Total Home Automation

WiFi Scale, Finally....

I have a bit of a weight problem.  For a long time, I have wanted a scale that would automatically get my weight, figure out who I am (i.e. vs. my wife or someone else that gets on the scale), and then keep track of my weight online. 

I could never find such a scale, so I started thinking about getting a scale with a RS-232 output and hooking it up to a computer, and writing the software myself.  Finally though, a company named Withings has come out with the product.

 

The Withings scale links to your wifi network.  It captures Weight, BMI, fat mass, etc.  It reports up to the web and IPhone.  I was at first worried that it might be difficult to configure with my WPA security, but it was quite easy.  You attach a supplied USB cable (as if I don't have a dozen of those) to the scale, plug it into your laptop, and run a config program (which you download from their site).  The system scans for available networks, you enter the WPA key, and your done.

The online software is great and evolving.  It is basically Flash based/web 2.0 type presentation.  They keep adding little features, like Target weight, then letting you track progress.  I suspect there will be a natural evolution of providing other information like recommended diets, exercise routines, etc.  It is a natural for them to make a wifi BP cuff, pulse gauge, maybe even a treadmill.  Would also be cool if they could link it to Twitter or facebook and embarrass me into losing weight.

EcoSnoop - Snooping for Energy Efficiency

The climate is in turmoil.  We cant build enough solar and wind generation quickly enough.  We have a tough problem if we want to save energy.  But what about our daily life?  Some estiamate that as much as 20% of the energy used in buildings is all waste related.  How often have we seen:

• Giant buildings lit in the middle of the night with no one in them
• Street lights left on during the day
• Doors left open in the middle of the day

The folks at EcoSnoop are developing a range of applications to help communities, end users, government, and business reduce energy waste through social networking.  EcoSnoop just released an iPhone application that turns everyday iPhone users into EcoDetectives (or EcoSnoops). 

If you see an example of energy waste that needs action, you open up EcoSnoop and then snap a picture.  The application asks you to categorize the "EcoCase" into various categories that best fit such as after hours lighting, Water Waste, poorly watered trees, etc.  There seems to also be a function called "I want", where a user can take a picture of their roof and say "I want solar".  I bleieve they intend to link the "I want function" to some form of lead generation to get back to vendors.  The iPhone captures the location, picture, and category - then it posts it onto the users account online at EcoSnoop.com 

From the iPhone you can select several others screens.  "Nearby" - shows other EcoCases in your general geographic location. "Mine" lists all your EcoCases.  "Settings" lets you enter your username and password from the EcoSnoop website.

EcoSnoop is apparently working on a more advanced version of their website that will open up to include a lot of social networking functions, cataloging, and dialog.  Through online engagement, EcoSnoop wants to help EcoSnoops bundle and arrange EcoCases into a set of actions that can be taken by the business, community, homeowner or whomever has the energy problem.  They also plan a blackberry, Pre, Twitter, Facebook, etc variant.  You can track their them on Twitter at EcoSnoop or on their fan page on Facebook.

The company is very concerned that EcoSnoop might violate privacy rights or create some for of "Red Baiting" from the days of McCarthyism.  So, they are working o various other steps in the process to maximize the opportunity to save energy while minimizing privacy infringement.

Apparently they are working on a business version of the software that will let businesses see and manage reported EcoCases.  The application is free, but one can imagine the business version will have some charge. 

If you do not have an iPhone, you can still see activity on the EcoSnoop Website.  Everyone should just go to the site and create a username and password.  You can install the application on the Iphone via your phones app store or through iTunes.  Search on the term "EcoSnoop".

A new view on Green Innovation from the Father of Ethernet

The Internet was developed over many years by many great entrepreneurs who toiled in the lab and the market place to develop real innovation. They did this with a passion for the technology they were developing, but great uncertainty with regard to how their technologies in the end would effect society. The true entrepreneurs of the bunch evolved with the market place, discovering new angles and views on how to be successful. They were beat up in the market place, and survived stronger for it. First amongst these Entrepreneurs is Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet (as in he has the patent) which is a critical foundational technology for the Internet. His classmates at MIT were key players in Email, FTP, TCP/IP, etc.

