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Need... More... Power...
MikeDawg writes "After dealing with the headache of never having enough electrical outlets, not having a cable TV coaxial, not having a telephone hookup in the right places of my apartment, I found this article at CNN. It is nice to see that college dorm rooms are getting filled with outlets to provide students with enough hook-ups with for all their electronics. My question to you (renters/dorm-room dwellers) is does your dorm room or apartment have enough outlets, whether it be electrical, cable, telephone, or anything else you may need? What do you do in a situation like this? Do you load up each socket with a 10+ port power strip (or battery backup as it may be) and pray that you don't knock-out the circuit everytime you start burning a CD?"
Remember that Slashdot story a while back, about the guy who made a fusion generator in his dorm room?
:)
He made it for fun: I NEED it
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
have you considered using a bicycle generator? i.e where you have to pedal for 5 hours a week to charge up a battery which can supply enough power for a TV for an hour or so?
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
I must say that I don't have enough power in my room. There's only one outlet here and I run a PC, (musical) keyboard, guitar effects kit, DSL modem, clock, etc etc. I have a power strip plugged into another power strip. An interesting side effect is that when I turn on my fan, my USB hub reboots.
Four screens, two boxes, wired through my stereo, cable modem, router, VCR running to one of the screens...
I just realized I'm using 3 powerstrips, and I'm probably responsible for more powerdrain in my house than every other appliance combined...
Meh.
Of Course not! I'm a geek :O)
What do you do in a situation like this? Do you load up each socket with a 10+ port power strip (or battery backup as it may be) and pray that you don't knock-out the circuit everytime you start burning a CD?
yes, of course!
Dorm rooms and small apartments don't lend themselves to large power generators. Maybe you can get a excercise bike and hook up a line! :)
One of the reasons they're doing this is that students often tend to use multiple extensions on a single outlet, which is the second leading cause of fire deaths, according to this.
In fact, the recent Moscow dorm fire that killed dozens and injured hundreds more was caused by such a fire, by a computer science student with dozens of electrical devices in his dorm. I suppose universities don't want such a thing to happen here.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/ 2001802164_dormfire27.html
In my dormroom at uu.se, I have plenty of outlets and the are situated in good places around the room, like a 4 socket outlet on the wall next to the TP.
Move sig!
You'll need a few basic tools.
Saw-zaw
Screwdriver
Wire Cutters
Electrical Tape
Cinnamon Rolls
Gloves
Using the sawzaw, carefull make an incision in a wall adjacent to the next dorm room. Put on the gloves and extremly carefully use the wire cutters, electrical tape, and cinnamon buns to wire in this "new found" power source.
You may want to use some "mud" and sheetrock to restore the wall surface to its original state.
Enjoy!
clifgriffin > blog
I "believe" that, in a campus, people shoul have thought of that, and having a powerstrip won't do much harm.
B-sides, let's do the math
Computer 250W + TV 100W + Sound Equipment 50W + Other Stuff 300W = 700W aprox 7 Amps (in 127V)
It's not going to trip anything
Unless you have an electric kettle = 2000W
Shortly after moving into this house I'm in now, I found out that the house has 2 power circuits. I've got 8 computers up and running in my office and my wife tried to warm up some food in the nuke. Next thing I know I'm staring at a blank screen. I can't wait till I own my own place...
I'm "advising" (It is illegal for an intelligent /.er to help with electrical work, but he can do it himself) a guy building his house. He suggested putting a bunch of outlets along the wall where the enertainment center obviously will go. I talked him out of it, because all that equipment should be on a surge protector anyway. Sure you can get the type that goes in the breaker box (a good idea in fact), but that doesn't stop the same level of surgers as the power strip will. At least until the power strip's protection frys. (generally one year)
However, I live in a trailer in the middle of the desert. (why? great view and it's cheap.) During the summer I can
a) run ac and cook
b) run my computer and ac
c) run my computer and cook
but not all three at the same time. (at least, not without having to take trips out to flip breaker switches).
I don't know how heavy the circuit breakers in the states generally are, but I run all my electrical devices on two breakers, both of them 16 amps, mains voltage here is 220, and I've never had a power outage.
16 amps @ 220 volts gives a power rating of 3520, a power consumation I won't ever reach with 2 computers and my lighting and stuff. The power intensive machines (washing machine, electrical oven and fridge) are on the other fuse.
If I were in america, I'd probably consider using one of the 220 volt outlets found in the kitchen, take one phase and run it to my computer room, but still, I can't imagine computer equipment and electronics tripping a circuit breaker unless it's a really low amperage.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Well, i have a grand total of 4 connectors of any sort in my room. 2 x power, 1 x phone, and 1 x lan.
the lan connection being the sole reason they are forgiven for giving me next to no power points.
i'm running my pc (and all the trimmings) on one multi plug. It hasn't gone down at all due to it's own power usage, but when when one of my flatmates hooked up a bouncy castle to his said bouncy caslte took out my pc, and everything else in the flat. *mutter grumble* he'd gone out and left his door locked so i couldn't unplug it and re set the breaker.
I've got heaps of kit all plugged into a single good ol' brittish 240V outlet. I have 2 extension leads, 3 4-way trailing sockets, a 6-way and 2 3 way adaptors. Right now I have 16 items plugged into it all. I've never blown a fuse yet, and the house seems to find enough power without any problems. I've got a circuit breaker at the socket, and it has never tripped. I can't be arsed doing the maths, but I'd be very surprised if my entire room uses as much power as a single kettle. It's all fairly low rated stuff, like TV, Tivo, hubs, 2 PCs, digibox, amp etc. I wouldn't chance plugging an electric fire in here though .
I shopped for a house with electricity in mind, and even then it was difficult. I had to get a house built in the mid eighties or later (true grounds, no aluminum wiring), and I wanted 150 amp or more service.
Even then I ended up running additional circuits to the garage for tools and lights, basesmet for tools, network, and server. The upstairs room I picked for the desktops had randomly been assigned two different circuts for the wall outlets.
I don't know what I'd do for power in a 10x15 dorm room, and probably as importantly air conditioning! Plus, at my university, I'd be afraid of the power. The u's electricians seem to have a habit of reversing hot and neutral, and in my machine room a new outlet's ground to neutral was -50 VAC. So power strips wouldn't be enough, you'd need a multimeter as well. heh.
My dorm room consists of a bedroom (with a small closet), a bathroom, and a little study room. There are 4 outlets in the bedroom, 2 in the bathroom, and 2 in the study room. However, THERE ARE 10 OUTLETS INSIDE THE CLOSET. And, no, it is not a walk-in closet. So any sparks that may fly in there are right next to that nice nylon winter jacket. It's not like THAT's a fire hazard, right?
I only had two double point outlets in my 9' X 12' room, and used two surge protected power strips to run everything (6 and 4 port).
With this, I managed to run a stereo, clock radio, fish tank, desk lights, computer, TV, VCR, powered internal aerial and PlayStation, with sufficient flexibility to be able to run a fan and other various electrical items on the spare ports. This was a pretty standard load for the rooms in the college, although some people had some fairly fancy kit setups (like major tropical fishtanks and home entertainment setups).
Of more interest is that I managed to fit all my gear into the room for three years (all clothes, toiletries, computer, books and books and books, hundreds of CD's, pictures, all notes and textbooks, software boxes, videos, playstation games, beanbag, guitar, music stand, fishtank, foldaway massage table) and still have room for the bed, desk and student chair and at least 80% of the original floor space still free of crap.
InfoSec that matters, when it counts.
Because most computer peripherals use either 5 VDC or 12 VDC, why not have a small array of 5V and 12V jacks in the back of PCs? That way, your peripherals can be powered by the PC and automatically turned off when you shut down your machine. This solution would let you dump a bunch of wall-warts and probably be more energy efficient too.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
hardly matter at all(razor, cellular charger, usb hubs, switches). you just need those extra plugs so that you don't need to be switching back and worth which device is plugged in at a time, for conviences sake.
i live in a 'cell' apartment(share the kitchen and wc with 2 other guys), and have around ~6 plugs around the room. 3 computers would go to them just fine, but switch, charger, tv, dreamcast, amplifier & etc take few sockets as well even if they don't pull all that much. none of them really take that much power though(computers maybe max 500w total if they by some streak of luck are all pulling max that they would at the same time) and i have to keep this room warm somehow don't i? the fuse isn't even near going out and all the outlets in this room are behind the same fuse anyways.
-
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I have similar problems when I host large LAN parties (IE, over 40 people at a hall). What I have found is that you can work everything out pretty well, and it will reduce problems. In Canada, the standard rating for an electrical circuit is a maximum of 10 amps. When you increase resistance in parallel, you increase the overall amperage. So, you have to watch how many computers you plug into a single circuit. It doesn't matter if it's a new SOCKET, you have to be certain that it's another CIRCUIT. In the US of A, the standard rating is 15 amps (or so I've heard) and so you can run a few more computers. Here in Canada, I find the magic number is 7 computers (that's a random survey of computers, and LANners like to have 400 watt PSUs and tricked out boxes with cold cathodes and the like). I hope that helps. :D
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
Its the amperage of the devices. Lots of dorms have one 20A breaker on a circuit that feeds all the outlets in multiple rooms. Plug in an iron and a hotplate and the breakers blow. In order to accomodate all these additional outlets the supply transformers and the electrial runs to the rooms need to be upgraded or replaced as well in addition to the panels and circuit breakers. The additional expense just isn't worth it in some buildings and Universities find it more cost effective to tear them down and start from scratch.
ES
- If I had all the money I spent on cars, I'd spend it all on cars.
In my dowm room I draw about 20A continuously, and no one notices. I have 8 power sockets (extended with UPS and 4 power strips).
:o)
However in the old rooms, the infrastructure can only handle 5A per room, and the whole flat (6 people) only gets 25A. Someone turns on a hair dryer and everything trips off
Beep beep.
I moved house a few years back, and the guy who built my current house definitely knew about the wisdom of never having too many outlets. Every single electrical outlet in the house is a double outlet, and each room has at least two of them. The kitchen, the lounge room and the game room have 3 each. They're very handy. We also have a gas outlet in each room, which we haven't used too much, but are also handy on the odd occasion we need one (useful for gas lamps during blackouts).
The two complaints I have are that there aren't enough tv aerial connections (only two in the whole house), and that there isn't cat 5/6 throughout the house.
If I had to build a house now, I would definitely recommend going overboard with the electricity, gas, aerial and cat 6 cabling. You may not use it now, but better to have too many outlets than not enough. Besides, who knows what you'll be running in a few years?
Um, to try and stay a bit more on topic, I'm surprised that this hasn't happened earlier in college dorms. Personal computers and stereos and a million other electrical goods have been around for a while now...
Nope... I have way too few outlets in my apartment.
I have one telephone outlet. In it, I have the ADSL, a phone and a wireless phone connected.
I have no grounded electrical outlets. I had an electrical shock when plugging my S-VHS cable to the GFX card (without having the computer on, but having my speakers connected and turned on).
I have four (2x2) electrical outlets. Two in the kitchen and two in the living room (both on the side opposite the computer). I have 10+ metres filled with cables for extra outlets. I think I have somewhat close to 30 units connected to one root outlet. Of course they're all on the same fuse.
I've had 3 monitors, two computers (both at 340W), one TV and the micro running at the same time. But yeah, every time I burn a CD I'm scared I have to put another random metallic object in as a fuse as the normal fuses give up.
On a side note, the TV only has one SCART outlet, but I have 4 units that all want to occupy the slot ^^.
My home has 3x48amp circuits (Europe, so 240v), so a total of 33kw consumption in the house.
I don't often get overloads.
My room comes with 8 power sockets, aerial socket (although the reception isn't great), phone socket and a 100Mbps connection to the uni network! It covers all my needs (with the use of 2 4-way strips).
Yup, I definitely pushed the limits... Thankfully they revamped the electrical system in the dorm I lived in before I moved in there. I'm one of the few people who actually took the time to map out the outlet-to-breaker-circuit mapping for the room. Hey, I had to make sure the refrigerator/microwave used a different circuit than my computers. Before I did that, I found that if I had all my monitors on (including one that was normally off), and my roommate microwaved something, the breaker tripped.
;-)
Of course, I also push the limits on how much power one uses for computer equipment. The height of my computer power draw was probably my sophomore year. At the end of that year, I borrowed an ammeter and took some measurements. One favorable thing I discovered was that most computers generally use nowhere near as much power as their power supplies are rated for. However, I still managed to max out my load at 14.5A (approx 1740W) continuous draw. Thank goodness I wasn't paying directly for that off the meter
Of course in those days I was running like 8 computers and 3 monitors. Now that I pay for my power, I have cut down a bit on the amount of 24/7 stuff I'm running, though I still manage to use quite a bit of electricity. Then again, now that I live in Florida, I'll bet that a lot of my juice goes too power the A/C.
