Slashdot Mirror
Use Linux to Reduce Your Power Bill
Stephen Herzog writes "Linux Devices has published an article about the AcquiSuite, a Linux based hardware device that collects and reports energy consumption information. Companies who are looking at energy management solutions need to keep the cost down in order to recover their retrofit cost with savings from the energy bill. Linux is a perfect fit for cheap data collection devices in part because "Linux provides complete TCP/IP functionality, PPP... and no royalties"."
Everybody knows that Windows machines use less power than Linux because they're not running as much.
There, I made the obligatory Slashdot 'Windows is unstable' joke. This should render the rest of the stale jokes -1, Redundant.
"Derp de derp."
We used proprietary software that cost a WHOLE lot and sold it to people for a lot. But it still saved money. Now the outfit is having to switch over to more Linux/OSS based stuff because they're running out of funding.
Except for the government clients.. they alwasy seemed to have money.
...can it also play OGG files? Hey how about doubling it as a firewall? Come on! Where's your hacker spirit?!
With the stability of Linux, I can leave my boxes on for an almost infinite length of time. So I do :). I never could do that with Windows, the machine would get all borked after only a couple of days. I guess Linux increases my power bill.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
Use Linux to Reduce Your Power Bill
You won't bathe, so there will be no need to waste power on hot water.
I save *loads* of electricity when I do a "shutdown now" on OpenBSD!
Trolling is a art,
I'm reading the article and thinking "Wouldn't it be more effective to just turn the damn thing off?"
:)
-Yes, this IS a joke.
If a man's character is to be abused there's nobody like a relative to do the business. -Thackeray, William
"Use Linux to Reduce Your Chances of Contracting Sexually Transmitted Diseases"
That's right, act now and no female will want to get within 100 feet of you!
Christ, any other trivial fucking benefits we can wow potential users with?
Use Linux to Reduce Bill(s) Power.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
kill a watt meter does this too.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
to monitor water usage. It is actually kind of cool from my geek perspective. You get a bill for utilities from a company in Texas which is where the data is aggregated.
At first when I saw the box and I didn't know what it was so I called the phone number and asked what it was and they said oh it is an embedded machine to remotely monitor your water usage. I guess I got a tech/service operator because they were very knowledgable and said it uses embedded linux and want on to explain how it works (in general terms). The rep said the only presence they have in Seattle is for a technician for service related calls.
You could easily imagine running a utility company on a skeleton crew with only a strong capital investment on the onset. Makes you think.
Surely you weren't referring to AMD's Athlon processor, were you?
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
We had an improperly-vented Athlon machine running Windows that was fine (as much as could be expected). We installed RedHat 7.2 on it and redeployed it as a server, and the CPU melted. Apparently, Windows was under-utilizing the CPU.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
We call the power company, and they give us detailed reports on how much power each site is using, and day-by-day breakdowns, comparisons with last year...
If you want to reduce power usage, would you want to use an Intel x86 chip in that goal? Wouldn't a PPC Linux be more power efficient? I am sure others can bring up other lower power consuming chips that have Linux ports than Intel's power hungry beast.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Rearrange the words and now it makes sense.
Using Linux itself has just saved me money in my time. "It just works". Make a change, reboot, make a change, reboot, reboot? Never. Mysterious crashes? Long gone.
:) that the lights turn on automatically (sensored to X10) and the Linux box sees this (and the time) and dims the lights automatically for me. HHmmm, this saves power too!
I've also always had I believe a CM11a plugged into one of the serial ports. It's called X10 and allows signalling to take place over the electrical lines.
Linux takes care of outside lighting, HV/AC, and a host of other operations for me around the house. Add in a RF remote and all of a sudden you can control/dim the lights throughout the house with X10 and the remote in your hand (Linux does nothing here).
Can Windows control the lights? Of course, but I've never seen a Windows box "just work" with no human intervention for years on end.
I like the fact that when I walk into the bathroom at 2am (for obvious reasons
Your father doesn't know what he's talking about. Power quality is a MAJOR issue. Any place with large amounts of inductive loads (ie fluorescent lights, motors, etc) can easily triple their electrical bill by not having a good power factor. It is standard practice for electrical companies to charge extra if your power factor is bad as well. What he may be referring to is heaters. A heater is not an inductive load, so it will already have a power factor close to unity. However, in a large building with lots of motors/fans/air conditioning, power factor is a very important consideration. And if you get into an industrial setting, you would have to be completely insane not to care about power quality.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
I've already worked with two companies doing almost exactly the same thing.Check these out:
www.enflex.net/products/mg-200.htmlwww.envenergy.com/products/medhardware.shtml
Both are embedded linux systems for building automation, power consumtion monitoring, and providing information about the monitored systems over the internet.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
But linux is also proven to reduce your processor heat as well. Its called two little assembaly opcodes that Linux uses.