Metcalfe went on to found 3Com corporation, a leader in the Internet. He has been around all the key innovations in information technology over the last 40 years. He is now a major investor in all forms of new start-ups, with a particular concentration on Energy.

Metcalfe's perspective on how to solve the energy problem is a good lesson for us all. Metcalfe, based on his real and successful experience actually doing something that has changed our lives, believes that the pathway to climate salvation will be the development of Clean and Cheap energy. This notion of "Cheap" is critical to his perspective. Rather than restrict, Metcalfe wants to expand and make efficient. Now think about this, computers use to be expensive, over time they became cheaper, new applications were developed, society shifted, the world operates in a different manner. Perhaps in a better manner. Metcalfe suggests that the dire climate predictions will be swept away by entrepreneurs who blow our mind with market derived innovation. For a great summary of Metcalfe's views, you need to see this YouTube video:

If you listen to Metcalfe, you are compelled to think differently about how to solve the climate problem in a way that meets all our needs.

Automate your book reading....

I am of a generation that is in transition.  My older sister did all of here high school book reports and papers on a typewriter, while I did mine on an apple II (one of the few in my class).  I have always thought electronic books would be the wave of the future, therefore really excited when the Kindle first came out.

I bought the first generation Kindle for my wife, and we never really used it.  I bought the next generation for my mother, and I am still not sure she uses it.  I just bought a Kindle DX for myself, and am in love.

So, it took me a while to get use to it.  The final tipping point for me is the larger form factor of the DX.  It puts enough information on the page that lets you spend more time reading and less time clicking "Next Page".  The functions take a bit getting use to, like figuring out the difference between "Previous page" and "Back".  Back being about going up a level.

I use the kindle as a daily source of the newspaper.  I already have moved online for most news, but I like the ability to read material on the kindle.  I find I read more of the articles compared to being on the web.  The key feeds I like are WSJ, NY Times and Politico, though there are a few others (Blogs) that you can get.  The kindle charges a small fee (basically air time) to get you certain blogs.  Reading the WSJ and NY Times is a bit problematic - you need to switch between the "Sections" view which lists top level themes (World News, Technology, etc) and "Article List" which lists key articles.  I do not think they publish all articles, but I have yet to resolve this.

I really like the notion of the pdf function.  Essentially you register an email address for your kindle (i.e. energylover@kindle.com).  There is an anti spam function to prevent abuse.  You then email a pdf to your address and it shows up on the Kindle.  The gray scale function on the kindle does not work real well here, but its sufficient for now.

I used the PDF function to download the entire The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), (1,201 pages) and related amendments (300 pages), which gets me to the tree saving part.  Its a bit ironic that a major bill on climate change results in so many pages.  If they just fixed the margins the bill would be about 600 pages.  But, I can say for sure, reading ACES bill on my kindle was easy and saved a lot of trees.

I need to figure out what the carbon foot print of my Kindle is (electronics etc), but I am fully bought into this technology now and in love with its potential.  Its fun to get aa good book and turn it page by page, but I think I am making the transition to electronic permanent.

EcoSnoop

I have seen a Beta Release of a new application called EcoSnoop, that is sort of a social networking system for Green people.  The soon to be released Iphone application lets you take pictures of green issues like "Lights left on in a building" late at night, and post these on a website to be discussed and perhaps resolved.

The notion is that many organizations want to be green, they just are not sure how to be green.  EcoSnoop leverages the good will of the community to provide that extra bit of help in being green.

GreenTip: Airflow - A Waste of Energy

The practical reality of every home, and the truth behind the challenge of energy efficiency, is that what a manufacture says savings will be, and what happens once something is installed are two different things.  Low refrigerant in home air conditioning systems and poor airflow are two big issues in home energy usage.