...but hopefully the colleges are putting a little thought into their designs for the dorms. While it's true that outlets are usually in short supply, you can still be up an electrical creek without a paddle if all the outlets are on the same (underpowered) circuit.
A lot of apartments suffer from this problem as well no matter what their age... I have lived in an apartment that was over 20 years old, and it had a total of three ten-amp circuits for the entire place (not counting the circuits for the appliances which are pretty much dedicated). This was not exactly optimal for supporting five PCs and their peripherals along with a SUN Ultra 450. I've lived in newer (5 years old or so) apartments that had the exact same problem.
It's my opinion that the best thing you can do is go to Radio Shack and invest in one of those Circuit Detectives. Use that to determine what outlets correspond to which breaker, and how much power you have through that breaker (the ratings are printed on their for your sanity). Once you have that figured out you can begin learning the fine art of load-balancing on your outlets. "Let's see, I have 2 amps for my PS2 here on circuit A, and 3 amps for my TV on circuit B, and 2 amps for my PC on circuit A...."
That supports multiple devices!? Instead of an 18 inch power strip with widely separated 3 prong recepticles, an 8 inch block with 12+ single hole power plugs.
I'd even stick with one manufacturer if they offered a single power unit across their product line.
4 firewire drives from the same manufacture == 4 fscking bricks on my power strip! Makes baby jeebus cry.
Yes, it's true. This man has no dick.
Sure a spaghetti mess of powerboards and double adapter is all good and well until you blow a fuse.
Beings aspergers AND pulling chicks... I enjoy the challenge!
Please post any links you have to reasonably priced plug strips. (They are also called power strips.) I don't see why 12 outlets should cost about 2 dollars per outlet.
Note that a plug strip should have the outlet orientation that allows plugging in three outlet adapters without the adapter outlets interfering with each other.
you can always use a fuel cell and rewire the apartment.
however, hydrogen is hard to come by.
or, save up your money and go by a townhouse, or condominium, or buy a real house. one or the other.. the latter is probably the best solution
I blew a power circuit in my dorm room last week. Took out all the plugs on the left side, which I then learned were connected to each other. Also learned that my primary UPS is a bit slow to switchover..
At the time: Computer, laptop, 19 and 17 inch tubes, klipsh speakers, 200watt-second studio strobe, slave light, and rice cooker.
What's to be done? I ran an extension cable from the other side of the room. A few days later, they reset the breaker and everything worked again.
I am sooooooo clever.
Our problem isn't necessarily to few outlets, but fuse size. In the city where my fine university is located (Kalamazoo, MI), most student rental houseing qualifies as "Historic". This means that there are a lot of houses full of cloth insulated aluminum wiring attached to fuse panels and fuses with small ratings. Plus the circuits don't make a bit of sense. You blow a fuse using an outlet in a room on the back side of the house and the lights in a room on the opposite side go out, while the room right next door stays intact.
Many dorm rooms can draw only a small amount of power, no matter how many plugs you add. A TV, PC, Seperate Amp, desk light, fridge (popular beer coolant device in college) and have them all on and BOOM! You've blown the fuse for your room which most likely takes out the entire corridor/stairblock. I've experience many power outages from someone overloading the stairblock, seen cables banded between rooms via windows (aerial cables, ethernet to a single connection shared between 20 etc).
Dorm rooms were wired with only low requirements in mind. These days of consumer electronics overload capacity. RTFA etc etc etc.
Of course, I have no real use for more than one PC, so I may not qualify as much of a geek in this respect... ;)
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Power conversion should be done at a central location in the building. There should be standard 12V DC plugs and strips as well as the higher AC voltage all over the building.
Yeah right. There's 4 two socket outlets between my roommate and me, and we still need 3 power strips to power all our stuff, not counting the ridiculous thing that comes with the desk that's as wide as the desk, but only comes with 3 outlets.
- A
This summer we decided that having a 1' deep cable pile over half of my bedroom wasn't a wise idea. So we renovated the old guest bedroom into an office for me. We quickly came to the conclusion that my bedroom was about "-" that close to an electrical fire as-is, so we made sure that there was enough E running to the room for peak power demand of all the systems.
We currently have one 15-amp circuit (120) and three 20-amp (120) circuits run in here. That's about 9 kW of power if I need it. I strongly recommend with all computing projects that you never, ever, ever scrimp on your electrical budget - it will serve you well.
Oh yeah, and major points for adding a battery backup - they own.
-Jordan
Having just trodden on a standard British 13Amp plug my son thoughtfully left sitting in the middle of the room, I'm currently a little brassed off with the self righting - pins upwards - design.
But having a fuse in the plug seems like a good idea. I've never come close to blowing my ring-main's main 20Amp fuse, no matter how much I've cascaded off extension leads.
well, in my apartment I have two power outlets. Since I have about 4 running machines, a dvd set, a fridge, etc. and everything connected somehow together I have a weird hum in my speakers. That's the only thing that's distrurbing. Other things can be handled with 10+ connectors
Well, its my third and last year in a "halls of residence" of the many types there are available for students here in the Uk..All three accomodation agencies prior to renting the room promised plenty of "features" while they all had basic or crippled facilities. For example, one had a contract with a telco to provide phones operated by "pay as you go" top up cards, and no internet alternative...So i was stuck for a year with 56k over pay as you go.... fsking expensive for a student. Now, in another accom. agency, i have no broadband availability (thanx to the terms&conditions that don't allow 3rd party installations), and every time my flatmates turn on the oven my room goes pitch black...Topping that, i have to pay a fsking tv licence, although i don't own a tv(hate tv - not interactive), but there is one pre-installed in the flat...how stupid is that...Well at least i found out how useful an AOL cd can be when it comes to saving money on internet access...
Roses are red, violets are blue, most poems rhyme, but this one doesn't...
DIY is the only way to fly.
My apartment was an outbuilding with no cable TV and all underground wiring.
So, I bought a 100 foot fish tape and a roll of RG6qs. I was able to pull cable and ethernet thru 1 inch wide conduit under the parking lot to the basement of the main house.
Got my cable modem, and used the ethernet to share the Internet service back to the main building. The 4 tenants paid for my service.
Lived there for 5 years before I bought my castle.
Other projects included installing cable, phone and ethernet in every room. The landlord was psyched.
4 devices on the 1 plug plus cable tidy round the cables going to one set of devices, i.e. computer base and monitor.
http://www.standsunique.com/accessories.html
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Hey, it should be everyone's right to have a file server, workstation computer or three, television, dvd player, vcr, and don't forget that 30,000 watt stereo system, all runnin' 24-7! That's what we're paying the college for, right? I mean, if they can't handle the drain on their grid, that ain't my fault, cause I already them what they asked for, and that includes the electric bill, gosh darn it!
Hey, my 3-bedroom *house* was built in 1967. Upstairs, my computer room (one of the two larger bedrooms) and the bathroom are one circuit, 15A I believe. The other two bedrooms are another circuit.
Now, I'm smart enough to know that my computer room with 3 PC's running (and a Cisco 2924 switch, DSL modem, etc) can't do everything. So, for the most part, the three Alpha's, two HP735's, Sun E250 and A1000, SGI's, etc, all are powered off most of the time.
I plan on setting them all up in the basement, but thats worse. The "family room" (finished basement) and the garage share *one* 20A circuit. God forbid I try and run my electric welder, I pop the breaker regularly if I do that. On the bright side, running new outlets to the garage will be much easier.
I have power outlets about every 6 feet in my apartment/dorm (more of the former than the latter). Normally this would be enough, except not all my electronics are spread evenly throughout the room. For example, by my bed, I have a cellphone charger, phone, caller ID, and lamp all plugged in.
Oh yes, let's not forget my precious computer's need; however that is handled by the battery backup.
The only thing I really long for is multiple ethernet and cable jacks. Right now, I only have 1 of each and my computer and TV are confined to thier seperate corners.
desktop P4 computer with four drives
dual 17" flat CRT monitors
laser printer (the lights dim when I print stuff)
20" CRT TV
VCR
500W digital surround system
40W stereo (my alarm clock) standalone subwoofer
Xbox (I suppose it sucks about as much power as a laptop)
crappy little microwave (now that I think about it, this thing probably uses the same energy as a calculator)
dorm fridge (medium sized)
LOTS of Christmas/rope lights
two blacklights
two halogen desk lamps
two little fans (another pair, even though I am without a roommate)
phone, hub, lava lamp, chargers, external drives, other little stuff yadda yadda yadda
I've managed to ghetto-rig another two outlets out of the room's built in 60's style light fixtures through the use of light-bulb socket adapters (ungrounded of course, so they just get used for fans and of course rope lights).
Still, with my extra outlets I still only have a total of 10 - not nearly enough as to get away with plugging stuff directly into the walls. All I can do is try and distribute the load using good power strips and limiting the total of end connections on each outlet. This results in some cables reaching in strange directions, but it keeps the dorm from burning down.
Related story: another non-CS friend is known for his 6 feet long steel industrial power strip. Ridiculous but necessary.
Here in sweden/lulea, I live in a quite small apartment nearby the University. I have 6 outlets on approximately 25 square meters, but none of them are ok. instead i use the extra one under my "kitchen-sink-light" that happens to be the only one with three wires (=grounded) and from that i take all the power I need (through a large surge protector, never trust anyone) for my elecronics. Granted, I take power through the other outlets also, but the main issue here (this being slashdot) is for electronics(in one form or other). So I would say here in Sweden, atleast, the amount of outlets with three wires is limited. And that is really what you want. I seem to recall that quite many electrical appliances are out side their terms of warranty (including computers) if installed to an electrical outlet without three wires.
Porn still comes in paper form, you know.
Zing!
Well, this really isnt an issue around here.
While my dorm Room only had 3 usable power outlets i put powerstrips on all of them, one of the powerstrips had 2 monitors and 3 puters (dual athlon, p2, powerbook plus accessories (dts5.1, printer, external usb disk, regular desktop speakers, ipod, zire) hooked up to it.
Even in the case of parralel reboot (aka power outage) this didnt trigger the breakers.
In Germany the specs for how good the wiring has to be are so high its VERY unlikely youll ever manage to trigger something with regular electronics.
-- never underestimate someone who overestimates himself
I know this goes against the grain of most geeks, but how about just getting by with LESS STUFF?
Powerbook? Check.
Guitar? Check.
Library card? Check.
All the rest of the electronics can go to Goodwill.
Where I opened out the ring-main, and stuck two double sockets side by side, giving 4 points on the ring right by my desk, one feeds into a UPS which splits it 8 ways, and two more to 4-way splitters, the last one is a seperate for my lamp.
:)
Giving me 17 electrical points..., alas I'm running out
In practice you'd like a power bus fed by some big central PS that doesn't depend on the computer. This PS would provide for standby power to peripherals, like the ATX standard. Compliant peripherals would take a trickle of power from the bus during "sleep", and wake up (turn on their main power supply, reset and boot) on some electrical command. Some other command, or a sustained period of inactivity, would set them back to the sleep state.
This is pretty much what many cars have today, using the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus. CAN modules "sleep", some with their RAM powered on and all with their comm chips running, on less than a milliamp. The speed is not up to computer specs (0.5 mbit/sec or so), but the techniques could easily be adapted to something like FireWire if the will existed or one manufacturer had the pull to create a de-facto standard. With something like this you could have a "power strip" like a laptop brick, putting out 12-14 VDC for a host of peripherals and maybe the computer as well. You might not get rid of all the wires (though a combined power/data bus could do that too), but you'd certainly get rid of all the wall-warts. It would make backup pretty trivial, too (just hook in a deep-cycle battery). Who wouldn't want that?
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I'm not in school, and I own a lot less stuff than most self-proclaimed 'geeks' would find normal, however, I do have two computers and a large 1960's oscilloscope which will draw 600-700W.
I live in a crummy 100 year old apartment built in a worker-class community in Montreal. The apartments were built before electrification, so they have no provisions for outlets, and even running water is a miracle.
So when they rebuild these things, they can't wire in the walls because the walls are made of solid timber. So they slap on the drywall about 3 inches away from the main walls and ceiling, and wire everything there.
This makes it easy to add the missing phone, network and coax cable because all I need to do is remove the mouldings, whack the wires into the empty space behind the drywall, and run the wires into the different rooms.
It was pretty simple, passing from one room to the other just required drilling a largeish hole in the back of a closet to get to the other room, but the final drop into the 'hobby' room was messy, but now I have rooms with those faceplates with 6 holes that you can whack different jacks into.
2 phone jacks, ethernet jack, and coax.
So now I can connect two ends of the apartment together, and the scope is on its own breaker, with a computer and LCD monitor for the electronics hobby stuff.
