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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?"
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.