Ben Shephard

Since I’ve switched my energy supplier to First Utility the other week I’ve been wondering where and how I can cut back my energy usage. One of the things I’ve always wondered about is how much energy I use hosting my own website. I have a spare room that I have as a study and I keep my computers in there quietly humming away 24/7. A few years ago I bought a plug in energy meter from Maplin. It was in the sale and I thought it might open my eyes as to how much power I use and where.

Plug in Power Meter

I’ve Left it plugged in the the computer room for ages but I tend to forget it’s there and not look at it before I pull the plug out to move something or there’s a power cut and all my recorded data is lost.

I decided today to see what it had recorded since I last moved the room around about a month ago. It told me it had been running for 836 hours and in that time my kit had used 113 kWh of electricity. This works out at an annual average of 1184 kWh. My total electricity consumption for 2009 was 3627 kWh so hosting my own web site accounts for just under a third of my total electricity consumption. That does seem like rather a lot but what I want to know is would it be worth turning it off and investing in other ways of hosting my stuff such as a VPS. I worked out the cost based on First Utility’s prices which they emailed to me earlier in the week which at the moment is 8.064 pence per kWh so the cost of running my kit for the year works out at £95.48. This pails in to insignificance compared to the cost of my internet connection which is £22.43 a month plus £11 line rental for a PSTN phone line I don’t want. I wish they would just provide the broadband over the line on it’s own but it seems that isn’t possible. This means I spend £401.16 a year on my broadband connection so in total I spend £496.64 a year so now I need to work out what’s cheaper. I worked out my CO2 foot print using the on-line calculator on the National Energy Foundation’s website (click here) which tells me that my kit produces 640 Kg of CO2 every year. Using this I was also able to work out my CO2 footprint for the whole of 2009 which was about 9.25 tonnes over the whole year. This doesn’t include any CO2 produced at work and is just my own personal domestic output. This consists of Electricty 1950 Kg, Gas 3340 Kg and Petrol 1612 Kg but one of the biggest and easiest to solve was the  CO2 produced by my trip to the USA last year which came in at 2393 Kg. I had a miserable time there and it cost me and the environment a small fortune so to save my sanity and the planet I’ll not be going back there again unless I find a really good reason to do so.

So of all the things I can do to help save the planet the best one is to not go on long distance holidays but what else can I do?

If I did move my server to a VPS or some other hosted solution the carbon footprint wouldn’t go away it would just be shifted elsewhere and hidden from me. It may be reduced considerably depending on which option I went for but the trade off is that it would be less exciting for me as a hobby because I like looking after the hardware as well as the software that runs on it as I learn a hell of a lot from it also I don’t think the costs would be significantly less for it to be worthwhile from the adverts I’ve seen. I may be able to make things better by using a less powerful or more economical machine to host things on. Perhaps moving things on to my old laptop would help me save a fairly significant amount.

So my hobby accounts for a third of my electricity usage but what’s the other two thirds made up of I’m wondering. One I can have a pretty good guess at. My shower is a 9 Kw electric shower so for every 20 mins in the shower I’ve used another 3 kWh of electric so that must account for about another 3rd. It’s hard to work out if it’s cheaper to have a bath because gas is harder to measure in the same was I can electric. I suppose solar water heating might help cut down on my water heating costs but the outlay to have something like that installed would be prohibitively expensive. I suppose an interest free loan from the government might help uptake of technology like this but I still don’t think it would give me a nice hot shower first thing tomorrow morning when I get up for work. I’ve cleaned the windows today and I just realised I left the step ladder out with the sponge on the top rung and it had froze to the ladders. Solar is all good if you get lots of sunlight which of course anywhere in the world at night you don’t get any at all so without some really well insulated tanks you wouldn’t be having a hot shower before work. In the day if you get lots of sun then solar is all good but I live in the UK and the only sun that comes out every day without fail in this country is a tabloid newspaper. I suppose the other third would be just general stuff like the kitchen appliances and lighting. Lighting is an area where there is always room for improvement. I use low energy fluorescent lamps all through the house but I think this can be reduced further by using more LED lighting. I bought a set of 120 LED fairy lights for Christmas but I decided to keep them up all year round in my bedroom. They are a nice low level light and only use 3 watts of power. I’d like to get some more LED’s so that I could better light some of the gloomier parts of my house with a minimal impact on my electric bill and perhaps replace some of the fluorescent lamps with LED alternatives if I can.