What really irritates me is that most AC-DC adapters have the prongs directly on the body of the adapter and almost ALWAYS cover more than one outlet.
Oddly enough, in my apartment at UTC, we have a double outlet on its own 20 amp circuit, and three other outlets on a second 20 amp circuit in each bedroom, plus a 100 mb lan and a telephone plug in each room.
Only bad thing is there's only one cable TV jack, and it's in the living room. Easily solved with about 50 feet of coax and plenty of splitters...
I ask the landlord for permission. I pull all the cable i need. I subtract cost from rent.
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
I used to have a room full of computers. My apartment could handle it, at least after I ran CAT 5 along the walls to each of the desks, but after a while it all just got sort of silly, and I decided to start cutting back on the computer lab that was my life.
First, when a previous employer laid me off, I gave their extra computers that I had been storing (Really, we were storing equipment because the company couldn't afford storage space.) back. When I showed up with the stuff they all thought that I was nuts.
Then, I stopped doing contract work on weekends. Now I don't ever have tables covered with Sun systems laying around.
After that, I got sick of dealing with hard disk issues on the Ultra-60 I never used and sold it.
When my college-student sisters desktop started croaking, I gave her my old 700mhz Athlon machine.
After I finally gave up on trying to keep driver and Direct X versions compatible with my games, I stopped using my Windows box for anything but the occasional blackboad.com login, so it sits cold all day.
Most recently, a storm finally wiped out my poor little firewall, after four years of R2D2-like service, and I haven't fixed or replaced her yet.
So now I'm down to just using my iBook most of the time. Makes life nice and simple, and honestly, I don't really mind the silence that comes with all of those other computers being turned OFF.
Last year when I lived at UPenn's dorms, myself and 3 roommates had a suite. Each one of us had a refrigerator,tv, vcr, at least one computer (myself and another had an additional laptop), a console, a few lights, and the normal things such as alarm clocks, etc.
In addition, to share among ourselves we had a microwave, toaster, coffee maker, and a george foreman grill.
To accomodate all those things, was not a problem, the amount of sockets was sufficient. However, since the fridges, computers, etc were always running....when we turned on the micowave we would ALWAYS blow a breaker.
Eventually we figured out what was goin on and we learned to turn off some stuff before cooking, but it only goes to show that they underestimate the power needs of the technologically advanced college society.
Momma told me that sigs are for the devil
I'll never forget being at Virginia Tech in one of the old dorms. We have 2 electrical plugs not including the 1 by the sink. We plugged power strips into them both and ran 2 computers, 2 monitors, 1 SCSI external driver, Microwave, Fridge, VCR, TV, and Nintendo. Whats funny is all the electronics sat next to or on top of each other because we had no where else to put them. So the Radio was on top of the TV which was on the microwave which was on the desks an inch above the VCR which was on the fridge. We called it the tower of power because when you moved a monitor next to it the screen on that side would display wrong.
When I built the house I am in now, I wired the hell out of it. Every room has 3 CAT5 drops and an RG-6 (coax) drop. My office has 6 CAT5 and 2 RG-6 (because at the time I had cable modem service, now I have DSL). Even my kitchen and dining room are wired with CAT5 drops (just in case). All of this wiring runs back to a central patch panel in the garage.
So am I set? Not really. It's funny how when you build a house, you think you know how you are going to use each room. Then you move in and change your mind. The room I designated as an office is fine, but it's right across from the bedroom and we get to listen to the hum of many fans as we drift off to sleep at night. There is a room downstairs that I later realized would make a great office, but it isn't wired with enough drops (because it was supposed to be just a sitting room).
I contracted out the network cabling through a company I used to work for, so I got exactly what I wanted and for cheap. The electrical wiring was done by a contractor hired by the builder, and I had much less control and had to make a lot of compromises (rather than spend a fortune in custom "upgrades"). As a result, I have only 8 outlets in my office, and they all run off the same circuit. All of my equipment in that room is powered by my APC 3000 UPS, with a power strip plugged into each of its 8 outlets. That UPS was modified to run on a 15A 120V circuit (basically by swapping out the 30A locking plug) and aside from a few lamps around the room, is the only draw on that line.
Right now, I've got the load at around 40% of the UPS's designed capacity, which is about 80% of the circuit's capacity. And that's with my rack of Cisco gear powered off. I power that rack up to do some lab work, and I am right at the max. I usually work in the dark, simply because I'm afraid that if I power on a lamp, I'll throw the breaker.
Moral of the story: even when you design for capacity and connectivity, you still run into brick walls eventually. I've actually given thought to the idea that the next house we build will not have wiring fished through the walls, but instead use this wiring raceway I saw on a home improvement show a couple of years ago. It is exposed and easily accessible to facilitate upgrades to power and cabling. Need another outlet? Just snap one in.
Why don't people just either
a) not bring so much stuff to school (where in theory you should be working most of the time anyway)
or b) just UNPLUG one thing, then plug another in! (you don't really need to run everything concurrently)
To me at least, it just seems that people are starting to jump to the "how do I expand my current limits" solution, when maybe the "how do I conserve power" solution might be better in some situations. I am not saying this holds true for everyone, some people have to be able to watch a video and decompose the effect of the background on the overall composition of the..(well you get the idea), but in GENERAL conservation should be used before expansion.
You can double the amount of power that you can use in your room by simply switching to 220 volts. It doesn't require a transformer to do this; just wire your outlets the same way a 220v dryer is wired.
A friend had a dorm mate that had brought a 220v stereo from overseas... they found that half the room was on one 110v circuit and that the other half was on another. So, they connected the stereo to the "hot"s of each circuit, and they had 220 volts total. Or something close enough.
Ok, it's not to code at all and is dangerous because some appliances (like lamps and toasters) will have electrified enclosures. But, it would work as long as no appliances touched each other, you, your dog, or a real ground.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
In the dorms in my school (UNC), next to every desk in the dorms are 4 outlets. This is generally enough to run all the computer equipment you can throw at it (I am running two boxes, a laptop, a monitor, a stereo setup, my switch, an external HDD, my printer, two lights, and still have one of them open to use for things like charging my cell phone). In addition, there are two sets of two plugs elsewhere in the room. I did make sure to plug the refrigerator and the microwave onto different plugs (thank goodness for extension cords). There are also 2 gigabit ethernet ports and a coax cable port. It *is* a pain to run the ethernet cables around the floor of the room to get to the far desk, but its not too bad. The dorms are also all wireless, but the reception on the fringes of the dorms, where my room is, is a little less than stellar, so I just use wired ethernet.
So far we havent really had any problems with power going out. Someone tripped one of the breakers a couple of months ago, but apparently only the two sets of two plugs were on them--both of the quad plugs still had power.
"It looks like Circuit City in some of those rooms," said Dan Bertsos, director of residence services at Wright State University near Dayton, Ohio.
And also:
They power a color TV, stereo, compact disc and DVD players, video game player, desktop computer and laptop, printer, scanner, refrigerator, microwave and two fans. Then there are rechargers for a cell phone, hand-held computer, camera, electric razor and toothbrush.
Yeah, but I bet Dan has all of these things at home too. Most of these new appliances are a result of college policies and planning. The computer is obvious. It is at minimum the new typewriter. The printer and scanner come along when the college doesn't provide these services in a convenient place or charges too much for them. The stereo has been around for a while in dorm rooms. You need one because the shitty radio isn't going to cut it. The TV and the DVD player are in each room because there's no communal space for reasonably sized groups (4-8 students). If they had a place with their friends, these things could live out in some sort of small living room. The microwave and refrigerator are in response to colleges jacking up board costs to pay for fundraising activities (a very common practice). They are also not new: my mom was boiling water on a hotplate in here dorm room -- much less safe than a microwave. Again, some communal space could reduce the number of microwaves a fridges.
Most dorms try to provide communal space in living rooms that are public to some 12-20 students. This is far too large. There's too much sharing of responsibility for the accidents in the microwave to ever get cleaned or for food in the fridge to be safe from hungry fingers. You need a space that the small group feels ownership over.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Back when I lived in the dorms (I'm still in college now, but have since moved to an off-campus apartment) they had outlets for two rooms on the same circuit. My room had 5 computers and associated monitors, printer, refrigerator, microwave, fans, etc. and the guys next door had 6 or 7 computers, monitors, stereo, refrigerator, micorwave, fans, etc. We blew the fuse (that's right, no circuit breakers in this dorm) all the time. A few weeks after the semester started, we reached an agreement that neither of us would use our microwave until we alerted the guys next door so we could power down our monitors, printers, and other unnecessary hardware (of course we never wanted to power one of the computers down).
Not specified in the ad, but the master bedroom has about 28 outlets, in groups of 6 or 8, the other bedrooms are similarly equipped, as are all the other rooms. Next to one set of 8 outlets on 2 opposite walls, there are 2 to 3 ethernet outlets, 1 to 2 three-line telecom outlets, and 1 to 3 coaxial outlets, all using leviton 6 position faceplates.
It was a complete gut renovation, so all the telecom wiring is all new, behind walls, and easily accessible/changeable from the attic.
If the future tenants supply a gigabit switch, they'll have a gigabit ethernet network at no additional charge to them, as well as multiple telephone outlets in every room, and cable/dish connections in every room as well.
Now if the job situation would only turn around in NYC, we'll finally be able to rent the apartment. What gets me is that of the couple of potential tenants that came to see the apartment, none of them were interested in the connectivity and power available. And craig's list hasn't really provided any responses with interest to the ethernet and telecom wiring. Everyone seems to think they can apartment shop without seeing the apartments.
We used close to 1000 feet of ethernet wire (including telecom), over 600-700 feet of coaxial wire, and a large number of Cat 5e, coaxial, and 3 line telecom jacks, plus all the related hardware in a single 3 bedroom/6 room apartment.
Did we waste our time and tremendous effort (and money) getting ethernet/telecom/coaxial wiring behind every wall in every room?
Nobody seems to care.
In the dorms, they provide us with one ethernet port, one telephone, and three electrical sockets per student. Enough, in my opinion. But they don't let us plug in more than one computer into the network.
I doubt there's been a sudden surge in student usage of toasters, kettles, electric heaters or other appliances drawing a large amount of power. All the electonic devices that have recently become popular are low-voltage - 12V or less. So why is the answer to put in more high-voltage AC outlets, requiring a trained electrician? It would make more sense to run a 12V or 5V power supply within the building, if there were some way to connect devices to it.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The dorm I was in during college was built in the 50s, but did have a 4-plug outlet on 3 of the 4 walls. With a few powerstrips it was enough.
My apartment also has (nearly) enough outlets. Our major complaint is that it is a 2 bedroom and 1 bedroom has a TV outlet (used for cable modem and mythtv). The other room has a phone outlet.
no comment
Folks, before you start rewiring as someone has suggested, keep in mind that you can die if you get shocked. You might not keel over immediately, but it's possible that you go to sleep that night and never wake up because your heart stops.
Don't daisy chain power strips. If you do and the first in the chain can't handle, you will blow fuses or melt insulation. The conductor essentially becomes a filament and just gets red hot.
Most importantly -- you can destroy equipment or shorten the life by using incorrect voltages.
I had a situation at my school last year where our power kept going off because our circut was overloading and the breaker would go off. We learned how to reset it from the box that was down the hall, but it was really annoying that it kept going off. What was stranger was it never had this problem before, so finally we had the maintence department of the school come up and check it out and I learned a bit about how much power devices consume.
Our room was one of 3 doubles set up on the same circut. We were the only ones around, so we couldn't do much about the other rooms power, but we could look at ours. The circuts cut after 20 amps. When we turned everything on in our room, the circut breaker went off and broke the circut, but we found out that it wasn't our stuff causing me majority of the problem. We had in the room 3 computers, 4 monitors, 2 TV's, 2 Xboxes, 3 lamps, 2 alarm clocks, 2 phones, 2 speaker systems, 1 sperate stereo, a dozen accessories for various computers (printers, scanners... etc). and a few other things that I can't remember.
When we had all of our stuf off, the breaker was still reporting 11 amps being drawn from the other rooms. He went into one and found an illegal (per college rules anyway) space heater in there on with no one around. He turned just that off and we were down to 2 amps being drawn. After turning all of our stuff back on, it went up to 12.
One space heater was using almost as much power as 2 people's worth of electronics. Moral of the story: don't use space heaters in college dorms 'cause power outages every 30 mins suck.
This too is an old house and the wiring here is archaic. Most of the outlets are only two prong, and most of three prong outlets aren't properly grounded. There are a grand total of two sets of grounded outlets in the entire house that don't trigger a reading of "wiring fault". One set is down in the basement, and the other is on the upstairs stove.
