number of external power bricks though. Simplifies the wiring there, too.

Cheers

Lest too many of you develop the opinion that I'm an energy conservation maniac (not a bad thing, that, but..), we do indulge in UPSs that are on 24/7 to protect critical electronics.

I imagine they don't help the bottom line for power consumption, but they do seem to have put an end to premature death syndrome for the things we plug into them.

Or maybe designs have just improved enough. Dunno. Before we started using UPSs, we did have the odd PSU and/or motherboard just "die" for no good reason, but never since.

Cheers

Hmm you could do this right now. Get a big honking AC-DC supply and put it in the basement/closet. The AC-DC supply would have to put out +5,+12 and possible +19 (that's what my Dell takes) if you wanted it to power laptops too. Run some DC wiring around the home, make custom cables with Sermos connectors for various voltages for all your appliances. Could be a fun project- not sure how much you would really save in the end though.

Hmmm.. that makes me feel better about my electrical usage.

My most recent electric bill (see attached) showed me using 559 KWH.

Now, there are a few things to take into consideration.

First of all, the bill is bi-monthly. It shows consumption from October 10 through December 10, 2010, at an average consumption of 9.47 KWH per day.

Second, my house is smaller than yours (about 160 M^2 [OK, Archeon, how did you get that superscript in your post? ] including the downstairs neighbor, but that really isn't much of a factor because my climate is so temperate that I literally have no way of heating or cooling my house. Nor do I need any. House size does not affect my consumption.

Third, there are only two sources of significant power consumption: my refrigerator, and my computer. I calculate that my refrigerator is consuming 70% of all the electricity I use. (My stove and my hot water heater are gas-fired.)

Fourth, there are only three of us living here, and SWMBO probably spends more time away from the house than in it, other than to sleep. And even when we're at home, it is literally a glass house (outside walls are glass floor to ceiling!) and so much light pours in that artificial lighting just isn't required. In the 14 months we've been here I have yet to replace a light bulb.

Fifth, my rate per KWH is so high (with taxes and monthly connection fee, around $.30 USD per KWH) that I pay pretty close attention to my usage. It is frightening to see an electric bill for $2094.20 before realizing that it is in pesos, not dollars, and that it is really $167 USD and that it is for TWO months, and that my downstairs neighbor pays a third of it. But still, $57 per month for pretty minimal usage stings a little bit.

Sixth, my March-April bill from 2010 was an anomaly. I can only think of two possibilities. It is not impossible (I have heard rumors...) that CFE "phreaked" the meter, adding an additional 500 KWH to it (and no, I don't mean "mis-read" the meter, that would have corrected itself on the following bill!), or somehow the construction site next door tapped into my power.

But, if you are operating at less than one third of the average consumption for your area, and I am operating at one quarter of what you are using (albeit smaller house, fewer people, more temperate climate, etc.) I guess I'm doing OK.

tanstaafl.

I'm currently just using the stock Verizon FiOS modem/router, which has no such options.

Simple. The square meter sign comes standard on Belgian keyboards.


Gee, now I'm feeling bad again. But hey, on the other hand, that 1000 KWh/month is now: mid-winter, with temperatures as low as -10 degrees C. That electrical usage should easily get halved in summer when there is no need to have the heater on.

The price you're paying for electricity doesn't seem all that steep to me. I'm currently paying about 120 euro/month. Most people here are paying up to 200 euro/month or more (and, we've built a larger than standard house, I have to be honest about that as well - most houses here are between 100m²-200m²). It's because we were able to build such an eh... larger house I've searched for a possibility to get this house heated without getting choked by the electrical bill in the process. The extra insulation and geothermal heat pump did the trick. And I'm very happy when I say this because this heat pump was kind of a step in the dark. I know of nobody who uses such a system and it really isn't very common here. But it turned out quite nicely.

You can also type in "&sup2;" → "²"

You can also superscript or subscript text using [sup] and [sub] tags.

My monthly bill isn't too bad, but only because I use very little.

At 120 euros for 1,000 KWH, you're paying €.12/KWH. [That's 12/100ths of a euro per KWH, the decimal point is hard to see.] I'm paying €.23/KWH, almost exactly double the cost per KWH that you are paying. If I used 1,000 KWH/month, my bill would come to €230/month, or about $315 USD.

My overall electricity expense is reasonable, but my unit cost per KWH is pretty steep.

tanstaafl.

I can't seem to make that work. Can you be more specific?

tanstaafl.

Sure, just do this.

How about ²22222²?


is
This is superscript

Same for sub for subscript

That's not really doing to work so well due to the impedance of the cabling. The good thing about high voltage is that your resistive losses are much less as the currents are lower (V=IR, after all). That'll also mean that your 5v in the basement might end up being 4.5v or less depending on both the cabling and what was pulling current from it.

