Once we had decided that there would be a new marble floor at ground level, it was immediately clear that a floor heating would also be needed because for most of us the main trigger for turning up the heat, is cold feet. But what effect would this floor heating have on energy consumption?

After the decision for the new floor had been made, everything went very quickly and I actually had little time to devote to the issue of energy consumption. I didn’t really like the prospect of having another power consuming pump in our house… but then there is always a good tip from Pieter

Pump consuming at least 44W ??

Normally, a floor heating comes with a standard pump, in this case from the Grundfos brand, including a pump switch. This pump switch switches off the pump at times when there is no need for it to run and thus saves energy.

Floor heating unit with standard pump

However, nowadays there is an alternative, namely the Grundfos Alpha2. This is a pump which significantly reduces energy consumption. At least, that’s what is being advertised; time will tell how much of this is true… The extra cost for this pump of EUR 190 should be recouped within 2-3 years; for me a good reason to let the standard pump be replaced by this Alpha2.

Grundfos Alpha2 using 7W

The most exciting feature of this pump is called AUTOADAPT, which means the capacity (=used energy) is automatically adjusted to the demand. In the above picture you see my Alpha2 consuming 7W while the central heating is on.

This week i was finally allowed to turn on the floor heating (hey, we’re in the middle of May! I shouldn’t have to do this!) and saw this pump use 7-8W of energy, which is much less then a conventional pump would use. How this pump (which has to be  used without a pump switch btw) performs compared to the combination of a standard pump including pump switch? Time and a energy meter will tell!

Now that the new floor is nearly finished, i can start working on some Home Automation related subjects again; the first was using LED strips in the kitchen.

LED strips

In total 4 segments of LED strip are used; 2 near the floor at the plinths of the lower kitchen cabinets, 1 at the counter top and 1 on top of the upper kitchen cabinets.

Today i finished controlling all these LED strips individually.

I don’t have Ethernet in the kitchen, so i used the ZigBee approach (again ). I mounted a XBee on a Sparkfun XBee RS232 board and connected it to the Chromoflex RS232 RX input:

XBee and Chromoflex in a box

The XBee RS232 board is powered by the adapter that also powers the Chromoflex, so all i needed was a wall outlet for the Chromoflex adapter and the Chromoflex was “connected”.

Now it was time to add control functions to my Touchscreen application, running on my Asus TOP in the livingroom. I added a “LED” button on the floorplan, in the middle of the kitchen:

LED button on the floorplan

And i found a very cool Trackbar Control and created a new pop-up form with it, that appears when you push the “LED” button:

LED Trackbar

With this form i can control each LED segment individually. To minimize traffic, i used the same approach as i did earlier with controlling my thermostat; a timer event fires when the Trackbar value hasn’t changed for 1.5 seconds and sends the new value to my Domotica System by XMLRPC:

That’s all there is to it. My Domotica system takes care of the rest e.g. building the Chromoflex packet based on the USP3 protocol, wrapping it in a XBee Transmit Request packet and sending it to the ZigBee coordinator. Home Automation is sooo cool

In november 2008 i replaced 2 conventional fluorescent tubes by a LED version. Thinking they would last a long, long time was very, very wrong… In october 2009, not even a year after i started using them, the first tube started acting strange; one of the three rows of a total of 342 LEDs wasn’t burning anymore. Next day, the second row of 114 LED’s stopped burning. Guess what happened the day after that… a rough calculation tells me this tube has done its job for 360 x 5 = 1800 hours. Multiplying by 10 doesn’t even come close to what is advertised!

So i called the supplier for replacement tubes.

LED tube, "version 2"

He promised me he would send me 2 new tubes, although he warned me in advance that it could take some time.. OK, i wasn’t in a hurry for replacement cause one tube was still working. But in the 2nd week of January i called again  to ask why it took so long for my LED tubes to arrive? The result was a very interesting conversation and i was given a bit of insight on how the LED market is working nowadays.

For example, i was told that the supplier had experienced a huge amount of failing LED light products being returned, especially during the hot summer of 2009. Bad design led to massive overheating of LED tubes and other LED products, causing lots and lots of  malfunctions..

Another thing the supplier told me, is that they had stopped selling most of the brands and had now limited their product range to only the high end segment; only those (with an equally high price tag) products could possibly live up to the life expectations that are so strongly advertised. Between the lines, you could read that his business had been seriously threatened by all the problems they faced with LED products in 2009. Quite a story for a normal ‘consumer’ like me who likes to try out new products, technologies and gather experiences with those products.