I couldn't keep an eye on mom from the basement, so my entire home office system is plugged into the stove, via 100 feet of yellow outdoor extension cord which snakes halfway around the house, and into the biggest UPS I could find. Hardly ideal, though it is kind of funny that the stove is now a point of failure in my computer system.
So a warning kiddies: avoid old houses. Even if the rent is low, they ain't worth it.
well, in my room there is 1 coax connector, 2 ethernet ports, 1 phone jack, and probably 7 or so power jacks (though they are in odd places).
really the only thing we need more of is the power jacks... and the ethernet ports need to be on the other side of the room. o_O
Careful. It's actually quite easy to implement per-circuit power metering (as they do in colo facilities) One day they're going to realise that charging for excessive power usage would be practical and profitable.
There were two 10/100 ethernet ports in a jack that was always located in the center of the wall on one side of the room in all of our dorms... This always led to the buying of enormous ethernet cables and boxing/duct tape to run across the floor ;)
As far as electrical outlets, they were never a problem, although myself and fellow technologically enabled were known to have more than two power strips (NO, we didn't plug them into each other!). Never really found a need for more outlets in our dorms, just more ethernet!.
Frank"Other bands play, but Manowar KILLS"
In my dorm room, my roomate and I each have 6 electrical outlets, a phone jack, and an ethernet port. According to the university, that should be plenty.
But, between the Microfridge, 3 fans, 2 lights, telephone, cell phone charger, vcr, and computer, I find myself using two extensior cords, a powerstrip, and a 1000VA UPS.
My point? You can never have enough outlets, and they are never in the right places. I have to run an extension on my cat3, and a 25 foot cat5. Never mind the fact that my Microfridge is running through a lamp socket.
I'm home for thanksgiving break now, I hope there's not a fire while I'm gone.
CitrusTV (http://www.citrustv.net): the Nation's Oldest & Largest Entirely Student-Run Television Station
I live in Denmark, in a rented flat, where we "only" have a 32 Amps, 400 Volts line going in. We've got three bedrooms and two bathrooms running on a single 16 Amp, 230 Volts breaker and the living rooms share a single 16 Amp breaker, which is still puzlling me. I would have preferred a little more power to my room - the kitchen has its own 16 Amp, 400 Volts line, only needed for the stove, washing machine and fridge. In all rooms we have like 4 dual outlets with breakers at floorlevel and a single one with breaker next to the door, one meter above the floor. I would have liked some grounded outlets in the rooms, but fortunately we do have "HPFI"-relay thingies (surgeprotectors on the mainline with very fast reaction to human interference in the circuit). I'm just glad we don't have to power AC overhere ... 7 computers per person is enough power consumption :)
Just daisy chain like fifteen surge strips together. You end up with tons of usable outlets. Use extension cords + more power strips to get juice to other parts of the room.
Hint: Hide all of this under a pile of clothes or under your bed so the fire inspector doesn't see it.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Anyone try one of these yet? (Bottom of the page, Super Silencer retail box .pdf) Seasonic is claiming significantly greater efficiency than your average PC power supply. I've got one on order (less waste heat ==> less fan noise, and I want QUIET, dammit!), I'll see if it makes a difference on my UPS's load meter. Anyone already have one?
LCD monitors. If you have the money (yeah, big if) and don't have a really good excuse for running a CRT, buy one. 19" panels are the best bang/buck. Samsung is my favorite brand at the moment. Get a TV tuner card (or one of those ViewSonic N5 convertor boxes so you can shut the PC off) and ditch the separate TV.
Athlon 64. AMD's Cool & Quiet works very well, I think it was enabled by default in the ASUS K8V BIOS. It drops to 800MHz when you're not doing much and the power consumption goes way down. Even under full load it burns much less power than high-end P4s (65W vs. 100W?). AMD has made substantial progress on transistor leakage, Intel hasn't. The upcoming Intel Prescott "Blast Furnace Edition" (over 100W) ought to be banned from dorms.
Yes, you could go with a notebook, but they're just not the same...
Anyhow, since an awful lot of students have a lot more money than I did as an undergrad (WTF is with all the cell phones?!), maybe some of this is useful?
- Mobile phone
- DECT phone
- Printer
- Scanner
- Computer speaker set
- USB HUB
- Laptop
- VIA EPIA external power adapter (ok, in design, so leave it out for now)
- MIDI keyboard
- Switch
- ADSL modem
- 54Mbit wireless access point
This is all excluding the normal devices (which I will leave out).Question to you techies out there. Is it not possible to device a standard for these kind of devices? It would be nice to have an (upgradable) 12 V DC adapter in the house. Currently almost none of the adapters take just one outlet. Note that I am on 230V since I live in NL (europe). Not that that matters too much, I expect you are experiencing the same problem.
its not about the number of outlets in a room, you can always just split 'em. It is about how much power you're getting (i.e. the fuse threshold) since your dorm room is on one or two breakers max.
its not uncommon for breakers to go, infact my suitemate's room loses power every other day, and all they have is a TV and two computers.
Nah... since I'm on good terms with the landlord, I just had them run 3 new circuits to my office (it's an old building) when they re-wired the main panel.
Otherwise, I think I'd be focusing on Mini-ITX gear and laptops.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Living on the so-called "second most-wired campus" in the nation, I found that the room had about 5 electrical outlet spots with two plugs each. Add alarm clocks, microfridge, two laptops, two printers, cordless phone, two PDA cradles, TV, DVD player, PS2, my beautiful 300 watt surround sound system, a spare lamp or two (mmm)... There are about 3 big-old power strips which are just packed full.
What disappointed me is despite the 10mbps line to the Internet, there were only two outlets. If I use one and my roommate uses one, where do I plug in the old 486 I converted to NetBSD last week? I'm going to have to get some sort of cheap hub, and that means money. If I had money, I'd be using something better than a 486 as my personal web-server/slave machine.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The four of you shared an electric razor? That's kinda gross, dude.
Or leave it at home. Do you really *need* a TV, PC, laptop, 500W sound system, dvd player, PS2, Xbox, etc. in your dorm room?
Put a TV+FM tuner card and a DVD in your PC and a decent sound card. Get better-quality 5.1/6.1 surround speakers for the PC. One device replaces many, and with an LCD uses little power.
You'll still *need* the PS2/Xbox I suppose.
---
This is one of the biggest problems. Someone needs to get on Underwriters Laboratories' backsides, and get them to require that adapters only take one space.
The renovation done to the tenant's apartment includes 4 duplex outlets, for a total of 8 plugs, yet I can't stop them from using power strips due to the surge protectors. We tried using the individual surge protectors, but even with 8 plugs, only 2 individual surge protectors fit, because they won't fit one on top of the other, and if placed in the outside left plug, the next plug to the right is useless, the third plug to the right is available, plug a second surge protector in there, and the fourth plug can't be used, and the top row of four plugs can't be used either. With a computer plug and monitor plug, that leaves the scanner, printer, speakers, and other equipment unprotected.
The same situation exists without computers. The CO2 detector takes two spaces left or right, and the plugs above are useless as well. Three previous cell phones use power adapters that take more than one space. The latest cell phone adapter actually takes only one space, which really surprised me. The same with a battery charger for a flash light, as well as other battery chargers, and a plug in door chime. All take at least two spaces, and usually also block the top plugs, therefore taking four spaces for one plug.
Anyone working for UL reading this, you need to fix this baloney.
I just moved into a house with circa 1960 wiring. All my gear is in one room. When I found out the outlets weren't even grounded I refused to plug anything in. Had an electrician come in and run a new wire from the breaker panel, and told him this was for computer gear (didn't make any difference). Yes I only have 15A for the entire room, but I do try to not turn on everything at once. In addition to that, other stuff I've done: - Everything is run through a pair of 1KVA APCC UPS's - If I need more outlets (I can hear the cringing) I have an APCC power strip plugged into the UPS (more or less just for the heavy-guage wire). This is primarilly for "wall worts" (hub, firewall, PAD cradle, etc.) - All monitors are LCD - Inkjet printer, no laser printer - Anything w/an AC motor (air cleaner, vacuum cleaner, etc.) is either pluggin in the hall or run when everything else is off. - Try to get devices that can be powered off the USB or Firewire hub or off the computers themselves rather than have yet another power connection Despite this, I'm sure I'm "pushing it" with regard to the load on the circuit.
When I was living in a dorm, the substandard wiring had a hidden benefit. Every room and half shared a circuit- I was in a "half" room- one wall shared the circuit with the entire room next door, and the other wall shared with the room on that side. This gave me final veto authority over either of my neighbors' (usually poor) choice of music. I had a cut of lamp cord with the wires twisted together inside a big ball of electrical tape. Plug it in, it shuts off your neighbor's stereo (and everything else!). One semester I had a neighbor who liked to blast "Freebird" every afternoon. After the sixth or seventh time I used my "remote", he was out in the hallway swearing about the lousy dorms. A girl walking by innocently suggested that maybe his stereo was blowing the fuse. She didn't know how right she was!
The res I lived in was built in '67, it had little slender desks capable of supporting a type writer and I think six (3x2) outlets total per room. Unfortunately the circuits were shared between rooms nearest I can tell and it turned out that I could not power both my monitor and computer on the same circuit, had to run an extension cord around the room just to use my monitor without it looking like the surf on a beach.
I got over the power, it was the squirrels that were the real problem!
OK, I'm officially old. I went to school in the mid '80s and, IIRC, my roommate and I had maybe 10% of what the Miami-Ohio guy had. (An Atari 5200 was among the equipment, btw.)
:)
Really, though, do you youngins' *really* need all that stuff?
Who read it as such?
I was thinking... woah, another Slashdot server upgrade??
Don't quote me on this.
We only get about 4 individual outlets in the desk area, and 2 over next to the bed, and one next to the door. I needed to put two power strips on the desk and one next to the bed.
There's also this annoying fluorescent desk lamp right above the desk that is just low enough that you can't slide your computer underneath, and so are forced to put it on the floor (and hope your cables are long enough to go around the side of the desk), lay it on its side on the desk, or put it on one of the shelves above the desk like I do.
My past two apartments were 50 and 80 years old respectively. The 50 year old building had only two outlets per room, but we had a really great circuit (15A), so our only problem was that we ran extension cords everywhere. Our manager was even nice enough to let us drill through the walls and string our own RJ-45 cable for the network.
However, in my second apartment, we had plenty of outlets, it was just that they had only 2-prongs. It was the crappiest of crappy wiring systems. It had 15A that had to also be shared with the refridgerator and A/C. It left something like 6A for the rest of the house. You'll be happy to know that I only blew a circuit once.
-Heath
Most PSU's are only capable of drawing less than their rating anyway..I have an antec 350 watt here, but on closer inspection of the label can only pull 328 watts reliably.
Few computers will ever come close to pulling that amount. The processor takes up the most watts at around 70 for a new powerful one, followed by harddrive (~15), CD (when running), and video card (25 for std. AGP, up to 50 or even 110 for high powered stuff). There will be some draw on the other components but it won't amount to more than a few watts. I'd venture that most computers used in a dorm are only pulling 150 or so regardless of their PSU's rating.
-
I lived with a guy for many years who was constantly frustrated with the lack of electrical outlets in our room. For the first year we strung extension cords everywhere... which was really the only option given ONE outlet for the two of us (both computer geeks... with dozens of things to plug in).
The next year we moved into a triple with another guy, but power was still scarce. To add injury to insult, there was a panel above a desk that was clearly meant to be an outlet but had never been wired. Well... eventually my roommate snapped and decided he was going to fulfill the panel's destiny.
With the juice running the whole time, my roommate successfully wired a two outlet panel to the wall without shocking himself... except at the very end when he managed to create great arks of light that blew the power on half the floor. Thankfully we were good friends with the RA and had, on other more legitimate projects, blow the power before. Once we flipped the breakers back on, the juice was flowing and he had successfully wired a new outlet.
We made a number of "improvements" to that room over the year, but I think that one was the best
Only 120 characters... who can summarize their entire world understanding in 120 characters?!
Just do some simple math and you can avoid overloading a circuit.
1) Determine the rating of the circuit -- I imagine each dorm room will have one circuit. (Maybe two)
2) Determine which outlets go to which circuits. If outlets are close together, then they are probably on the same circuit.
3) Calculate the amps of everything you are plugging into the circuit.
4) Add them all up.
5) If they are close to or over the amp rating for the circuit, then you have a problem, and you will have to unplug stuff.
Important points to remember:
* Don't forget to check the rating on any power strips that you use! Most are rated at 15 amps, which is probably the same as the circuit you are plugging into.
* Circuit breakers can momentarily handle more than their rated amps. ie: it might be able to handle 17 amps for, say, 30 seconds before tripping. The higher the amps, the faster the trip. A direct short will (er, should) instantly trip the breaker.
