I created an energy usage summary webpage to give me an ‘executive dashboard’ of my home energy usage.
Chris Bergeron's Blog
My projects, rants and general info
Archive for the ‘home’ Category
Created Energy summary page
Saturday, February 20th, 2010Security System: Added mysql integration
Saturday, January 9th, 2010I wrote a program to read events from the security system and put them into an RSS Event Log 
. I have some logic in it so that not everything gets recorded. I wouldn’t want a would-be robber knowing when the system is armed or disarmed, of course!
An event is anything that is monitored by the security system, including door openings, windows being opened / closed, etc.
Finished putting cabinets in the main garage
Sunday, November 8th, 2009I finally got around to finishing the cabinets in the main-level garage. Organization is a wonderful thing, and having enough cabinet space to store everything is going to make it much easier to find things.
-
- Garage cabinets
Installed cabinets in the garage
Saturday, October 24th, 2009I spent most of the day installing some unfinished oak cabinets in my garage. I still have one more cabinet to mount, though. I also installed a pegboard to mount my tools on to. Here are some pictures:
-
- Garage cabinets
Theater Room: Framing Proscenium
Sunday, October 11th, 2009This weekend I worked on the theater room some more. I started to frame the proscenium base. It’s been very slow going, but it’s some progress.
-
- Proscenium
Theater Room: Installed carpet
Saturday, September 26th, 2009I installed some carpet in the theater room. I don’t think it’s permanent, but it will have to do for now. I also found the tiles that I’m going to install in the wall arch. Here are some pictures:
-
- Theater room with carpet
-
- Wall arch tiles
Security System: Update 1
Saturday, September 26th, 2009I’m adding a circuit breaker interrupter to my home security system. The purpose of it is to completely turn off some breakers in the home when the alarm is in ‘AWAY DAY’ mode. The goal is to conserve energy by completely disabling certain circuits in the house. I have a lot of electrical vampires, things that consume electricity even when turned off, in my home. One example is our DVR. It draws about 50 watts even when it’s powered off. I don’t have any scheduled recordings, so it makes sense to disable it when it’s not being used. This is only one example, but one of many devices that consume power when I don’t need them to. As a result, I’m building a circuit that breaks the electrical circuit when we’re not home. If the resultant savings are a few hundred watts (that would otherwise run 24/7) it will be a worthwhile endeavor; particularly considering the introduction of solar power. Here’s a picture of the interruptor circuit:
-
- Power interruptor circuit
Solar: Update 2
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009Tracking electricity usage is an important component of solar power. In order to help me achieve this goal, I wrote some software to help me monitor my electricity usage. Each month when the electric bill arrives, I input the data into an iPhone applet. This applet records the data into a database. I’m not going to link to it for privacy reasons, but here’s a picture of the applet:
Here are a couple of graphs produced from it. The first are the bill amounts:
The second is the number of kiloWatt hours used:
Here’s the latest data (as of Sunday 20th of May 2012 08:50:17 AM):
- 58 months of data
- 50,592 kiloWatt hours used totalling: $USD 6,107.35. This equates to a practical average price per watt of: $USD 0.12 (including base charges and tax)
- Average bill amount: $USD 105.30
- Average kWh per month: 872
Theater Room: Finished drywall
Monday, August 31st, 2009I put up the final wall of the theater room. I’ve also finished the design and layout of the proscenium (stage).
-
- Framing the fourth wall
-
- The proscenium wall
-
- A rendering of the ceiling tray
-
- Lighting Zones
-
- Rendering of the proscenium
Theater Room: Added an arched opening
Saturday, August 15th, 2009I framed an arched opening in the theater room. Ultimately, it’s going to be tiled, but for now it’s just framed in. It was pretty simple to do. I just used a string to draw a semi-circle on the drywall and cut it out. Then I built a simple wooden arch and placed it behind the drywall. I added a couple of two by fours for the lower shelf and to add depth. I’m going to add lighting and possibly build a water feature into it.
-
- The arch in the wall
-
- Building the arch
-
- Building the arch
-
- The arch framed in
-
- The wall with the arch cut in.
Loading ...