Power bill and other updates

Just got the Nov utilities bill. Power usage went down from 700 KWh in Aug to 639 KWh in Oct, when actual readings were taken. That's a drop of 61 KWh, or 8.7%. Still quite high.

The total bill went down only about $5 from last month. They probably anticipated demand destruction when the electricity rate got increased on 1 Oct, because the estimated reading was 669 KWh for the previous month.

SingPower has this habit of taking an actual reading only once other month and using some kind of odd algorithm to determine an estimated in-between reading. Trying to halve the labour costs, obviously. The rumoured upcoming network-connected power meter will change everything. I wonder if it will use the upcoming wireless network. They could take a reading every 5 minutes or so and the power to transmit that data will be charged back to *you*. Nice. Less-energy-gulping alternatives include pulling plain old phone wire, or tapping on to the SCV cable network.

As of late October, and after watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, we have been taken one more step - we are switching off our two main home PC's in the daytime during the weekdays, when we are at work. And I am switching off my office PC when I leave the office.

The earlier worry was that the hard drives might be more prone to crashing if subjected to on-and-off power cycles. But they still crash anyway. With hard drives, it's more of a matter of when they crash, not a matter of if. So we leave the home PC's on at night. They run scheduled jobs to backup not only to a second hard drive in the same PC, but also to copy the image files to each other, over the network. Double redundancy. You kind of pick up this sort of thing from hard experience. And years of reading up on the measures that the military employs.

We have several levels of hard drive backup redundancy, here's the list :

Level 1 - nightly automatic local backup on 2nd HDD
Level 2 - nightly automatic network backup to the other PC
Level 3 - regular manual backup to portable USB HDD
Level 4 - regular manual backup to 3rd PC
Level 5 - irregular manual backup to DVD-RW disks

So after making sure that it is nearly impossible to lose all the installed applications, configurations, settings and tweaks that will take weeks to setup all over again, we could turn off our PC's and let the hard drives crash whenever they may like. HDD's are cheap and getting cheaper. Time is the limiting factor. There's that, too.

Another thing that prompted me to turn off the machines : earlier, for a while, I installed a S.M.A.R.T. monitor utility that took readings off the hard drives themselves. It kept bleeping that the drives would crash any time because some safe temperature threshold had been exceeded, and that both the drives were at 48 degC. Okay, so quite a bit of electricity has to be going into heating up the drives. Power saving mode didn't work because the darn you-know-what O/S kept polling the drive for this or that file or directory. So the last thing left to do was to turn the whole machine off. Well, that worked.

To be sure, when we turn off the PC's, we turn off the main power switches as well. There goes the cable modem, router, speakers, printer - and telephone, which for no good reason uses power from an AC adaptor to keep track of caller ID numbers. The phone still works for calling in and out without AC power, it's just the caller ID part doesn't work. Heck with it. We fall back on a DECT phone and a battery-run caller ID thingy that Biow inherited from her brother when he sold his local apartment here.

We'll see how this effort goes 2 months from now, when the next actual reading is taken. Okay now, back to work.

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