* Not everything has the amps listed -- some devices only list the watts. You can calculate the amps by dividing the watts by the voltage. ie: your 400 watt computer running on 120 volts will have a max amps of 3.33.
* If you are in a situation where you have two circuits near your computer, and you overload one, keep this in mind: It is generally a Bad Idea to plug some peripherals into one outlet and others into another. Subtle differences in voltage and phase can lead to a net difference in voltage between your equipment and lead to permanent damage.
* This may be unfounded (someone correct me if I am wrong), but I always think that it is more dangerous to overload a power-strip than an outlet--meaning that I trust the circuit breaker in the closet more so than I trust the power strip.
I hope this helps. If you read this and go kill yourself, it's your own damn fault. Use at your own risk. Use common sense, and remember that this IS slashdot.
— darco
I have 4 sockets here... Running 4*PC, 3*Monitor, Countless USB/Network hubs, TV, VCR, Lighting, Fridge, Clock/radio, countless portable chargers (palmtop/phone/battery/etc), Mofo of a speaker system, and other stuff which is still running in that huge pile of crap which has several cables snaking out to turned on power sockets :)
Now, what was the address of that site that posted on slashdot if you didn't sign in for x days, again? :~
have you considered using a bicycle generator? i.e where you have to pedal for 5 hours a week to charge up a battery which can supply enough power for a TV for an hour or so?
I've thought of that before. You know, it's a great idea for a few reasons:
I do have to wonder about how bad this dorm room power crisis really is. Let's consider appliances with realistic maximum power consumptions:
Note that many of these loads are intermittent or mutually exclusive. Most laser printers only pull any amount of power when the printer is actually fusing a page. The boom box probably won't be playing loudly at the same time as the computer speakers. And, unless you like to leave the door open, the beer fridge's compressor should be off most of the time.
And some of these appliances will become duplicates in a shared dorm room, so the realistic likelihood of them being on at once is small.
1830 watts is the total power consumption for the list of appliances above. In my jurisdiction, commercial buildings (including University residences) have one outlet per 1500W circuit. Most circuit breakers are thermal (takes time to heat up a bimetallic strip in the breaker) and therefore act like slow-blow fuses. And unless you're printing a massive pile of course notes while playing the boom box and computer speakers loudly and doing it with the beer fridge door jammed open, the loads are probably going to be too transient to trip the breaker. So you may have a whole load of power bars plugged into that one outlet, but in reality, it's likely to be perfectly fine.
On the other hand, dorm rooms are small. It's in the students' best interests - forget power consumption - to slim things down:
Noting that this scheme is merely a common-sense approach to giving you more space in your dorm room (and making moving at the end of the year that much less painful), your maximum consumption will only be about 1260 watts. Which means that if you've got a circuit, you're fine.
I'd suggest to universities that they point out in their residence brochures something along the lines of "Moving into and out of residence can be unpleasant. For that reason, we suggest that students attempt to travel as lightly as possible. LCD monitors and video cards with TV inputs will save you space by avoiding having to carry around bulky CRT displays." Maybe offer a small rebate to students who use an LCD monitor and TV-in video card to replace a CRT-based monitor and TV set.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
How about a gasoline generator kept in your dorm room? It's benefits are twofold. Firstly, you get more power. Secondly, you'll have no problems getting to sleep. Once. My post college apt has ethernet in every room, I was instantly sold on it. It could have been next to a pig farm & I still probably would have signed the lease. My college dorm though definetly didn't have enough outlets. We just snaked extension cords, power strips, and ethernet cables from whatever outlets weren't getting used. That worked, but you did NOT want to walk around in the dark.
Grounding. Right now I'm in an apartment where the only path to gound is through the cable tv/internet coax. So ground is reversed in the cable modem. If I unplug the cable I have no ground on my other devices. Sometimes the grounding light on my surge protector(s) "pulses".
I'd gladly trade some of my outlets for properly grounded power.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
I actually had a similar problem before, my room in the apartment I used to live in had only 2 outlets, I had to use extensions for my countless electronic devices, later, when I moved to my new apartment, I made sure I had many outlets everywhere in my room, even if it was very unlikely to use, just to make sure not to use extensions, I don't worry about cable hassle any more.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
When I lived in the dorms we just wired up an extra outlet from the wall A/C unit. Before that we didn't have enough outlets though.
Back when I was in residence the students who had TVs in their room tended to be both asocial and pampered. Those with microwaves were finnicky eaters. And those with printers required copious tech support (from geeks down the hall like myself).
Maybe these students should grow up and learn to live without every little electronic device? Leaving your room and talking to someone instead of one more vibrator session in front of your Star Trek DVDs will probably make you a more interesting person. You might meet someone cool while standing in the lab printing out your F-quality essay. And learning how to brush your teeth with a manual brush will be indispensible after the revolution.
The problem is not the paucity of outlets, per se. The problem is the need for a lot of power in one place.
Along three linear feet of wall, I have plugged in:
4 computers, 1 monitor, one switch, one wireless access point, one battery backup (requires a 20A socket - adapted to use 2 15A sockets, which is OK since it's a 20A circuit behind them), one laser printer, and one lamp. That represents just under half the electrical devices in my room which need plugging in, and probably about 80% of the total power requirements.
This is the sort of problem that leads students to plug one power strip into another one (that, and their penchant for buying cheap extension cords), and overload circuits. Having four times as many outlets in the room would only help if there were more outlets within a few feet of what needs to be plugged in.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
... didn't have anything grounded when i first entered it. it also used 10-amp glass fuses.... the microwave used 8.8A of that, which makes using my computer for CS240 a bit difficult. I got an electrician to fix it though.
A properly designed electrical system in the home with the correct surge equipment at the front end (the electrical box) solves all these problems. from surges in the house from flipping on grandma's 40 year old stand mixer to nasty surges from the factory down the street.
Agreed. But there's still more to it than that.
Surge suppressors on the power entry, just after the main switch. *Large* breaker box.
And if you're building the house - or doing extensive work involving the removal of lots of drywall anyway - rewire the whole house. Build it to commercial specs, even if your residential requirements are lighter.
My suggestion is to use conduit for all wiring, and make sure that you put in extra conduit all over the place so that you can fish network and phone cables into any room as required. Put each duplex outlet on a separate 15A circuit (20A circuits are against code in residences in most jurisdictions). GFI outlets aren't just for bathrooms - they're not very expensive, so put them everywhere - they can save your life and your electronics from damage (say your stereo has a ground leak and you connect it to your computer). And make sure that you have an outlet at least every 10 feet in every room.
While you're doing all that, of course, you should be installing a residential sprinkler system. (Why? Sprinklers massively improve the fire safety of a house or commercial building. And it's a lot easier to clean up water damage than fire damage.) The reduction in your insurance rates over a few years might well pay for your entire renovation costs, and talk to your insurance company about the fact that the building is wired to commercial standards for another potential savings.
Other things to consider: While you've got the house apart, insulate the piss out of it, whether you're in a warm or cold climate.
You might also want to install a gray water system for the toilets. It's against code in my jurisdiction, but I don't really care because it's a good idea. The premise is simple: my toilet is almost 50 years old. It's not one of those stupid "water-efficient" toilets that takes 6 flushes to get rid of dark matter. And I don't like urinating in perfectly clean water - there's no point. So I put a 55 gallon drum in the basement. The bathtub U-trap (unscrew the washout nipple and find a piece of pipe of the same thread, make sure you still have a bend in the hose for a three-way U-trap) and washing machine now drain into the barrel. Using bleach in a cotton white cycle not only keeps your shirts blindingly white, but also keeps algae out of the barrel. Near the top of the barrel is an overflow pipe which takes excess stored water to the drain. A burglar alarm magnetic switch on the toilet's float now controls a relay which turns on a small pump. Gray water is pumped through a small hose up into the toilet tank, using a fountain pump with 15 feet of head.
Since I live in a cold climate and like hot showers, not only am I reclaiming the water, but I'm also reclaiming the heat. The water in the barrel cools down slowly, releasing its heat into the house. Saves me over $200 a year in heat and water costs.
A fringe benefit is that warm soapy water in the toilet dissolves stuff better than cold tap water, so the toilet doesn't need to be cleaned as often.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I had everything plugged in to one 15A circuit, that's all we got. "Everything", is a 19" CRT (probably used the most power), two Dual-CPU systems with several hard drives each, and about a half dozen pentium based machines. I never had any issues, even with the microwave running. I'm sure it was close though. I'm not sure if the lights were on the same circuit or not, I think it was just bad shielding in the stereo that made it hum when the lights were on.
They are absolutely solving the wrong problem. I was in college from 1988 to 1993 (yeah, the old five year plan) and I only had limited access to computers while I was there. I brought one along to type up term papers and make the occasional long-distance call to my BBS at home, but for the most part I didn't spend much time at the keyboard, even though I pursued a CS minor.
... but only after getting out from behind the keyboard.
And you know what? I'm really happy about it. So many different experiences transpired during those five years. Horizons broadened, friendships deepened, memories were made. All because I wasn't spending all my time behind the keyboard.
With lots of power and lots of connectivity, will today's university students have the good sense to leave the dorm once in a while? The average geek who got picked on by everyone in high school is suddenly going to realize that in college, the stigma is gone, and finally come out of his or her shell
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Or at least a dorm where they shoved 3 people where there was only meant for there to be two. The thing is we don't really have problems with power outlets as we all have a lot of surge strips, but it's the Lan ports that run short. Still, I find that there's usually enough power running around when I activate the human power cells installed in our beds. (Become a human battery, pay for college.)
Yesss, finally someone who can respect my decision to equip all my rooms with redundant power-, coax- (TV+FM) and phone-outlets.
/his/ network: None! He though: Since I am going to have phone-lines anywhere I will be able to simply plug in a modem and call my ISP.
:-)
:)
Though, I ripped the phone-outlets and replaced it with CAT5e, HARHARHAR!
My appartment was being renovated completely in 1999. And I *knew* oh so exactly what will happen. I knew it, I just knew it !
So I instructed the architect to equip each room with two phone-outlets and redundant power-outlets, I got even TV+FM coax in the kitchen.
I also added, that I want networking, to which he replied: "Sure, your appartment will be modern for the next ten years." Hmm...
I went to hospital, Mom supervised them. One day I got a call from Mom and the electrician was right at place. So I told him: Network! Network. E-T-H-E-R-N-E-T. He answered: "Yeah, yeah, network. Computer. Internet. I know. Dadidadi-Dumm."
Somehow I had a strange feeling about that guy.
When I came back I found
God, how awfull. Sadly I never managed meeting him in the dark on a lone street...
Anyway, I tore the phonestrips out (who needs them anyway these days with wireless DECT-phones) and replaced all by CAT5e, which I split, so I got two LAN ports per room. It would have been possible to keep one as phone-line, but as I said, I have a DECT.
I am sooo satisfied now. I can bring the girls home ! I switch on the STB (Linux, of course) in my bedroom and we watch the news, that get streamed from the MediaServer I have built and which is in the living-room. Chicks are not really interested in how it works, but I don't mind. It would be much worse to start each time over: "No, darling, the cables can not be torn away, the *need* to be on the floor, since this is *how* we watch TV.
What ? I have done stupid ? Why I do not do it like the other guys ? Using a TV with antenna ?" Huahuahua.
*I* *won* !
Just...I am short on power-outlets again. I have really a lot, but I already have started adding extendors. Too bad. But I did not know four years ago, I would have three computers in my living-room. And what I saved by dumping the HiFi, SAT-box and VCR is now being consumed by two servers, a force-feedback joystick, the switch and misc-equipment.
Now all I'd need would be good surges. Not those el-cheapo ones. I mean, real surges with line-conditioner, computed up to the joule.
BTW: Anyone got that formula, how to compute the surge ? One must check the Joule and... Please post, thanks
Hello?? Fred?! Is this you?
start out w/cheap power strips on all outlets. For the computers + clocks I use an APC UPS. I generally have 2-3 heavy duty 25-50 foot extension cables running around the edges of the rooms and under carpets. for the phones I use APC surge strips (the APC stuff is insured, if stuff gets fried they buy me new stuff).
You are whining about blowing circuits with your computer? I have to turn off everything in my house every time I plug in my welder to a dedicated 220 in the garage. If I don't i blow the main for the house every time. If I turn the welder up I can draw 220v at 70 amps. It doesn't help that its an 80 year old house.
But on a more realistic note, I would hate to have you peoples power bills. Has it occurred to you that maybe you should think about using a little less power? Out here in CA we have had rolling blackouts because of idiots who can't turn off the 45 appliances in their house they aren't using, and still have a 30 year old electric hot water heater. Maybe you should go check out Energystar.gov
We had two space heaters in my dorm room. They were called Slot-A Athons. 65 watts apeice for the CPUs, plus what the rest of the computer hardware put out. One of my roomates even printed up a little "Heat by AMD" placard to stick in the window.