Other areas I could cut down on are heating by installing more insulation. I don’t know if my walls can be insulated as this house is pretty old but it would be nice if someone who knew about those things told me what was possible with this house. I’ve insulated the loft but perhaps more could be done up there. I’ve got new modern energy efficient windows already so I’m struggling to find other things I can do to the house to keep the heat in.

I could drive a more economical car but the one I have isn’t exactly a gas guzzler and it suits my needs pretty well. I’m quiet a big chap and tend to carry tools and my netbook with me everywhere so a smart car might not be so good for me.

One of the biggest energy using items in my house is the washing machine. I know it’s no turned on all the time but changing habits in how I clean my clothes may make a difference. I just bought a new washer dryer but I try not to use the dryer if I can avoid it. I’ve just measured the energy used by washing my bedding and a few towels. The wash cycle used 0.85 kWh and drying the bedding on it’s own for an hour used 0.93 kWh so drying my laundry on the washing line on a nice day or on the clothes horse in the house could make a tiny dent in my energy consumption but I put the dryer on so I can get it straight back on the bed before I go to sleep tonight.

I think looking at my life style the biggest savings could be made with better switching of my heating. It’s on a timer and thermostat with a manual switch at the top of the stairs. This is all good if your home and want to turn things on or off but the timer puts it on at 5:30pm every day regardless but sometimes I don’t finish work untill late or I go to my parents for dinner so the heating being on then when I’m not home is just wasted because I’m not home to feel the benefit. I really want to come up with a way of remotely controling this stuff from my smart phone that way I can turn the heating on just before I head home so the house is warming up as I drive back and things are only on for the bare minimum.

Anyway for now I’ll be off to bed to dream up how I’m going to achieve this and hopefully some kind of micro generation project too

later

Ben

= 5.5

This week hasn’t been a good week at all. My relationship with Janine came to an end this week and it’s left me feeling pretty empty. I really liked her and hoped she would be “the one” but sadly not. I’m a person who always likes to have an idea where I’m going in life but Janine never seemed to want to look that far ahead and over time things just seemed less and less likely to work out between us. Everything came to an end quiet suddenly when I spoke my mind on a few of my worries. It feels a bit strange that just two weeks ago we were happily celebrating valentines day and today we can’t even talk to each other. I’m going to miss her and the kids and all of her family and friends whom I’ve come to know quiet well to say we’ve only been together a few months. I’ve spent the weekend cleaning and tidying and working on the computer while I try and work out what to do with the great gaping hole in my life. I think I’m going to sit back down at the computer for a few weeks and work on a few projects I’ve been thinking about. I’ve spent this afternoon creating a fancy USB tool kit that boots all my favourite partitioning and drive imaging tools. So far I’ve got Super Grub, Clonezilla, Parted Magic, BackTrack 3 and Darik’s boot and nuke all booting off a single 4GB USB stick with a customised syslinux boot loader. I’ve never played with syslinux before so it was nice to get to grips with something new. I just want to get Ubuntu on there next then I’m done.

Ben

= 3.5

Once again it’s been ages since I’ve written anything. It’s not that there hasn’t been anything happening worth writing about because there has but I’ve been spending lots of time doing other things. I’ve spent most of my spare time with Janine over the last few months but we’ve not been getting on so well recently and I’m a bit worried about all that but I don’t want to go into detail about it here. I’ve also been getting pretty worried about my finances. I had a pretty bad Christmas and had lots of time off work ill which is rare for me but that resulted in a very low January pay slip since I don’t get sick pay. Also my fridge broke down and I needed four new tyres on on the car and also had to pay for my car insurance which was extra this year since I added Janine as a named driver. All of this plus a pretty expensive Christmas has left my bank account a little worse for wear. It’s not been as empty as it is now for over ten years which is worrying because I’m barely earning more than I’m spending.

All of this had lead me to try to rethink some of my purchasing decisions.

I’m still paying for my car which is something I can’t do a great deal about. I could empty my savings and pay it off but then I’ve got nothing to fall back on should things suddenly get any harder. I don’t think I’ll ever want to borrow money again. It’s like having a ball and chain attached to my leg but once it’s all paid off I’ll be able to chill out a bit more.