Also, the little power bricks are actually pretty efficient - usually at least in the same ballpark as a honking PC supply. For example, I think the little iPhone chargers are 85%+ efficient, and a pretty near zero quiescent current when unloaded.

Right. Despite the thread context, I was more hoping for it to get rid of the large plugs. Probably less of an issue in the UK, where regular plugs dwarf the newer regulated supplies.

If it comes with a big linear regulator power supply then I usually replace it with a small SMPS unless its got a really bizarre output voltage.

The spare SMPS units I've got are all fairly small and the ones I order for special voltages aren't expensive either so its not a big deal to replace for me.

This thread comes at the right time for me. I just received my last, and worst ever, electric bill: 1232 kWh from Nov 5th to Jan 5th. It is slightly more than 600 kWh/month, 20kWh/day. € 318 overall.

That's bad.

Yikes! That's even higher per kWh than I'm paying, at €.26. That would come to $.35/kWh in US dollars.

Is anybody here paying a higher rate than that?

I stand corrected on my previous posts: Kilowatt Hours should be abbreviated kWh, not KWH or kwh, in tribute to James Watt of course.

tanstaafl.

$.36/kWh for the first 51 kWh each month, $.16/kWh for the rest

It is. Here electric power is generally extremely expensive. This happened since nuclear plants were dismissed in the entire contry and we started to buy electricity from nuclear plants in France, just cross the border.

Also, Doug, don't be fooled by the exchange rate. What matters to determine what is expensive and what is not is really based on a currency purchasing power. So, even though currently the €/$ exchange rate is what it is, still, within EU boundaries, we purchase with € 1 what in the US people purchase for $ 1 . That's not an exact figure, but the exchange rate is just giving you a more distorted perception of how expensive electricity here really is. It's bad, but not that bad.

That is even more true for Andy, who is converting GBP into US$.

Milton Ontario, Canada with tiered pricing, depending on time of day. Currently on Winter schedule.

The claimed WAP (weighted average price) is currently around CAD $0.069818 per kWh

This however is how it breaks down

On-Peak 0.099
Mid-Peak 0.081
Off-Peak 0.051

That's the base price per kWh. However, you will never pay that little for usage. First, your actual usage is multiplied by an adjustment factor which for us is currently 1.0351.

Every bill has the following charges which are calculated as a percentage of your usage charges:

Delivery - there's a fixed portion and a variable portion. The breakdown/percentage is never printed anywhere on the bill, only a total. At least 60% of the billed usage though.

Regulatory Charge - no info on how this amount is calculated. Always at least 10.5% of billed usage

Debt Retirement Charge - no info on how this is calculated. Always at least 9.5%, but I've seen it at 10% many times

This all comes out to a more realistic average price of 0.13 before tax or 0.147 after taxes.

I haven't done any profiling yet, but we're currently using a lot more energy than I'd like. Less right now than at the same time last year, since my wife is no longer on maternity leave and we're no longer washing diapers. I work from home, so it's always going to be higher than if I were out all day.

There are never any lights turned on in the daytime and at night we used to have pretty much only a single 13W CFL running, however now we also run a few other 15W or 18W bulbs for a few hours while our daughter is eating and playing before bed time.

I run my PVR system with 4 drives, NAS with 6 drives, UPS, router w/Tomato, Time Machine AP, switch, voip adapter, and 5 cordless phones 24/7. My MacBook Pro is running most of the day and over the past few months I know it's been consuming a lot more power than normal thanks to the bad firmware on the Seagate Momentus XL that never allows the drive to spin down.

I'd like to get the PVR shutting down when it's not doing something active, like recording. I didn't have success when I tested this a few years ago, but I hope the software now works properly for this. Will need to test it when the recording season winds down.

One nice reason about living in the Pacific Northwest:

Energy: All energy measured in kilowatt-hours at $0.031081 per kWh.
Delivery: All energy delivered in kilowatt-hours at $0.030981 per kWh.

Something like 80 or 90% of our power is hydroelectric here, so it's very cheap and not polluting. When the glaciers melt it might be a problem though.

That is just wrong. Oh, I don't doubt your figures, but the pricing structure is designed to discourage conservation.

It should be just the reverse -- $.16 for the first kWh (but more than just 51 kWh, perhaps 100 or even 150) and then $.36/kWh up to 1,000 kWh, then an ever escalating scale for usage beyond that.

Keep costs low for people who really can't afford high electric bills, and make it very costly for the "wastrels". In Mexico the government subsidizes the first few kWh so that a poor family with not much more than a few light bulbs and maybe a small TV can afford electricity. We rich Gringos with our big computer systems and fancy entertainment systems end up paying a lot more, and I think that is as it should be.

tanstaafl.