The UK system is also somewhat unique, in that the plugs themselves are fused. You can daisy-chain as many 4-way adaptors as you like, secure in the knowledge that should you exceed the 13A maximum rating for the outlet the fuse in the first 4-way's plug will blow. This also allows for the ring-main architecture of wiring in the walls that makes adding additional outlets to an existing system a lot less of a headache than it is on a purely spur-based system.
Of course running at 220/240V (or '230V' as it's know known) inherently makes for lower currents than the somewhat scary levels the leftpondians are talking about.
Two years ago the dorm room I lived in was made for two people and had six outlets. Unfortunately, all six outlets were right next to each other, and stuck on the front of the heater (somehow) below the windows so they weren't very useful... Ethernet/phone/coaxial were all together coming out of one spot so in the end there was a group of two extension cords, one phone, one ethernet, and one coaxial cable carrying everything through my half over to my roommate's half of the room.
This year I have an air conditioner-grade extension cable into a 1-3 adapter which has three surge protectors plugged into it, all of which are completely filled (total of about 6 std plugs and 7 adapters)... and that's only my computers, the tv/ps2/etc is all on the other side of the room.
So if there's any outlet adding, it's not happening at my school. But then again what is?
Running out of power really isn't an issue, since most of the devices I want to plug in are low powered (dsl router, cell phone charger, etc). On the other hand, many of them are powered by wall warts, which means the power strip needs to have some space between the outlets so the wall wart doesn't cover two outlets.
Any suggestions?
I *never* want that to happen. That's why I run my computer on a 3000VA UPS.
:-)
And I never accidentally make a CD coaster. Even when the UPS goes active to top off it's charge and flips the breaker for the rest of the building.
And not in your dorm room.
and they still arent enough, I have about 10 things plugged into every jack. I routinely nock out the circut and have to call Physical Plant to go reset em. They should just give me a key.
ok, what i say isn't completely relevant, because i wasn't accepted into my local dorms until this past fall, when i had allready landed a killer living arrangement in my old boss's basement.
:D)...but anyway, since at the time i hadn't really tried using my fridge or stove, my power should have been at pretty much nothing. i had no heat whatsoever(this is in saskatchewan, canada, mind you...so things got kind of cold...)..didn't vaccuum,and that was it.
but when i was living on my own in an apartment, i saved power. i mean this. i used leftover candles for light(and usually lived in the dark, worked or slept during dark hours, used sunlight during the day.) i had one computer,(a 386), which i used only when i had at minnimum two things that simply HAD to be done(usually replying to email, which wouldn't take too long). i used cold water to "cook" my noodles in, and cooked coffee when i needed to with a drip-pot(wish i would have thought of what i use now, a drip-pot with a thermos beside it
what did i find? i lost a lot of time. mabye not quite as much time as i would have spent on the internet reading slashdot, but i lost a lot of time. i was constantly tripping on things in the dark, my diet was horrible, so i was continually fainting from not eating enough, because i had no internet access/a shitty computer i have not really gone as far as i would have liked to by now in the computer science feild---if i spent half as much time wasted living in the dark reading Linux HOWTO's id be a power user by now, instead of still pretty much a noob. i used a record player for music...etc...i wasn't exactly living a luxorious life.
now? i have three computers, two running, one for backups and hard drive space, the other for my webserver/workstation...the third for experiments...and another computer coming in the mail. the load average of both computers are pretty much constantly > 1.0, and most of my hard drives are 98+% full.
because i use a walkman with rechargable batterries i don't have to flip records every 20 minutes, which is really, really nice. whats' nicer is internet radio...after all, why break from concentration of study to change a cd? why change from the concentration of study to unplug/plug something in? i am sitting here, to the front is my internet monitor/keyboard, to my right is my math study/pile...whenever my mind strays from math i just reach over and google it...if i get hungry, i walk upstairs, microwave something, and go back downstairs... there is so little distraction i have gone upwards of 14 hours of constant, productive work, without so much even noticing that the time was going by...no interruptions, because everything works, and is automated, allowing me to spend more time studying...and that's the goal here. i can figure a way to save money, and be green with electricity when i have a degree.
what is the point here? don't waste your time plugging/unplugging things, if you can afford it. go for a low power solution, but be aware of your needs, and what would be enough power to live comfortably on. not everyone needs a geek's level of electricity, but a geek does.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Start every power chain with a surge protector... preferably one with a small fuse that can be tripped by too much draw. Spread out anything heavy-draw and constant (airconditioner gets its own circuit), and put intermittent things on opposite circuits. If possible, use a power brick.
Consolidate your electronics. a TV card in a computer is good, a TV card in a laptop is better. Unless you are a DJ, your amplified stereo equipment is really overkill in a 5'x7' room. Your neighbors will thank you if you get a good pair of Lansing computer speakers for music. All dorms have a communal VCR / DVD player, and it is more fun to watch with everyone. Hair dryers should be used in the bathroom, not on your PC's circuit. A printer in your room may be convienient, but the PC lab down the hall has one that is cheaper, and whose output looks better than yours ever will.
Flourescent lighting is your friend, not those nasty Halogen things. Get translucent blinds (in addition to the regular ones), so that you can get some natural lighting. Remember, if it's filtered through plastic it won't burn your skin.
Just some battle-won ideas.
The ______ Agenda
Older houses and apartments were built to older building codes - you know the ones that let you have single-paned windows, asbestos insulation, lead-based paints?
Modern building codes require that there be an outlet no more than 6' away from every corner and on long walls there be an outlet within 6' of every point on the wall. They also specify a much higher amperage on every circuit.
Older houses/buildings/dorms were built to the requirements of their day. New ones are being built to newer standards and some older ones are being updated to newer standards (more outlets, double-paned glass, etc.) Nothing new here.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Well some people I know don't have any... :p
But my way of fixing was -
Fight over the hall outlet!
Least soutlets I've had is 2. Landlord in UK seem to cater well for students as long as the rooms are new.
A blog I run for the wealth
At Lousiana Tech, our dorm only had 2 prong outlets. This was the honors dorm, also, so we had a much larger amount of electronic equipment than regular students.
Last year, the dorm caught on fire.
Officially, it was due to the Air Conditioner.
But it was only a matter of time before something happened, due to the chaining of surge protectors, all leading back to ungrounded outlets.
Oh, and another official report stated that the fire alarms were going off. As someone with first hand knowledge, running out of the dorm, there were no fire alarms. So you cant always believe the "official" reports. Most sudents believe the crappy wiring was at fault, and not the AC.
We have four outlet plugs. Two near where the bed is for alarm clocks, two near our desks. Needless to say, with our fridge, gamecube, xbox, TV, two computers + monitors, cell phones, palm pilots, and other items, we have to string together a ton of power strips. I think i'm using 2 just for myself, and my roommate has two for him, and we 'share" one for our lamps and alarm clocks when reading. Our "network" jack is actually a Cat 11; we had to spend $20 on a cable that'll go from Cat 11 to Cat 5. And we only have one jack, so we had to provide our own hub. It's really bad, and the giant rennovations that are slated for my room will only address the network problem, which means i bought a $20 cable for 3 months of use.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
Buying several 4 socket UPS units and putting them on each real socket(2 per outlet), except for perhaps one you run a mini-fridge off of. Then, most of the power fuctuations you're going through are buffered by that capacitor+battery system, and in the off chance a breaker does blow, only the fridge will shut off. You also get hella good protection for your electronics as far as surge protection goes.
You can get 5-6 socket ones for $39 on pricewatch. Its well worth it. And when you do blow a breaker, all the UPS's will "sing" to you as my girlfriend calls it.
In any case, you should get renters insurance no matter HOW you use your electronics in your room. You neighbors aren't being that safe, and can destroy all your stuff in the blink of an eye.
And I have no clue if the power management this guy has works with linux servers. I don't set that up on any of my computers.
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
All the power in a US house is single phase. It is incorrect to refer to 220 in the US as two phase. Two phase means that the two phases are 90 degrees apart. 220 is single phase, 120 is half of 220. (for historical reasons US power is refered to as 220 and 120 volts, one half the other, it doesn't ad up so don't try) Two phase power is extreemly rate, I'm told it exists but I don't know where or why. Three phase is common in industry, and a few home shops have it (to run cheap surplus industrial equipment).
We lived in a duplex that was built in the 30's. Our problem was a lack of grounded outlets. There were plenty of two-prong outlets in each room, but only one grounded outlet per room, and they were in some odd places, like in the closet of the master bedroom. To get everything hooked up and plugged in, we had some nice bright orange heavy-duty extension cords snaking across the living room and down the hallway.
I was surprised that we never blew a fuse, even when we had two space heaters going, so I checked the fuse box. I guess someone else did have some problems, because every receptacle in there was filled with a 40 amp glass fuse. I asked an electrician friend about it, and he said that the wires in the walls would burn up before those fuses popped. So I complained to the landlord.
She dismissed me, told me I didn't know what I was talking about and that her son had put the 40 amp fuses in the and everything was fine.
So I did a little more investigating, and figured out that three of the fuses in our box actually controlled some of the lights and outlets in the other side of the duplex. It was empty, and the landlord was showing it nearly every day, so I just unscrewed those fuses and left them out. Sure enough, half the lights didn't work, and she started promising the prospective tenants that she'd get them fixed. I screwed the fuses back in before her idiot son came over, so everything was working fine when he tested it. Then I unscrewed them again next time she tried to show the place.
She finally broke down and hired an electrician to look at things. He wound up rewiring about half the outlets, putting in new circuit breaker boxes, pretty much redoing the whole system. Probably cost her a lot of money, but I sure slept better at night.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
Why bother with conduit when the house you just descibed will last at most 3 years before it is unlivable due to mold? Insulation sounds good, but modern hosues are so tight already that contractors consider themselves luck to have most survive, and there is much more effictive insultaition then the minimal they are putting in that will only make the problem worse.
Mold isn't a problem where I live; the climate is generally cold and fairly dry.
Probably the most important things to help out are proper dryer and bathroom vents. A dryer will suck a surprising amount of household air out the vent. If the air is already humid because your house is well-sealed, the drying time for your clothes will be longer, but it still gets rid of humid air in your house.
In my case, I want the humidity so that the house is comfortable - about 30% relative humidity. So I don't turn on the bathroom fan when I have a shower. The heating system circulates it. My dryer is electric (don't do this with gas!), so in the winter, I move the output to an air intake in the furnace. The furnace fan runs constantly, even when I'm not heating with oil or gas, and it takes the warm humid air from the dryer all through the house. Of course, I have to change the furnace filters a little more often (lint), but I get the nice smell of Bounce sheets all over the house. None of the lint seems to get to the electrostatic filters that a previous resident installed.
My house is small - 30'x40' bungalow with a basement. Everything is well insulated, even the basement walls. Overall, I can heat the house in the dead of winter (0F with wind) using nothing more than my usual electrical loads (computers, TV, lights, internally-vented dryer, etc) and a pair of 1.5kW electric baseboard heaters in the same room as the furnace. Usually, the baseboard heaters have a short duty cycle, and the furnace fan draws their heat throughout the house. You need a sweater sometimes, but there's about half a tank of furnace oil which has been sitting unused for a couple of years now.
I've been mulling over the idea of replacing the baseboard heaters with a stack of computers, simply because the electricity might as well be working on something productive like SETI@Home units on its way to becoming heat.
The real problem that I have is a lack of programming skills - I'm *not* a programmer. I want to be able to start and stop SETI@Home based on the status of a line on the parallel port.
I can easily whip up the electronics to bring high or low the Paper_Out line on a parallel port based on what the thermostat says. If the Paper_Out line is high, I want to start the SETI@Home task, and if it's low, I want to stop the SETI@Home task, leaving the processor idling (halted in a Pentium or better with power management enabled). Of course, the computers will continue to consume power in this state, but not as much. The power consumed in the idle state will simply decrease the duty cycle the processors have to do to keep the house warm.
I can easily write a shell script which will start and stop the SETI task, but I need an executable which will return the status of the port - 1 for Paper_Out high, 0 for Paper_Out low. Would like to be able to have it run on just about any Intel hardware, because I don't know what sorts of junker machines I can score for this project. Don't care if it has to run as root. Few dependencies are good - some of these machines might have very small hard disk drives, requiring small Linux installs. No X, perhaps an older distro, don't know.
Could do it with any conveniently readable line on either the parallel (Paper_Out, device_ready, etc) or 9-pin serial ports (CTS, etc.).
Anyone got any ideas? Am I simply missing something I can do easily with lpd or similar?