One thing I’m constantly looking at is my energy spending. My gas and electricity bills are pretty high so I decided to get my bill recalculated. I’m in credit with my supplier but they won’t return the balance because aparantly with Direct Debit the deal is your supposed to pay up front before you use the energy. Thats a new one on me and I felt like they were just making excuses. They lied to me to get my custom and told me they would be cheaper. I’d worked out my electricity consumption and that worked out right. My gas consumption was a little harder to work out and I just couldn’t quiet get my head around the math. I don’t understand why my gas would have a different calorific value than anyone elses and the imperial to metric conversions don’t seem to tally to me. My meter measures in cubic feet yet I’m charged in Kilowatts. I decided to have a look at Uswitch and compare the offerings from elsewhere. Top of the list as cheapest came a company I’d not heard much about before but they were about two thirds the price I’m currently paying. They were First Utility and their offering looks pretty good. Not only are they cheap but they are the only UK supplier currently rolling out free smart meters which constantly update your account with correct readings by GPRS so no more estimated bills. Also this can tie in with Google Energy Meter which is an I-Google app that graphs your energy usage so that you can tell exactly what you use and when. I like that kind of thing and I think it will come in very handy to help me cut down on wastage. Also I’d like to be able to control certain aspects of my house by remote control such as the heating. Sometimes I’m late leaving work so the heating being on at home then is all wasted energy. If i had a control unit that either had it’s own web interface or could hack something together with something like an Arduino I could get greater control over my energy usage and I think with something like that I could cut my gas usage by a third or more. If I could control my lights in a similar way I could improve my security by controlling lights on the fly when I’m away from the house from my G1 but that would require quiet a bit of wiring and could get pricey and I don’t have a great deal of budget right now.

One of my other areas for improvement is my communications bills. I pay quiet a bit for my mobile phone but that said I do use it a great deal and I’m tied into a contract for most of this year now. My broadband is an area I want to look at. I’m currently with Pipex business / Opal and for what you get it’s very pricey. It’s an ADSL line so a maximum speed of 8Mb which is slow by today’s standards. Also I have to have a phone line which I neither want or need and that costs me £132 a year. I do get a static IP address which I find very handy what with running all the websites I host. I did look at other ways to do what I do now with a dynamic domestic broadband account but I can’t really find a suitable solution that does everything I want it to. Business broadband is way over priced for what is is and so far I’ve found the performance to be pretty poor in comparison to previous domestic suppliers. I currently get about 4-5 Mb out of my line and for the same price with a domestic virgin media line I could get 50Mb but that said I’ve been with Virgin before and their customer service sucks. It’s hard to find a good compromise but I think I’ll be shopping around again for the next few months to see what I can get.

On another Internet related matter my site has been down quiet a bit recently and I think this may be down to a faulty router. I swapped out my ADSL router for one I borrowed from work. An old DrayTek Vigor 2600i I’ve not had any outages since but I’m going to give it a few days and swap them back and see if the problem comes back. If so it looks like I’ll have to invest in a new modem / router at some point this year. I’ve also got  a secondary router in my bedroom acting as an extra wireless AP since the signal is pretty weak at the far end of my house but that seems to be on it’s way out too as the wireless keeps dying on me. The DrayTek isn’t wireless so without that I’m tied to the wall all the time now. I may well invest in a decent wireless router and separate network modem if I have to replace them. I’ve wanted a Linksys WRT54GL for a long time as that model can run third party firmwares quiet nicely which come with lots of added features. Also rather than having the extra AP in my bedroom I think I’d go for some meaty high gain antennae and stick with just the one box.

I need to get my spending sorted out and apart from that I’m doing all the other obvious things like cutting back my food budget. I need to lose some weight anyway. I’m also going to try and stop using the car quiet so much because the price of petrol is on the rise again so as the weather improves I’ll try and get out on my feet a bit more and walk places. The best way I find to do this is to walk to the pub because then I don’t waste money on over priced soft drinks and I get some exorcise plus I can spend the petrol money on more beer.

The other factor I’m looking at is my income. I’ve started STS and I’m trying to get my name out there as much as I can but so far I’ve not had any paying customers but there is time yet. I’m also looking around for alternative employment but the economy being the way it is things are pretty limited. I think it will be the same for STS as well because if people in general don’t have much money then they might not see getting the computer fixed as priority right now. But on the flip side of the coin it may be that people are trying to prolong the life of their machines and would like help with upgrades. I’m hoping things take off eventually because I really admire my friends who work for themselves. I  still think it takes a lot of guts to give up your day job but time will tell.

