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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
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
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
...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...."
holy crap you are giving him bad advice.
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.
so your lack of knowledge is dooming this guy to have sub-standard wiring. Very Nice of you.
most quality whole house surge supressors are at least 20 times more effective than the crap you can buy even for $100.00 as a plug in strip.
My IsoBar whole house supressor with replaceable surge and filter modues was not the top of the line for whole house and still had ratings that were far higher than even the "audiophile" quality power strips.
plus it's reaction time is at least 300% better so the power spikes dont get past it... unlike all power strips as they lack a solid ground to drop the surge to... they can be fast but they dont have a ground that is effective for dropping a 4000 volt spike.
I really feel for people buiulding a house and taking advice from amateurs that really dont know what they are talking about.
USE WHOLE HOUSE supression, period. if you have a home theatre, add a second whole house supressor and noise filter if you really think you need it.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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!
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
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.