In my opinion, LED is hugely overrated in specifications, lifetime expectation and savings. I’ve bought at least 10 LED bulbs in the past year of which 3 stopped working in their first days. That’s 25-30%! within a week.  Needless to say i have very big doubts about the quality of the current LED technology.

And what will happen when my newly placed LED tubes stop working again in, say, 6 years? Will those tubes be replaced again, at no charge? Guess not.

No, for me LED is a nice product for the manufacturers, who don’t fully control the process of producing a good LED product yet but don’t mind making big money with it already, letting the customers pay 80 Euro for a single LED tube and delivering garbage.

And for politicians, who are encouraging the use of LED to show off how ‘green’ they are, while believing the LED producers on their blue eyes regarding to the quality of LED products. I wonder how much of them are actually using LED products themselves.

Me? I’ve learned my lesson and will not buy any LED product until my box of spare energy saving lamps is completely empty.

Yesterday our old and broken freezer was replaced by a new A++ class freezer, a Liebherr GP1466-22.

While hunting down the large power consumers in our house, i found out that our old freezer had a defective thermostat. It was constantly freezing, 24 hours a day! Something had to be done about that, since constantly cosuming 65-70W is way to much! Now that the new freezer has been working for 30 hours or so, i can see it has an average power usage of 16.5W. That’s 145 kWh per year, where the old freezer used 587 kWh. That’s another 440 kWh saved on a yearly basis…

Now i wonder how the manufacturer has come to the advertised 135 kWh…

While doing all kinds of things to reduce power usage in our house (very good to combine with Domotica), i realised it was time to do something about those fluorescent tubes in my office.
There are 2 lighting fittings above my head, each one of them having 2 (120 cm) fluorescent light tubes of 36W. That’s quite a lot of light, but also Watt.
First thing i did was reduce the amount of tubes to 2. This still gave me enough light; but still i wasn’t satisfied and was looking for a way to reduce power usage further.
So i started looking for a way to replace these TL tubes with a LED version. After searching some websites that have lots of information about LED lights (like www.olino.org), i found these tubes.

Power consumption of these tubes is 15W, and they can operate without a ballast. If you’ve ever felt how hot a ballast can become, you’ll understand what waste of energy this is.

I decided to buy 2 of these tubes and yesterday they arrived:

Because i have to modify the fittings a bit (removing the ballast and rearrange the wiring inside), i have to wait untill next weekend before i can start replacing the tubes with their LED version since that’s the first time i’ll be home during daytime…

I hope that replacing the TL tubes with LED tubes will also reduce the noise i am experiencing from the TL tubes. That would be a nice advantage; this will save me a few X10 noise filters. And i’ll get rid of the sometimes very annoying time the TL tubes need to start giving light.

We’ll see what happens.

I purchased Chartdirector recently. Not being satisfied with the charting software i used so far, i decided to go for this product after trying several others. I think i made the right choice

While moving to Chartdirector, i read all kinds of stuff about clickable charts, a feature i couldn’t use before. This could be a really good opportunity to try and do something about not being able to keep track of detailed information on data that was getting “old”. So i decided to create a page with 4 clickable charts to get from a year-based chart down to an hour-based chart:

Clicking on one of the bars above will instantly update a chart that displays the data for all the months in the selected year.

Clicking on one of the bars of the chart above, will instantly update a chart that displays the data for all the days in the selected month.

Clicking on one of the bars above will instantly update a chart that displays the data for all the hours in the selected day.

And that is where it ends, gas usage information is stored on an hourly basis, so here you are at the level at which the information is stored, just with 3 clicks…

After some problems with the NIC driver, my Windows Server 2008 is running fine.

With all the BSOD’s i had in the beginning, the index was below 5.00 at some point. But since i replaced the NIC driver, the Sysytem Stability Chart is rising steadily.

No problems whatsoever, everything is working very stable. The only disadvantage of working with 5 virtual machines on Hyper-V is that when you have to install updates on the host that require a reboot, all VMs have to be restarted. Besides that, i can only see benefits of working this way.

Yesterday we got a letter from the company that does the maintenance of our central heating. It said our current central heating was to vulnerable to failures and we were offered an upgrade to a newer central heating at a reduced price. Well, it is true that our central heating has caused us a lot of trouble through the 10 years that we live here. So i understand the reason why they want us to upgrade to a newer model from a different brand. But i’ve got my own wishes…
Our new central heating should be controlled by means of the Opentherm protocol for instance, so that i can ‘tap’ the communication between central heating and the thermostat and incorporate the data that i can get out of that, into my Domotica System. And i’ve made my choice: our new central heating will be a Remeha Avanta, controlled by a Remeha Celsia 20, including a so-called gateway for attaching a RS-232 cable to it and tap the communication.