I’m hoping I can sort a lot of this stuff out by the end of the year and become a bit better off but as for the other things in my life right now everything feels a bit uncertain. I’m trying to put things to the back of my mind a bit and concentrate on the stuff I can work on easily as once I’m financially secure I’ll be able to breathe a bit more and hopefully be a bit more relaxed. Relationships can be a roller-coaster ride at the best of times but when the rest of my life feels like it’s falling apart around me it’s difficult to just chill out and get on with life.

Hopefully I’ll be back again soon with something more exciting to write about. The release of Ubuntu 10.04 is just around the corner now so hopefully I’ll have some nice things to say about that. I’ve tried the alpha so far and when running from a live USB stick I didn’t notice any power problems which really killed 9.10 for me on both my laptop and netbook. but I’ve still got some work to do on that. I just don’t want to wipe out my perfectly usable 9.04 install to do it and then have to go back and re install again. I’ve been without my netbook for long enough this winter and it felt like I was missing a limb or something but my G1 running CyanogenMod helped ease the pain somewhat.

Later

Ben

= 4.5

It’s been a good few weeks since I last managed to write a post because things have been getting a bit on top of me just recently. There has been lots of good and bad things happening that have managed to keep me off here.

I suppose the biggest thing to happen over the last few weeks has been my decision to go a bit further with the idea of setting up my own business. I bought a domain name a few months ago but never did anything with it but now I’ve got my site set up and something half decent on it. It’s a brief description of the kind of services I can provide along with a contact page. You can find it at http://sts-it.co.uk I’ve also had a batch of 500 business cards printed up to hand out and I’ve been doing as much work as I can for family and friends to try and spread the word.

Setting up the website and back end software to organise myself and any work I get has posed me with a few new technical challenges. I wanted my emails to go into a ticketing system so that I can manage my time better and keep a track of indavidual jobs easily. I already use software like this in my day job and although it’s neither open source or the most reliable of applications it’s free for single users and the biggest advantage is that I already know where everything is and I’m used to it’s quirks so I decided I’d go with the same for STS. I’m using Service Desk Plus by Manage Engine. It’s pretty easy to set up on a Linux box and it sets up everything it needs including a web server and My-SQL database. The downside of this is that if you are already running on a machine with a My-SQL server on it they tend to conflict as they both run on the same port number. I decided I’d like to keep ServiceDesk reasonably seperate from my main box but I didn’t want to have to run two machines because electricity costs money. I set up an Ubuntu machine in Virtual Box and installed ServiceDesk on that only to realise it wouldn’t talk to my mail server. I had to think this one over for a few days but eventually came up with a solution by setting up Postfix, Dovecot and Fetchmail on the VM and used that to get mail in and out of ServiceDesk. It’s become a pretty complicated set up but it’s working nicely for me now.

I’ve also revisited some old problems with my CCTV and managed to get that back up and running. My Live Video page has now made a return and people can once again watch for me putting the bin out and all that exciting stuff. I thought the problems I encountered were due to changes in the way Ubuntu 9.10 handeled video but it turned out that I just needed to specify a few extra options in VLC to get the image working properly. I’d tried all sorts of things to get it going again even reinstalling the older version of VLC from source which proved to be a learning curve. I’m just happy I didn’t manage to do any damage since I was doing all this on a live machine that already does tonnes of other stuff which I didn’t want to break. The problem with running everything on one machine is that all the eggs are in one basket and if that dies I’m pretty screwed. I make regular backups to a remote location but if my machine died and I had to build another from scratch it would be expensive and time consuming but then if I had the money for more hardware now I’d already have it running so I’ve got no choice. I did see a nice upgrade kit the other day that consisted of case and motherboard with an Intel i7 processor and 6GB of memory. My processor loads are pretty low on my current machine (Intel Core2 Duo 1.8GHz) but It’s the memory that’s a killer because the motherboard will only take 2GB which I’m already up to. Ideally I’d like atleast another 2GB so I can play with more VM’s without running out but sadly that’s a no go without a new moterboard and even case upgrade (since the current one is BTX form factor).