EI
Halt
This two little commands enable all interupts and then halt the processor (in that order). So while the box is doing nothing, the processor is also doing nothing, excepting waiting on some interupts to go back to work. Because the processor has halted and is doing absolutely nothing, it has time to cool down.
Windows, as far as I know, does not implement these opcodes, and I don't know excatly how they could get away with it. I guess that is how processors burn up. Maybe these opcodes help in the deduction of your power billsince the processor is no longer "active".
All opcodes are for the Z80, I do not know if they are the same for the x86 processors as well, but the theory is the same.
Radio Shack has one here
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Especially for retrofit situations? All outlets can be X-10 managed, but this doesn't say anything about actual power consumption. I'd like something at my breaker box to measure the actual Kilowatt usage on the different circuits. Also it needs to be something passive, so if the computer goes down the system still needs to work perfectly (and then can poll the devices when it comes back up).
For CMOS devices, the power consumed is proportional the TOGGLING of GATE STATES NOT the length of time that the device is energized.
From a processor viewpoint, just saying the Linux consumes more power because the machine in on more misses an important effeciency of Linux.
For friend of mine measured the CPU temperature for both Linux and Windows on the same machine.
Linux ran at about 78F degrees. Windows ran at about 92F degrees. Same tasks for both.
Hotter chip means more energy consumed and shorter chip life.
Linux should get credit for measurebly more effecient use of cpu gates.
--Hopscotch
And I use Linux all the time.
In fact, all our web-based energy visualisation products were developed and run on Linux, and the 3D energy visualisation work I do on this in my spare time:
screenshot
is also developed and run on Linux.
The devices we use to interface ethernet with meters are too lightweight to run linux, they simply provide a TCP-IP -> serial connection for the meter's RS-232/422 interface and an ethernet port for connection to a LAN.
Many meters only support pulse-output, which does require a device such as this to count pulses, convert them to kWh or other relevant measurement, buffer these readings for some period and provide a interface for this data to be extracted, which is what this device is.
It is nice to see multiple inputs for temperature etc, as energy consumption data alone often does not provide enough of a picture to make decisions that can really cut your energy peaks or identify areas of inefficiency.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I don't know which is less interesting; that somebody makes electricity monitoring equipment that runs Linux, or that somebody managed to exchange a drive on his Mac.
Please put up something more thrilling. Otherwise I might have to return to work.
Tor
I work for a building automation systems manufacturer and have designed, built, and sold energy management/building automation systems since 1987. Your father is operating from the perspective of an HVAC mechanic and has a particularly narrow perspective on energy management in general. Yes, replacing inefficient equipment can reduce costs at apparently minimal levels. However, he likely has never worked with a BAS that was configured correctly and adequately supported by the vendor.
A properly installed and configured building automation solution will find most of the savings are in finding ways to reduce demand through scheduling, staging, load sharing, load shedding, cycling, super-cooling, and other strategies. By reducing demand, you can go to a utility and negotiate reduced rates based on staying withing certain demand levels during peak times during the day.
Simple things like making sure the lights, HVAC, and things like escalators come on at the right time in a staged order (to prevent demand spikes), and only where they are needed and are shut off when they are not in use (at night) can save a large facility literally millions every year.
Changing out HVAC equipment for more efficient equipment is a very tiny part of the puzzle.
BTW- all of the major BAS manufacturers (including my employer) have such a meter-monitoring unit, and many of them or related systems are increasingly based on embedded Linux. Meter monitoring units are useful to monitor a facility before it is put under complete control to determine where the savings can be found. Once the facility is in place, meter monitoring and associated daily reports are typically used to ensure that the system is operating properly, but in this case there is much more information available.
So to say you might only get a $200 to $500 payoff over 15 years is small potatoes compared to the potential millions you can save at a typical big-box retail, manufacturing facility, or large high school.
GTWreck
You think this is a joke but here's the proof that its true!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
It's called the Kill-A-Watt, and is available from ETA Engineering, CCrane, and Radio Shack. .
I'm not involved in this, but just bought one, and it's answered a bunch of questions about how much everything uses. Interesting!
I know Steve and the guys behind the AcquiSuite. I designed the Veris Enercept power meter that's shown on their home page. In fact, I can probably take credit for convincing them to go with Linux on x86 a few years ago (they were also seriously considering PSOS on the netsilicon ARM+ethernet hardware). I didn't actually participate in the AcquiSuite though, and I'm not affiliated with them, and I recently left Veris Industries. So take the rest of this comment with a grain of salt... I'm not totally impartial, but I do know quite a bit about the system.