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
On top of that, your intelligent power supply might produce nice clean 5V and 12V power at its output terminals, but what about at the end of a branch circuit with varying loads? Circuit voltage would go up and down as different devices use more or less power. 4V or 10V might not be enough for a particular device. You'd have to supply a higher voltage, say 20V (or hey, why not go for 120V or 220V!) and then use a voltage regulator at the points of use to ensure your devices get the voltages they really want. Some devices need both positive and negative voltages (+/-12V, etc)... All of a sudden you need a switching power supply running from your low voltage outlet (hey, wait a minute why not use power that's already AC and can be run through a cheap transformer and rectifiers to make +/- DC power?)...
Thomas Edison tried to sell the world on DC power distribution on a large scale, and the same voltage drop issues that plagued Edison's DC power distribution system will be evident in a low voltage household DC distribution setup too.
Sure, you could just use really fat DC power wires, but have you priced heavy gauge wire lately? It's really expensive.
Putting moderation advice in your
while I lived on campus:
4 20 amp outlets each side in front and back
(total 16)
2 eathernet ports each connected to a switch
(needed more to have a file server)
1 phone line
(who needs that when everyone im's eachother)
1 2 light rapid start wraparoud
(magnetic balist so enjoy that 60hz flicker)
I go to UCF and have 12 outlets for our two person room. We've still had to add 2 6-outlet surge protectors tho.
Reality-corrected version ... but only to realize (after wasting years of desperate searching) that the damage is done, most people already have a life and won't care about yours! Completely disillusioned, the average geek returns to his trusty place behind the keyboard.
The average geek who got picked on by everyone in high school is suddenly going to realize that in college, the stigma is gone, and finally come out of his or her shell
I don't know about the situation in all localities, but in the City of Minneapolis, extension cords and power strips are against the law in rental housing.
I ran into this at the last place I rented, before I went out and bought a townhome.
I have a pretty serious lack of outlets in my room.. I live in an apartment with four other people and I have to share my room with two guys; note that my room was originally built as a double, though..There are only two sets of outlets I've noticed, although there might be a third hiding somewhere. The biggest pain is that there are only two RJ-45 ports, so I have to share my internet connection with my switch. I've been burnt by this before as my roommates use Windows and have had virii on their computers that led to the ports I used being turned off and myself left without Internet access..
;) I've accidentally turned off my computer before but that's due to the power cord in the back being loose.. That said, I worry about this problem all the time since one of my roommates is not a very careful person, but he hasn't caused any trouble yet. The living room area with the TV also uses its fair share of power with two power strips completely filled up with adaptors from the four game consoles attached to the TV. I hope that the new apartments my school is building will have a greater complement of power outlets and RJ-45 ports.
Anyway, on the subject of power outlets, my desk alone is currently using three power strips (completely full), an extension cord (for my blacklight), and one of those things that screws onto an outlet to provide 6 outlets instead of 2. I haven't really had much problem with accidentally disconnecting hardware.. My only advice is to screw on that thing that provides 6 outlets otherwise you get screwed
I live at Shawnee State University, in Portsmouth, Ohio.
The suites I stay in are brand spanking new, having just been built the summer before hand.
I have...6 plugs on my side of the room, plus 2 ethernet jacks, and a phone jack. I have 2 power strips, 1 with a minifridge and a microwave plugged into it, and the other with my computer, 17" monitor, 300watt klipsch speakers (which are on high ALOT), laptop charger, and a shitload of wall worts.
I've never blown a breaker, and if I do, I just walk over to the breaker box in my roommates room, and flip it back on.
Our suite has a few problems though. There weren't enough coax jacks ran, just one per each side of the room in the bedrooms, and one was tossed at random into the living room. The obvious place for the TV is in the corner, yet the jack is halfway up the wall, in the center of the room.
They also didn't put in big enough Air Conditioners, because me and my roommates have frozen ours up all the time when it was hot out, then you have to leave it off all day, to way for it to warm/cool off, or whatever it does.
Last year, my dorm was still on the original wiring from the late 50's when the building was built. I had one outlet by my desk and a second outlet on the other side of the room. About once a week, the girl next door to me would dry her hair and trip the breaker. It was incredibly annoying since it would usually happen early in the morning and my alarm would end up not going off. They did some electrical upgrades this summer and now I 7 outlets but they are all above my desk, so I'm forced to run surge bars (since nothing else is acceptable) over my room to power my fridge and microwave and especially my alarm clock. By hey, at least the power isn't going out every week. The dorm my sister lived in had one outlet up near the ceiling above the bed and that was it. It was pretty hard to get things set up well when you are running power strips all over the place. It makes the room look horrible. Obviously it is expensive for the electrical systems to be upgraded but it is just a matter of time before rows of power strips cause a fire and cost students their lives. Then some universities will ban any type of outlet extending device and we will be screwed...
Our Living room has two seperate power outlets. This is used to run the following:
3 Lamps
TV
Receiver
Pre-Amp
Record Player
Cd Player
Sub Woofer
VCR
DVD
Tivo
Sattleite box
PlayStation
and the girfriend INSISTS on x-mas lights...year round.
We haven't put up the tree yet either.
The problem I have seen is that since the power system in the house is so old, I am having to make either or choices in my usage. Want to listen to music and play the PlayStation? No Problem, but, someone walks in the room and turns on a lamp, and you can actually see every thing flicker. At this point I am terrified that the electronics industry is going to come up with the next device I must have, and I am going to have to give something up.
Also, the problem carries through to the rest of the house. I am constanly having to check to see what the GF is doing before I go in the basement and use any power tools (different circuit)
After talking to an electrician friend, my only solution apparently is to re-wire over half the house with a more robust system.
Can't afford that.
But, on the plus side, it does mean that we are getting better and not leaving un-necessary things on.
If you are one in a million, then there are six thousand people who are just like you.
thats why you buy a router, use the MAC address on it from your computer, and plug in as many damned machines as you wish.
Yeah, I hate my schools network policy too.
A 13 amp extension cord is usually 16-gauge, sometimes 14-gauge for the longer ones.
19 amps running through 16-gauge wire (4.094 ohms per 1000') converts about 1.48 watts per foot to heat.
You'd have to run this extension cord through some amazingly perfect thermal insulation (carpeting won't do it) before anything could get to flashpoint.
Standard amperage limits are based off acceptable voltage drops, not heating.
I've lived in 7 different rooms at the University of Colorado. I've never had a problem with the amount of power -- we have an on-campus power plant with lines under ground, so we even keep power during town-wide blackouts. The problem is that the architects (in the '30s-'60s, mind) thought the best places for outlets are natural places to put dressers. (Hmmm. Electrical dressers. There's a concept!)
On several occasions I've had power strips suspended in the air, plugged into an inconvenient outlet on one end and connected to a hopelessly short lamp cord at the other.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
You mean, of course, that they don't let you plug more than one NAT router into the network, correct?
In my first dorm there were 5 outlets, 1 of which was ungrounded (above a mirror). We were allowed hair dryers,
Heh... Note that those ungrounded outlets built into bathroom light fixtures are normally for electric razors only.
What's different about them?
When they say "RAZOR ONLY" beside the outlet, the outlet is usually on a small 1:1 power transformer. It's called an isolation transformer, and in those applications, they're usually only built to handle something under about 50W. Don't plug a hair dryer into it!
What does it do?
Ordinary outlets have a "hot" side and a neutral side. The neutral side is tied directly to ground at the distribution transformer and usually (depends on local electrical codes) at the fuse box. The hot side is connected to a winding on the distribution transformer which is putting out 120V with respect to ground. The power is then referenced to ground - usually to a cold water pipe which comes directly into the building through the earth.
Outlets also have a wide blade and a narrow blade. The wide blade is supposed to be connected to neutral, the narrow blade is supposed to be connected to hot.
Theoretically, you should be able to touch the wide prong and the ground (round prong) at the same time without getting a shock. The whole point of this is to allow you to accidentally touch the large part of a light socket base without getting a shock. Back in the day, lots of radios and TV sets used a "hot chassis" which was tied directly to one side of the power line - this should have been the neutral. (Most of them also predate polarized power cords, so depending on which way you had it plugged in, you had a 50% chance of the chassis being at 120V or neutral with respect to ground. Be careful!)
The isolation transformer removes that reference to ground, the potential difference exists only between the prongs of the outlet. This is good if you accidentally drop your electric razor into a sink full of water, because there will be no ground current through you - the only current would be from one wet point within the razor to another wet point within the razor.
Isolation transformers are a very important safety feature. Personally, I like them better than ground fault interruptors. The biggest problem with isolation transformers is that making one which will handle the current of a hair dryer or other large (power-wise) appliance requires a lot of heavy iron laminates and copper (expensive).
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
my living room has 22 power outlets... my bedroom has 6 and its a tiny ass room! the people that built this house were insane...
"an eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind"
Colleges could always make the argument that providing infinite numbers of amps and outlets raises their costs and hence tuition, and suggest that students leave some of the crap at home...and perhaps even coordinate between roommates so there's no dupes. A computer monitor and a TV card can replace the TV completely, and for a small dorm room a decent set of PC speakers can replace the stereo with no trouble.
I can't imagine having that much shit. I mean you need a computer, a clock, a light, and maybe some chargers for razors or cell phones. The computer takes care of any form of electronic entertainment needed, and you are in college so you shoudn't need that much.
Just in time for our discussion... CNN releases this article on increasing power needs of students in college. Good quick read related to this thread.
Easy solution: Daisy chain.
barzelay.net
This might help you get started but the full coffee maker howto is what you want to look for.
http://linuxselfhelp.com/HOWTO/mini/Coffee.html
After spending about a year in California, I have come to the conclusion that a lot of things that Americans do re: electricity are pretty dangerous, and would be downright illegal in Australia. I've noticed in several places people using "grounding adapters" as a way to get around that pesky grounding pin not quite fitting in that ancient 2-pin socket. Not to mention the adapter states "connect tab to grounded screw", i.e. use them on a wall plate with a grounded box (yeah right - how often does that happen?). Also, those extension cords with wires the thickness of my clock radio with the three outlets on the end - in my opinion - VERY dangerous, and they're just itching to have "grounding adapters" used with them. While the houses I have been in had plenty of outlets (3-4 duplex outlets per room), the internal wiring and circuits were simply too small. 2 bedroom house had 3 15 Amp circuits, one for the fridge, microwave, washer and dryer, another for 2 bedrooms, the bathroom and the light circuits, and the other for the outdoor receptacle, the lounge room (tv, cable box, dvd, 3-4 floor lamps, heater). Performing daily chores is an exercise in balancing circuits, let's see. I can't do the washing if the fridge is going to be running, so, turn the fridge thermo right up, do the washing, do the drying (stop both if you need to microwave something), then turn the thermostat in the fridge back to it's normal chill level. Otherwise, expect circuits to trip. In Australia we commonly use 3-4 20A, 240V/50Hz circuits in most houses for power, 2x 10A (sometimes 16A) circuits for lights and ceiling fans, dedicated 20A circuits for air conditioners, 32A circuits for electric stoves and ovens, and 20A circuits for fridges. Really old houses will use 16A power circuits and 8A light circuits, but it still provides more power (at 240V, not 220) than most relatively new installations in the US. A few shockers: http://deschutes.no-ip.com/usapower.jpg Quality :)
http://deschutes.no-ip.com/usapower2.jpg
Worry about morons using two heaters off the same power board first.
I got to Olin College of Engineering, and our dorms are pretty well outfitted. There are two major wall panels in the room (it's a double). Each one has 2 fiber ports, 4 Cat6 ports, 1 coax cable TV and 4 power outlets. Even so, I have a power strip hoooked up.
I think people are going to fill whatever capacity they're given...
___ alwaysBETA.com - Hey, you've got nothing better to do.
Yea so much for not having enough outlets, try having half the outlets in your dorm not having ground plugs (a random half might I add). Tech service guys distribute those plugs that have a fake ground that you're supposed to hook up with a wire to a real ground (but who does?). Its always nice to have your tv, computer, dvd, ps2, dreamcast, and stero on a strip that doesnt really have a ground. And the fun with our network is, they block all traffic between local machines due to 'security' and 'virus' concerns. Sucks that to play lan games we have to run our own network cables between dorm rooms!
What do you do when you run out of gas at when driving down the highway? Do you walk, or do you just sit there?
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
We've recently had an extra team move downstairs to our floor at work, and we've had the circuit trip twice now because the higher load. The floor is getting upgraded from a one phase to a three phase supply this weekend. IIRC, the toaster was the culprit of the blackouts as it drew 8 amps or so and pushed the circuit past its limit!
Post Properties are big when I live in Atlanta. I admit, when I was moving the lure of their PostSmart apartments was fairly high.