Hopefully I can make enough money out of STS over the next year to be able to get that upgrade

Aside form my personal projects things with Janine and the kids seem to be going pretty well. I’ve taken Janine out on a couple of driving lessons and she’s starting to get the hang of it. It’s a strange thing for me teaching someone else to drive because there is a lot to think about but we’re going out on quiet roads with plenty of room so we can both get used to things together. It certainly feels strange to be sat in the passenger seat of my own car but it’s an enjoyable experience. Things seem to be going really well in that respect and I think we’ve managed to calm down a bit after the initial excitement of getting together and being together is becoming normal but we do miss one another when we can’t be around.

On a less than happy note nothing seems to be changing for the better at work and I awoke this morning and by chance hapened to spot a small brown patch on my blue bedroom carpet under the radiator. Closer inspection revealed the radiator was leaking slowly so I put a loaf tin under it catch the drips but I’ve got a bit of a plumbing job lined up for the weekend now. Life can’t all be a bed of roses I suppose but hey ho tomorrow is another day. and speaking of which it’s time I wasn’t here.

Later

Ben

= 6.2

It’s recently come to my attention that I’ve not been acting myself again since the new year. I know what the root cause of this was but it wasn’t until Janine pointed it out yesterday that I realised I have a problem with anxiety. I’ve had to stay at home on my own today because I needed to think things through and do some reading and quiet a few pennies have started to drop today. The situation I’ve been in since the new year isn’t something I’ve experienced before and it’s not really something I can talk about easily on here so I’m going to go with the ones I can talk about openly and have had lots of experience of before which is social anxiety and phobia.

last year I made a new years resolution which I wrote about on here and part of that was to start attending Linux user group (LUG) meetings. There are Linux user groups all over the world which are just groups of people with a common interest in Linux and open source software who meet up maybe once a month to socialise and talk about their common interest. There is a LUG in most towns and cities and around here there is one in Mansfield and one in Nottingham. I never did find the courage to go along though because I felt frightened of meeting new people. This is a pretty recent example but going back I remember when I used to be frightened of just going shopping for groceries. I hated it and when I went to the supermarket I’d keep my head down and not look at anyone and try not to talk to anyone if I could avoid it. One of the things that used to scare me the most about shopping was bumping into people I haven’t seen for years because I felt awkward and never knew what to say. Even if I’d bump into someone from work who I spent every day with and knew really well I’d panic because I was in unfamiliar surroundings and never know what to say to them.

Going back even further I remember not being able to talk to certain people whom I felt uneasy around for various reasons. One was a director at a company I used to work for who would say good morning to me in passing in the corridor and my reply would just come out completely garbled which at the time I didn’t understand why. On several occasions I was completely unable to speak to him. He must have thought he’d hired a right nutter

On another occasion my sister took me to a Slimming World meeting which she went to quiet regularly as she thought it might help me lose weight but once I got there and was sat in a big circle with everyone else I panicked and by the end of it I decided not to go again which I don’t think my sister was very impressed about but I was too scared of being in that kind of social situation again.

I’ve found this condition pretty easy to live with because most things I can run away from quiet easily. My life has changed somewhat since meeting Janine and I have come to realise that this kind of thing might prove more of a problem for me since there are all kinds of new situations that I’m being thrown head on into which is no bad thing. It’s my choice to do this but relationships aren’t easy and some times there are things that could cause me problems such as meeting the family which I think I’ve dealt with surprisingly well given the problems I’ve had in the past. Now I’ve realised this is an issue I need to try to improve things but the question is how to go about it. I think if I go to the doctors they will probably prescribe me a course of mind altering drugs of the kind I’ve had before for depression but I know from experience these things can be addictive and can cause more problems than they solve. I’ve asked my doctors advice in herbal treatments before but doctors it seems don’t study or have any interest in herbal and potentially much less dangerous medicines. My doctor told me I should go to a shop that specialises in such remedies and ask them as they would know more they him. This is perhaps a problem with modern medical practice. Herbal remedies have been used for thousands of years and there seems to be little understanding of their effectiveness compared to commercial alternatives. I think is because there is less money in herbal medicine so all the studies are conducted with commercial drugs and the companies that produce those are good at marketing them regardless of how good they are compared to herbal alternatives.

The other options out there are things such as cognitive behavioural therapy but I’m unsure how that would work at the moment but it’s something I need to look at. I’d prefer to try and deal with this without outside help if I can so I might invest in some self help books or something.

It would be nice to hear from others who suffer with similar issues or those who have seen me in such a situation before or even anyone who has something to say on this subject. Feel free to drop a comment on this post or email me via my contact page or what ever.

Ben

= 5.6