The AcquiSuite is designed for use in commercial buildings and groups of buildings. It can monitor many power lines, not just one socket. The Veris Enercept meters are typically installed in the breaker boxes that feed major sections or subsystems of a building. These meters are meant for 3-phase power systems in the 20 to 2400 amp range, not single-phase 120 volt, 15 amp residential. The AcquiSuite also interfaces to temperature, humidity and other types of sensors.
There's three major factors (as I understand):
One of the key factors is cost... since this thing is supposed to save energy, it needs to be a lot less expensive that what it costs to install.
Compare to the "Kill A Watt" (which actually offers similar functionality for single-phase 120 volt as the Veris Enercept, but on a LCD instead of RS-485 network). With a simple meter like that, you can look over at it and see the power company is give the correct voltage, and how much current/power you're using at any particular time. You can see the accumulated consumption, so you could jot that number down every month and see how much the attached load cost you.
But to be useful in truely saving money, you need to log the data, collect that data, and get an analysis of that data in a timely manner.
You can go to your conventional power meter, be it the "Kill A Watt", Veris Enercpt, or the "glass meter" on the side of your house and read what it says. If you remember what it was last time to read it, say a week ago, you might say "damn, I used a lot of power this week, I'll have to try to do better next week... but how?"
Now enter the AcquiSuite (or other data logging methods): when you're wondering about your power usage, you visit a website using your browser, and in seconds you have a detailed plot showing how much power you were using throughout the day. It's similar to those bandwitch graphs from MRTG, you see a massive anamoly and say "holy sh*t, what happened the night before last that used so much power"? Or perhaps you see the longer time scale and see that something hogs lots of power every Monday morning. Or perahsp you compare graphs for similar office spaces in different buildings and see that one office uses a lot more power than the others, and perhaps only in the morning.
This is the sort of information that you really need to find where power is being wasted. And it's the timely fashion that's required to actually do something about it. You can find the janitor who didn't turn the light off, or modify a factory start-up proceedure for sequencing those machines properly on Monday morning, or fix the heating system in that one office that's using too much power.
That is what the AcquiSuite, and systems like it, are all about. They log data on a fine enough time scale from enough locations that you can (hopefully) see those unexpected events that are wasting power and costing money, and you can see them very shortly after they occur, so you can actually go do something about them.
One of the neat things about the AcquiSuite is it's ability to use the internet (linux tcp/ip stack and ppp). It can call an ISP and upload its data to a server, and as I recall it can be set to do this on a schedule with many others, so that a whole bunch of them can share just one dial-up account to send their data. I was told that a lot of people install them on their existing fax line, since it only makes calls infreqeuently and off of business hours. There were a bunch of other simple but nice features to the AcquiSuite that Steve was telling me about, but they escape me right now. Oh well.
I hope this has cleared up some of what this is all about. I know a lot of slashdotters see a product and only think of its application in a resedential application, mainly their house, appartment, dorm room, etc. This thing is targeted at commercial builds and groups of buildings.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I know a story of a company (which I can't mention due to former NDA) that used a system similar to this AcquiSuite. The guy who saw the facilities manager for a large "campus" hired a database consultant to build some scripts to automatically update a "naughty" and "nice" list of the departments who used the most and least power per square foot of their respective areas. He had it automatically send emails to the managers of any sections that wasted a lot of power relative to the other areas.
Much of their power bill turned out to be for lighting, and by the managers simply telling their people to turn the lights off, their power bill went down considerably. The peer pressure of having the departments compared to each other went a long way towards motivating and sustaining measures to save power.
So your dad may be right, or he may be wrong about HVAC, but there's a lot of ways to save power besides ripping out your furnace and cooling systems.
Just to mention another one, I know of a place where they had a large peak demand charge (power companies charge for peak usage as well as comsumed kwh on the east coast), and it turned out large machines which melted material with heaters were all "warming up" at the same time. By having the machine operator come in to work an hour earlier and turn the machines on in a sequence they saved thousands on their monthly bill. I heard a similar story of a heat-based machine that caused a large peak because whoever installed the machine went "overkill" on the number of heating elements. They just cut the wires to half the heaters, and the machine took twice as long to warm up (was on a timer anyway in that case) but didn't set a record peak and thus the power bill went way down. In both those cases, they believed their excessive peak demand bills were from actual useful work, but once detailed data was logged it turned out to be from machine startups and they saved lots of money by simply starting the machines up differently.
So you may not think it's such a great device, but there are a lot of people who've saved a lot of money simply by learning where they were really using power and making simple changes to the way they operated. They would probably not agree with you.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Its amazing what a single comma might do...
Santiago