Basically, their new apartments are built wired to support home networking (wired), surround sound, and multiple phone lines. The outlets, however, were fairly ugly -- huge wall units like you'd see in a business. But there were network drops in every room and plenty of outlets and, most appealing to me, audio wires for surround sound and multiple speakers. I hate wiring for surround sound in the living room every time I change apartments. Here, you just plugged into the wall behind the TV, and then the wires came out the other side of the room and even on the patio.
Ultimately, despite the high geek factor, I didn't go with the properties with this feature. The rent was pretty steep compared to what I could get elsewhere, and wireless was already on the scene so I figured the networking wouldn't be too crucial. I'm also wondering if they opened the electrical system to support such a wired household. Hrm. I haven't heard of any burning down lately, I suppose...
Our 4 person, 2 bedroom apartment is barely larger than three dorm rooms but it's new and therefor the power outlets were not spared at all.
Living room / kitchen: 16 power outlets, 2 tv jacks, 2 network connections, and 12 phone jacks.
Each bedroom: 8 power outlets, 2 tv jacks, 2 network connections, and 4 phone jacks.
Having 36 power outlets (4 in bathroom) and 12 phone lines at our disposal is really nice. Having only 6 network connections with all those wall plugs makes it a sin.
Direct away from face when opening.
Most of the apartments I ever looked at in San Francisco lacked grounded outlets - this was something I paid attention to. Luckily I ended up living in a recently renovated house which had a room (office) rewired specifically to be computer-friendly. It could have used one or two more outlets, and it was only one room, but I appreciated it nonetheless.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
My apartment has plenty of outlets (5 in the bedroom alone), and a sound electrical system, but the main issue I notice is with the placement of sockets. Of those five outlets in the bedroom, three are unused, and one is just used for my DSL modem (since it's next to the phone jack). The other one gets to hold all of my primary computer equipment. Out in the living room, one socket has a couple lamps and a cordless phone on it. The other has a TV, VCR, DVD player/home theater system, stereo, computer system, three videogame consoles, and (now) a Christmas tree plugged into it. The problem is that all the electronic stuff gets put in the same part of the room. It'd be nice to have an extra outlet or two along that wall in these rooms...
DennyK
we got extension cords runnin into our rooms from the kitchen circuit cause we overloaded our bedroom and becareful when turning on 19" crt's cause it cut's both rooms off hehe
Wow, what a good idea. It pisses me off to no-end that this didn't occur to me on my own.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Iv'e always wondered why you yanks use 120V. In Aus we have 240V 10amp sockets as standard. A lot more power 2500Watt, less current, wire costs and less fire hazzard.
Red eye's at night, Hackers delight. Red eye's in the morning, Professors Warning.
Iv'e always wondered why you yanks use 120V. In Aus we have 240V 10amp sockets as standard. A lot more power 2400Watt, less current, wire costs and less fire hazzard.
Red eye's at night, Hackers delight. Red eye's in the morning, Professors Warning.
I have what I think may be a unique situation, or at least close to it:
My studio is in our basement (nothing unusual about that I suppose). I've got a Mac and a PC, each with a CRT and the usual crop of peripherals. Then there's a fair amount of audio gear -- a 120-watt and 80-watt amp, an electric piano, a synth module, a small mixer, and a few other bits. And of course, a TV in case I get stir crazy with no windows (that is to say, glass-covered holes in the walls -- Windows XP doesn't do much to help with the blues).
Then throw in a 1500-watt space heater which has to run at least at the lowest setting at all times, since I live in Boston, and in the winter, without the heater, the temperature in the basement gets down to around freezing.
Now, all that is doable until the wife comes down to DO THE LAUNDRY. That's right -- there's a washer and dryer right near my desk. Yes, I know there are a million probably serious dangers lurking around this setup, but of most immediate concern to me is the fact that I can't work while the dryer is running -- combined with everything else, it usually pushes the circuit over the edge.
It's a bummer...
Try the ACE classes. It will work on any platform, even embeded ones (at least with the serial port). (the classes you would be interested in are ACE_DEV_IO and ACE_DEV_Connector).
This might help you get started but the full coffee maker howto is what you want to look for.
http://linuxselfhelp.com/HOWTO/mini/Coffee.html
Thanks; I checked it out, but both the mini and full HOWTO seem to have exactly the same text.
They both tell me how to make the computer control a device.
I want the device to control the computer!
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
But, yea, we used 10-outlet power strips anyway.
I could kill you, sure, but I could only make you cry with these words
- Storage batteries are not widely available in 48 VDC, so battery backup becomes a lot more expensive (a 12 VDC system can use any old deep-cycle battery, which is what I got to re-power my UPS when its gel cells died).
- Linear regulation for low-power, low-cost devices becomes far less efficient; the alternative is to make the cheapest power supply a lot more expensive.
Aside from that there is no strong reason to prefer either voltage for running low-power devices. As for powering the computer off an external PS which also runs outside peripherals, I think that the needs of the computer vary so much between types of units that a one-size-fits-all power brick would cause too many problems with the tradeoff between capacity and expense. The computer is a big enough load to merit its own PS (though it might share the backup battery with the peripheral brick).Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Standard construction in Thailand, where I live, has one [1] two[2]-holed electrical outlet per room, right next to the light switch by the door. Lots and lots of extension cords. In our bedroom the previous tenant had an air conditioner; we spliced the leftover power wires to an extension cord to create an outlet on that side of the room. Unless you have an electrician install the wiring, and watch him carefully, nothing is grounded, even if it's got three holes.
Well, mine does have _enough_ of them...but they're almost all _on the wrong side_. (The side with lots of outlets, including the cable TV feed and all the phone jacks, is the one which hosts the sofa and the lamps, while the one with all the computer and A/V hardware that so desperately wants to be fed power and bits has a measly two wall plates for power. Due to the odd geometry of the place, reversing the furniture arrangement would make it impossible to walk.)
I solve it by running long cables across the room, held above head height by wrapping them around the rafters (it's a loft).
When I was a [fulltime] student (5 years ago) my room in halls of residence had a single socket. But that's ok because the only thing I had to plug in was a desk lamp.
Why on earth does anyone need, like, 5 computers and a fridge in their bedroom?
I used the purpose built computing facilities (24hr access, nice and warm in winter too!) and the communal "kitchens".
Set the computers up at home and use ssh if you must.
To me this questions is like this: "I've got 15 cars, I'm having trouble garaging all the porsches and the ferrari, how can I get my university to pay my garaging bills?"
Anyway, end of rant.
Take it from a guy who had far too much distracting crap in his dorm room, get rid of everything. Get a laptop and a telephone and leave everything else home. No TV, no stereo, no CD's, no DVD, no Playstation, no microwave, no fridge. They're all a waste of time and space in the end, and you have to move them many times up and down several flights of stairs.
Keep the posters down to a minimum and bring enough clothes for 2 weeks, 1 casual dress outfit and maybe a suit if you're going to go to formals.
Go to the mess hall, it's really faster than cooking. Study in the library and learn to just sleep in your dorm room. You're there to learn and get grades, not to build a temple to Jim Morrison.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I have 6-way power strips coming from every outlet in my apartment, and of those, I think one socket is free.
I need one more coax outlet in my apartment (the one I have is already split between cable modem and 2 TV's) and could even do with another telephone socket.
Some patch panels would be nice too, so that the entire bottom half of my apartment doesn't have to be on wireless.
Oh and can someone fix the quality of the wiring so that my X10 devices work reliably?
I guess I really need to buy my own house and have the electricians in....
#include <sig.h>
I saw this on the local news just yesterday. How annoying this whole discussion is.. The recommendation was to only use the available sockets = safe?! The news was saying don't put more than 6 sockets in a six socket power-strip. Now /.'ers are saying "don't chain power-strips" and "I only have two free sockets in my room".
It is very simple for geeks to do all the necessary computations involved here..
Power(W) = Volt(V) * Current(A)
RMS is not same as AC is not the same as DC, but power ratings pretty much are
In the dorms, avoid halogen lamps and large CRTs (especially turning on and off)
Christmas lights (indoor-type) use very little wattage and you can chain tons of them together.
Your circuit breaker in a modern building WILL trip before you ever have a problem, so use as many power-strips until the power goes out.
Perhaps this is an appropriate discussion in which to ask: Can somebody explain the difference between Watts and Volt-Amps?
(You give the example of a 400 W computer running on 120 VAC consuming a max of 3.33 A. While your math makes sense to me, UPS manufacturers always rate their gear in VA instead of W. Why?)
myselfmusic
Try the ACE classes. It will work on any platform, even embeded ones (at least with the serial port). (the classes you would be interested in are ACE_DEV_IO and ACE_DEV_Connector).
Thanks for the heads-up, but this is way beyond me. I've looked at the header files doxygen documentation, but I still can't see how to integrate it into something like:
#include "$EVERYTHING_SO_THAT_gcc_SHUTS_UP"
void main() {
if (ttyS0.flags("CTS")){
cout << "1";
} else {
cout << "0";
}
}
Heh... I don't know much about programming, besides what I've read in K&R and the courses I had to take in university. And when I have to code, my style is so much brute force and ignorance that Microsoft keeps on trying to hire me to join the Outlook team.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Found it! A great little program which will report the status of pins on serial ports. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/86 223
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
My father, an electrical engineer, was surprised when I showed him my electrician's reference book containing formulas for things like load balancing. He thought, for big jobs, electricians worked off pre-made plans drawn up by someone "educated" who did the calculations for them.
Heheh... must have blown him away to learn that you can do almost all AC circuit analysis without having to take the square root of a negative number even once... and still have the circuit work!
I imagine many PhDs think carpenters don't know anything about structural engineering, or that auto mechanics are totally ignorant of mechanical engineering. Ivory-tower arrogance can sometimes work just like thick-headed stupidity.I agree completely. Some of the engineers I've worked with have had the same mentality. One in particular, a very recent top-of-his-class graduate from a respectable mechanical engineering school, had a particular need to try to spoon-feed a machine shop full of guys who'd already had a decade of experience before he was born.
While the guy I'm thinking about is a particularly stellar example, to a lesser extent, I know lots of people from university whose career choices were made because, "Well, the guidance counsellor said that I was good at math and physics, so I should do engineering".
These are people who never played with Lego, and didn't ask for tools for Chrismakkah. To me, that's a more important engineering prerequisite than calculus, since calculus can be learned; mechanical/electrical/etc aptitude simply cannot.
Engineering is a tough course. I know first-hand. But it doesn't make you more intelligent, or more creative - education cannot do that (if anything, education seems to stifle creativity - look at PhDs). All it does is teach you a lot of stuff, show you a new way of thinking about problems, and work you nearly to death.
Lots of the smartest guys I've known are the blue-collar guys who build, install and service the stuff I design. We hang around together, drinking beer, shooting the shit, and working on each others' vehicles. I like hanging around on the floor, working alongside them, learning from their experience, and I like when they hang around in my office, looking over my shoulder and trying to understand a pile of math or seeing OrCAD on my monitor. The janitor hated all the oily bootprints on my carpet, so I picked up a runner.
I expect them to tell me when they think a design or procedure can be improved. They help me make a product more reliable, more durable, cheaper to assemble or easier to fix.
For the most part, a good (wo)man with relevent skills (electrician or technician, machinist, structural ironworker, etc.) can do by eyeball ("Yup, that'll hold") most of the work of an engineer.
When surrounded by good people, the work of the engineer is to optimize and certify the design through careful mathematical analysis. And a good engineer will bridge the gap between white-collar management types and the blue-collar guys who actually build the company's products.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
It's called The Library. Not only are there desks there, but you don't have to block out the ambient noise of three idling computers in an enclosed concrete 10' by 8' space.
Meant to do this for a while, but never got around to it.
I have a great old 1950s Quik-Frez fridge which I updated a long time ago with a new (R-134) Amana compressor, new insulation, homebuilt electronic thermostat, little bit of Bondo to fill the dents, and a fresh coat of paint. Looks brand new, works even better.
The problem is, as much as I love it, I can never get around to defrosting it (no way to easily add defrost heaters to the ice box). And it's a little small for food and stuff.
The sound of my computers drives me insane, but I'm not going to go to the silent PC trouble, or water cooling, etc. So what I've been meaning to do is put a small hole for wires in the bottom of the fridge and install the computers inside it. With the door closed, it would be silent (I stuck a power supply connected to a pair of old Seagate ST-225 5.25" hard disks inside to try). The thermostat could be set to keep the interior about 50F, or turned off altogether if the interior temperature doesn't get out of hand.
The only real problem is the accessibilty of the backs of the machines for cables and stuff.
It's not an issue right now, though. Most of my computers now live in a laundry/furnace room on the other side of a wall from my monitor and keyboard, so hopefully this will give someone an idea of what to do with a cool old fridge.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.