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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?"
It's also very dangerous, and may be against your institutions fire or helath and safety rules.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Ahh, I had a friend in much the same situation as you last year.. for an entire room, he had only two sockets in the wall. So he promptly daisy-chained together a couple of extension cables to accomodate his desktop computer (with 400W PSU, I might add), monitor, lamps, toaster, kettle, blender, laptop, 150W stereo hifi amp.. The room actually hummed, and similarly to you, the lights in the room would dim whenever he switched on too many things.
I have 6 plugs to work with (compared to 4 this year), which is just about ample for me with a few extension cables. I had a rather worrying incident last year when my computer would randomly lose power and go off whenever somebody switched on too many appliances downstairs.. But the one time that I switched my computer on in the morning and heard a loud *BANG* (had to replace the PSU after that), I thought again about the power situation.
Certainly in my case, there really should be more power in rooms.. and not only that but perhaps some safer wiring too - there are a lot of old buildings here that have electrical wiring that's just as old!
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.
If I had to build a house now, I would definitely recommend going overboard with the electricity, gas, aerial and cat 6 cabling.
:(
It's good advice. I regret not doing extra drops (cat 5e at the time) when remodeling. I have a minimum of 3 ports per room, and I find that I'm always running short. Coax for the television is even worse - the electrician who did that drop only did one drop per room. This is very inconvenient if you want to put the tv on the side of the room opposite the coax outlet.
The most important thing if you're doing new construction is when doing the blueprints, design the house so that all of your water, cable, and electricity runs are accessible, and centralized. Residential contractors build so that you won't want to do maintainance - they staple wires in place, embed pipes in concrete, and do other things to discourage you from "upgrading" your house. Don't forget to put electrical, networking, and cable in cabinets (you'd be surprised how handy that can be - I wish I had done it), and give your garage/attic/basement a double-helping of everything, plus a main feeder big enough to supply another sub-panel/subnet worth of power/bandwidth. In this case, I told the idiot architect to give me a 80amp run to the attic (don't ask me why, just run it), but he ended up omitting it and not telling me.
By coordinating all of your runs via a central location, and making sure that you can access it, you can leave room for future expansion. Better yet, locate all your networking equipment there also, and soundproof the sucker. I sort of have this arrangement now (centralized location), but all the runs are embedded in drywall
Remember, if you hire a contractor, YOU MUST CHECK THE WORK. If you hire an architect/general contractor to implement things, YOU MUST CHECK THE WORK. This is year 3 of living in this house, and I'm still fixing electrical problems, correcting defects in cabinetry, patching walls and stucco, and replacing worn out plumbing. No, I didn't hire these guys, if I had, I would have kept a closer eye on em.
anyways.. being conservative on the above figures.. I get 2070 watts drawn.. at 120 volts (average US voltage in the wall socket.)
My quarterly electricity bill is approximately 45 all year round. The power costs about 5.6p/kWh, so anybody with a calculator can determine that the power draw of this house averages about 400W.
Peak power usage for the house (excluding hardwired appliances, i.e. cooker, shower and washing machine) is less than 1kW. Perversely, I can draw 3kW from a single outlet (13A at 220v) - and there's four per room.
However, what I really want to know is how a student in a dorm room requires two to four times the power of a house with two geeks, a half dozen computers, plus our other toys.
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.
I've heard about universities as much as ten years ago banning even just having a refrigerator because the wiring couldn't keep up with every room having a refrigerator.
Rewiring old buildings is expensive, replacing them even more so, so people had to put up with restrictions. Many of these buildings may be several decades and possibly centuries old, so it may have been a while since the wiring has been given an update.
People say that, but it doesn't make any sense. North American outlets are generally rated and have breakers/fuses for 15A. Breakers on power bars are generally rated for 10A. Plugging a power bar into a power bar into a power bar, and sucking a few watts here and a few watts there with silly fat transformers driving wimpy low-power devices shouldn't cause any problems at all.
As soon as you hit 10A, your first breaker goes. As soon as you hit 15, the branch circuit breaker goes.
How is this dangerous?
Now if you're one of those nuts who's response to blowing a breaker is to put in a bigger breaker, then you'll heat up your wiring in the walls, make the insulation brittle and weak, until some day the insulation cracks, a short appears and that over-rated wire surrounded by dry, warm building materials bursts into flames.
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.
"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!
So the moral of the story: when you don't have enough outlets, make more. As a geek you have a instinctive understanding of electricity.
Umm. This is a dangerous suggestion man. Geeks may have an understanding of electricity, but certainly not instinctive. Unless a geek is an engineer or physics major, they probably shouldn't go fooling with building circuitry.
Then again, if we rid the world of a bunch of geeks, then there will be less competition for those tech jobs eh?
Weasly idea. Good one.
They fancy themselves "intelligent enough" to figure it out on their own and don't expect it to be at all complicated because, after all, uneducated folks do it. They then get stuck in this mindset and won't listen to explainations that sound "complicated" because they've already decided it should be easy. 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. 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.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
To carry 100A, engineers recommend at least #4 wire (0.232" dia.) so that it doesn't get too hot. As we will see in this example #2/0 (two-aught) (0.414" dia) or bigger is a better choice.
The resistance of #2/0 is 0.15ohms/1000ft. Our run is 1000 feet (500 each way). For that length run at 100A, the voltage drop is 15.4V, so to get 12V we need a powersupply that outputs at least 27.4V. Our efficiency here is 43.79%. That sucks!
We'll try again with a bigger wire. 4/0 (0.552" dia) this time. The resistance is 0.049ohm/1000feet. Now we only need a 21.8V power supply and our efficiency is up to 55%. This still sucks compared to AC. Now imagine wiring a whole building like this. Perhaps we need 10,000A of DC power, we'd have to give up using copper and go to something with a lower resistance (silver for example). At $5.36/oz (current market price) that's just not feasable.
Sorry you loose.
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
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.
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.