Re: Product idea

On 2/18/2025 6:18 AM, Carlos E.R. wrote:

Houses, here, use forced air HVAC (for the most part).
But, virtually all are built on slabs and are devoid of
(distributed) return air ductwork ("Supply" is high;
"Return" is omitted).
>
So, open room doors are the primary means of recovering
air from those rooms.  CLOSE a door and you seriously
impede air flow IN and OUT of said room.

>
Is that Canada? Because I have seen that in Ottawa. Originally for heating, later AC added.

>
No, I'm in the southwestern US.  "Building" (construction) conventions
are very different, here.  Everything is "fast and loose".
>
E.g., roads, here, are asphalt on top of hard-pan.  No sub-base
for drainage, etc.  Cheap (low quality) windows, doors, etc.
Doesn't matter how much the house costs (we have friends in
multimillion dollar homes -- that set out BUCKETS each time
it rains!), it's just a different mindset.

 Yes. And when comes a hurricane, it levels everything flat. Over there you build with wood (and can have disastrous fires). Over here, it is all concrete and bricks.

Most homes, here, are some form of masonry.  Even wood framed homes
are stucco-over-wood.

Mind, I had water leaks on my roof. I don't have the skill set to go up there (plus I am afraid of heights), so had some men come. Basically what they did was rearrange the ceramic tiles properly leaving no holes. Finding men with that skill is not easy, I was lucky.

Roofs, here, are notorious for developing leaks.  I think the only
technology that *may* be immune is tin/copper/metal (assuming installed
correctly).
The biggest problem is the perforations through the roof that are
part of the construction.  E.g., combustion reliefs for the furnace
and water heater, vents for the waste water lines, venting for the
"attic/ceiling space", etc.
Even clay tile is not immune as the structures "move" with the
temperature changes.  And, blown rain that defies natural gravitational
flow (if you protect vents from above, there is nothing to stop
water infiltration from the *sides*)

I had a gadget to actually measure the power consumed at a socket, but it broke. Like if its internal software got corrupted. I should get another one day, and find out what my computer socket takes.

>
I have a "Watts Up" but it is really just a novelty item.
I can plug the refrigerator into it and let it "watch" for
a week to summarize energy usage.  But, the label on the
front of the refrigerator already told us what the appliance
is EXPECTED to cost to operate over the course of a year.

 Yes. It sums usage each day, max/min, power factor, etc, in a tiny display.

Exactly.  But, only for the load it monitors.  E.g., it's
hard to look at an entire branch circuit.
My UPSs monitor these things so I have them report the load
conditions for *those* individual loads.  A display also lets
me see the data so I can manually manage my loads (soas not
to overload the branch circuit)

Having all those devices "sleeping" (1W or less??) vs.
trying to eliminate those loads by ADDING more switched
outlets?  Is it worth the hassle to switch the monitors
OFF when the associated computer(s) are sleeping?  Or,
just let them "sleep", as well?

 Well, if I see my rack using 200 watts I will more aggressively hibernate my desktop machine when not using it.

Many of my boxes draw about that (e.g., 8 spindles).  But, I don't
leave them running -- power them up, read or write what I need
and then power back down.  E.g., I have another 99G of rainbow tables
to move into my archive, later today.  The machine that hosts them
will be running for (99GB/1Gb + 99GB/300MB) seconds -- the time to
transfer them to the archive (having first cached them on a workstation)
and then the time to verify the hashes of each file.
I let things sleep pretty quickly.  I have the "extra" spindles in
my workstations spin down after a short while (they are present
as "on-line secondary storage" -- to save me from having to
load optical media libraries).  Ditto for the monitors.  But,
if I was pinching pennies, I would move the extra HBAs and NICs
to other machines just to save those watts.  But, at the expense of
convenience (my *time* is the most precious thing).
This can be a hazzard if I am not diligent; setting up a TELNET/SSH
session and walking away often finds the session closed (by the remote
end) because the workstation decided to sleep -- unaware of the
ongoing connection.
[There are certain apps that I can open just to tickle host to
prevent this behavior]

I think I'm paying too much.

Energy tends to be pretty inexpensive, here.  Likely why we are so
wasteful of it.  *Water* tends to get far more attention as it is
a more constrained resource!