My house, as many homes do, uses the space between the floor to bring air back to the air handling system.  In 1960 it was a nice cheap and effective way to build a HVAC system.  With today's concerns about air quality and material out gassing, return air is brought through a duct system.

The contractors arrived today to remove my old air handling units, and install the rest of my geothermal.  They ripped out one of the current air handlers.

It did not take long to find the first issue.  The supply air duct which comes down to the back of the green air handlers (Silver duct to the left and behind in this picture). has an obstruction in floor joist area.

Looking up into the duct, that has been cut out, you can see another grey/silver duct running across above the vanes coming down.  This is hard to see, but essentially the duct blocks 80% or the return air flow.

 

These are 5 ton air handling units, so the blowers for 40 years have been operating with the added burden of drawing a lot of air through a space the faction of intended design.  You cn bitch and scream about the idiots who made the mistake, but this is not a surprising revelation.  These units for years have been running with a lot more load to attempt to make up the desired temperature in the zone.

When undertaking these kinds of projects it is super critical to have a contractor with the integrity to point these kinds of problems out.  It could have been real easy for them to have masked this issue and I would have been left wondering why I was not getting the right performance from my system.

Geothermal Project: What is going away....

Since I am replacing my heating and cooling system, all the interior air handling units need to be replace, along with the exterior compressors.  My current system is made up of 3 big old air handlers....

These units have heat exchangers in them fed by a boiler and outdoor air-conditioning units.  The Boiler feeds 5 units all together, these three green ones in the basement and two newer units in the attic.  The Boiler was built the year I was born and probably is only about 70% efficient if that.

The part my wife really likes is that all the outdoor compressor units go away.  With that goes the related noise.  These units are stacked in the back end of the house out of the way a bit from everything, but just below our bedroom window.

 

The green colored air handlers, boiler and out door compressor units are all being replace with the white unit shown in the picture (Note its size vs one of the old green colored air handlers).

 

The air handlers in the attic are modern variable speed units, so we are keeping them.  They also use the new 410A refrigerant systems, so we can install what is called a split system.  Essentially, the big white thing includes a compressor, ground loop water pump, and an air handler.  With a spit system, it deletes the air handler - passing hot and cold refrigerant to the air handlers in the attic.  We wanted to save space in the basement so we mounted them in a rack (I stole this idea from President Bush's ranch where he did the same thing for his Geothermal system).

Geothermal Project: Horizontal Boring is realy cool......

I placed the Geothermal wells in my lower driveway.  The primary feeders need to come up from the driveway, around the front of the house, and into a corner of the foundation.  Unfortunately we have some nice old trees in front of the house in the way of where the pipes needs to go underground. 

 

So, the contractor proposed something called horizontal boring.  With a horizontal bore, they can go under the trees, horizontally, without damaging the trees.  Not only can they go under, they can actually steer the bore left, right, up and down in various ways to dodge the foundation, water pipes, natural gas, etc.

The Horizontal Bore machine, made by Vermeer, is about 15 feet long by 4 feet.  Unlike a bore that uses a spinning bit, a horizontal bore essentially pushes through the ground using hydraulic force.  The end of the bore has a asymmetric wedge.  the wedge can be turned 90 degrees, more or less, to cause the bore to move left, right, up or down as it is pushed through the dirt.

 

A technician follows the bore head, as it moves through the dirt, with a hand held device (an advanced metal detector) that tells him how deep the bore head is, and its general location.  With that information, he helps the operator decided how to run the bore. 

 

The bore was pushed some 90 feet to a hole the contractor dug at a corner of our foundation.

 

Once the bore pushes through at the far end, they attach a cutting bit(About 6 inches in diameter) to the end.  The bit has a swivel, that is then attached to the pipes that needed to be pulled back through the hole.  The bore machine then rotates the bore and pulls the drill bit back through the hole, expanding its size from 3/4" to 6 inches, dragging the pipes along the way.