I agree that it is weighted in favour of those who use more power.

But I can't see how you can say it discourages conservation. The more power you use the more you pay. You conserve energy you have a lower power bill. The fact that the rate lowers after a certain level of usage doesn't change that.

I kill 51kWh in less than 3 days.

Last month, our house consumed 679 kWh, which cost $60, bottom line (roughly $0.07 per kWh plus taxes and fees). We've got gas heat, so these numbers represent lighting, computers, and appliances. The big bills will be coming this summer, when we need the A/C. I'll be curious to compare them to last year, now that I've got the LED lights in, which both save energy in terms of lumens per watt, but also put out effectively no heat.

If LED lights put out no heat, why do they have massive heat sinks ?

Yes, it's a common misconception I think. While your average Maplins 3mm LED doesn't generate any noticeable heat, something like a Luxeon Rebel generates a fair amount, although I'd say the reason it needs a heatsink is just because there's so little surface area to dissipate the heat compared to, say, a normal lightbulb.

Our "smart" elected leaders have done the same here. Even though we still have a couple of nuclear plants, most of our electricity is also produced in France. They told us this would save us money. Of course the opposite turned out to be true (how strange...).

Same as with Bruno, over here the kWh rate is not the only thing that's taken into account when a bill is created. There's also the delivery costs, network usage costs, taxes, and a few other factors which I don't know by heart. Either way, it's expensive. Luckily we do have the day/night-time tariff which means the electricity is about 2.5 times as costly between 7 AM and 10 PM. Between 10 PM and 7 AM and in weekends, the lower rate applies.

Low-power LEDs are very efficient, but you can't produce usable room lighting at those power levels. As you increase the power, the efficiency of LEDs drops dramatically. However, Cree and Nichia seem to be on the verge of developing LEDs that outperform fluorescent lighting.

The massive heat sinks are to keep the LED operating temperatures lower, which radically extends their service lifetime. Cree claims 50,000 service hours for their current fixtures.

I bought a bunch of Cree LR6 lights ($70/ea. online) to replace 60W halogen ceiling lights. They consume only 10.5W and put out light that looks damn near identical. Comparably bright CFL bulbs, in warm white but with lower CRI, seem to clock in at 15-20W.

One of the real winning features of the Cree lights, relative to CFLs, is that they're instant on. No warm-up period. Another feature is that you don't hear anything. Where I have CFL bulbs in our house, I can hear their power transformers quietly humming away, which bugs me a bit.

LEDs suffer from thermal runaway issues so you need the big heatsinks to stop them from going bang.

The design of most downlights means that the heatsink is even bigger because the downlights are designed for halogens or regular bulbs which can tolerate the higher temperatures from lack of convection.

The reason why all nuclear plants were dismissed, in Italy, is actually quite sillier than that, IMO.
Soon after the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, USSR, there was a popular uproar against nuclear power in general. Which is naive, and yet understandable. A referendum took place.
Most political parties decided to take side agains nuclear energy and clearly most people voted against nuclear energy.

Sure enough, without even entering the debate about nuclear plants safety, nobody seemed to realize that banning nuclear plants is plain silly if the rest of EU still uses them.

Result was that we gained virtually no increased safety; but, electric power price, instead, indeed increased; and, such price is almost entirely set by electric energy producers abroad. In addition to that, we are still paying taxes to finance the dismissal of our nuclear plants, a quite expensive process; which, by the way, one may have hoped would be cheaper/safer in the future due to better technology. Not to mention unemployment generated in the towns where most of the economy was based on the presence of nuclear plants.

Indeed history is full of poor political decisions, but I admit I am still fascinated on how incredibly silly this particular one was. It is hard to find anything good in it even if you try hard.

... Not to mention that a part of Italian forein politics is heavily determined by the desperate need to buy energy aboroad, since we do not produce enough. And various dangerous diplomatic games have been played by our Governments because of this.

Again, a bad call of remarkable historical proportions.

A snap shot of our rates over a few years...


1Q 2008 3Q 2008 3Q 2009 3Q 2010 3Q 2011
Monthly Customer Charge - $2.93 $3.07 $3.16 $3.25 $3.35

Peak Season Apr - Sep
First 600kWh, per kWh $0.0751 $0.0787 $0.0811 $0.0835 $0.0860
Every kWh above 600kWh $0.0842 $0.0882 $0.0908 $0.0935 $0.0963

Non-Peak Season Oct - Mar
All kWh, per kWh $0.0751 $0.0787 $0.0811 $0.0835 $0.0860


Ross