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Tractor Hydraulics - Cylinders
I'm still waiting on my valve assembly, but I thought I would write a bit about repairing the cylinders on the tractor. The cylinders are what do the real work of lifting and moving things. The engine...
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Room Temperature Sensor; got to use the 3D printer for real
I used my 3D printer on a real project, the room temperature sensor. I spent a ton of time messing around with various drawing tools and learning a little about slicing software, but didn't actually do...
View ArticleXively: See I told you so...
Over and over again I've ranted about how I hate cloud storage of data, or reliance on cloud services for control around the house, and again I was justified. Earlier this month Xively (formerly Cosm...
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Grafana: So, how well does this thing work?
As it turns out, pretty darn well. For those of you just getting into house control and monitoring, Grafana is a general purpose set of graphing tools. However, its documentation is daunting. They...
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Grafana: Now to get it working on a Raspberry Pi
Last post I talked about how I got Grafana working on my desktop talking to my database. It actually worked pretty well. Unfortunately, the laptop is NOT where I want it to run; I want it to be running...
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My Freezer: Right in the middle of installing Grafana
So, I'm installing Grafana on my laptop and pull up a chart that looks like this for my monitored appliances:What the heck? the freezer in the house is getting hot! About a minute later, an email comes...
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Grafana: Getting close to having something nice
I spent a few hours getting a Pi 3B running properly for this Grafana project. I actually think it is going to worth the effort. Grafana seems to work well and I have all the code on my own...
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Local Power Politics
I live in Arizona USA just north of Phoenix in the foothills. Power here is supplied by a company that calls itself "Arizona Public Service," that is an owned subsidiary of Pinnacle West Capital...
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Tractor Hydraulics: New Front Loader
A while back I posted about the front loader valve on my big tractor, then forgot to post an update <link>. Well, after several screw ups and two separate orders for new hoses and such, I got it...
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So, I Went to a Couple of Garage Sales ...
Driving down the road this fine Saturday in the desert I saw a sign for a garage sale. I don't normally go to these because I haven't had much luck finding anything of interest, but a couple of weeks...
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Another Garage Sale Find
I found something else at a garage sale that I'm going to write about. I promise I'll get back to technical projects for a while after this.I was looking through a bunch of really old TV repair...
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Supercooling a House in the Desert
A while back I ranted a while about power politics in the desert <link>, and after some thought and because I've been doing this for years now, I decided to post a few articles on 'supercooling'...
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Supercooling a House in the Desert: part 2
Last post I examined how much my house's internal temperature rose over an eight hour period of temperatures that exceeded 100F with no AC at all during the period. That gives me a feel for how much...
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More on House Power Monitoring: Prebuilt Device
There's been a lot of new devices appearing on the market for monitoring power. I decided to get one and see what was actually going on. I prowled around Alibaba for a while and settled on this one:The...
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Supercooling a House in the Desert: part 3
I'm going to talk about the APS (Arizona Public Service) phone software for monitoring your power. For folk that don't live here (Arizona, USA), much of this will be of little value. It might give you...
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PZEM-004: Now to actually use it for something
Literally hundreds of these energy monitors have been sold, but judging from the various articles I've run across, not too many of them have actually been used to meaningfully monitor power around the...
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Ordering Chinese Devices Through Amazon
This isn't a complaint session about Amazon, they've done well by me <link> several times, nor am I going to complain about Chinese products; a lot of the posts on this blog are about those...
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Monitoring Water Heater Power
Well, I can now monitor my hot water heater power usage. The step-down transformer I got <link> worked just fine and I managed to put together all the pieces and now have it out there running...
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Wrapping Up The Water Heater Monitor (and control)
For the present, I'm going to claim that (as the British say) the water heater monitor is, "All done and dusted." There's a few tiny items I'll mention that I may do in the future to make is a little...
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Supercooling in the Desert: May 22, 2018 a day that will live in infamy !
This is the day I got clobbered by APS (my power company)Look just before 8PM (20:00); see that bunch of spikes? My peak billing period lasts until 8, and something was sucking power before the period...
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