Where should electric car charging points be located

eCar Charger Coolmine

Apparently electric cars are set to become much more common in Ireland in the near future.  However, before this can happen there will need to be a network of charging points for electric cars located at convenient locations throughout the country. The ESB is currently rolling out a series of such charging points.

Obviously such charging points are going to be located at Motorway service stations to facilitate motorists who are trying to undertake a long journey across the country. I was also interested to see that one has been installed in the "Park and Ride" facility attached to Coolmine rail station (near where I live). The idea must be that they expect that local commuters will use their eCars for the short trip to get to the rail station before taking the train.

This seems like a sensible idea, however the only problem is that the charging point is located in the area reserved for disabled drivers. Do the ESB expect that eCars will only be driven by disabled drivers or do they plan to give eCar drivers special permission to use the disabled parking spots?

Hackday is coming again

As I have mentioned on my blog previously, Hackday is a wonderful event which is held at IBM each year. The general idea is to see what cool "hacks" employees can build in a single day. These events are a wonderful way to encourage innovation and also build morale because employees get to work on a fun project of their own choosing. I have been involved in the Hackday event since shortly after it started and I entered every Hackday since Hackday 2. As a result I once was awared the title "The Oldest Hacker in Town" in recognition of my long term commitment to the contest.

This years event "Hackday 9" is scheduled to take place next Friday and the newly redesiged contest site is now up and running for employees to register their projects (unfortunately the site is not accessible outside IBM). Although there is a local event planned for the Dublin lab I don't think I will be able to take part myself this year due to the fact that I will be on a course. However, you can rest assured that I will definitely be thinking of all the IBM hackers and I will also be helping out with the judging process later.

Variable rate mortgages are fundamentally unjust

The vast majority of mortgages offered by Irish banks are variable rate mortgages, so most consumers have no option but to choose one. However, I have always struggled to see how this system could be considered fair. Consumers have to choose a lender based upon what rate they are currently charging, but since the rate will change several times over the life of the mortgage there is no guarantee that the lender they choose will be cheapest overall.

The way this system works is that the banks constantly alter the rate of interest that they charge mortgage holders based upon the rate that the bank have to pay on the inter-bank markets to borrow money (plus a profit margin of course). It might seem at first glance that this is fair, but surely the bank only need to source money on the inter-bank markets when they give out new mortgages rather than constantly through the life of a mortgage. If most mortgages are for a term of 20 years or more, this means that on average mortgage holders took out their mortgages about 10 years ago and hence the inter-bank rates charged 10 years ago are more relevant than the inter-bank rates now.

It could be argued that consumers are free to choose which bank they want to get a mortgage from, but since consumers need to pay considerable administrative fees to switch from one mortgage provider to another, they don't really have a choice to switch from one bank to another in the middle of the term of the loan. Some banks exploit this fact by offering new customers a special introductory offer for the first year, which means that they are using their existing customers (who have no choice) to subsidise potential new customers (who do have a choice). Surely this is grossly unfair and should not be allowed!

A few Irish banks offer fixed rate mortgages where the interest rate is fixed for a limited term (e.g. 3 or 5 years), but since most consumers want a mortgage over 20 years or more this is of limited value to consumers. I wonder why no Irish bank offers customers the option to lock the interest rate for the entire life of the mortgage - banks in other countries offer this. 

How much energy does it take to watch television

The Individual Appliance Monitor (IAM) I ordered from Current Costs arrived yesterday. This is a device that I can insert between the plug of an appliance and the wall socket that will then send data to my home electricity monitoring system about how much electricity is being consumed by the device(s) plugged into this socket. This will enable me to analyse the power consumption of individual devices more accurately. The first thing I decided to look at was the amount of energy being consumed by the television in my living room.

I have often heard people say that it is possible to save a significant amount of power by completely switching off your television rather than just leave it on stand-by where it can be switched back on again with the remote. I have always been sceptical of this information and the measurement from the IAM indicate that it is not drawing any power while in stand-by mode (or at least the power being consumed was too small to register and the IAM is capable or registering a single watt of power). Therefore, I conclude that it is not worth my while to unplug the TV from the wall every night.

When I turn on the TV, but leave the cable decoder box switched off the TV begins to consume about 100 watts of power (it is showing a blank screen). When I switch on the cable decoder box and begin watching something on the screen, the amount of power being consumed by the TV increases to about 200 watts. Therefore leaving my TV permanently switched on would cost about 20 euro per month, which would be a significant amount of money to waste.

I get television service from UPC and the package I have signed-up for includes the ability to automatically record all episodes of a program. Naturally for this feature to work I need to leave the decoder box constantly connected to power and in stand-by mode. When the box is completely in stand-by mode it consumes about 8 watts of power, but once it is either switched on or starts to record a program from my preferences its power consumption raises to about 20 watts. Therefore the TV recording service is effectively costing me between 1 and 2 euro per month in power in addition to the subscription costs from my cable provider. I think this is quite reasonable.

Circles, Friends and Followers

There has been a lot of interest in the recent launch of Google+ social networking service. One of the features that has gained most attention is the fact that  Google+ use the concept of circles to track the relationships between people as distinct from how Facebook uses Friends and Twitter uses Followers. However, many people are confused about how Google+ uses circles so I thought it might be helpful to write a brief explanation.

Facebook was originally based upon a simple model of symmetric friend links, this means that for if Tom is Jane's friend then Jane must also be Tom's friend. It is for this reason that when you add a new friend on Facebook the other person must confirm that they also wish to add you as a friend. This simple model of friendship works well for the friendships that we establish in school (and hence it is a good match for Facebook which originally was most used within a school setting). However, real world relationships are much more complex and hence mode advanced models of social relationships are sometimes needed.

Not all friendships are the same. For example, most people would have different criterion for what they would be comfortable sharing with their work colleagues and what they would like to share with their close friends and family members. For this reason, Facebook introduced a feature called 'lists' where you can divide your friends into different catergories. When you share something on Facebook you can choose whether you want to share it with all of your friends or else restrict it to only the members of a particular list. Since this feature was not originally in Facebook when it launched many users are not even aware of its existence and hence they tend to share everything with all of their friends (and this is the default anyway).

The other weakness in the Facebook friendship model is the fact that it is not necessary true that the people whose updates you would like to read are the same as the people whom you are happy to allow read what you post to the site (Facebook uses your friend list for these two different purposes). Systems like Twitter recognise this difference by implementing asymmetric links that they call 'followers'. By default all updates sent to Twitter can be read by anyone. If I add someone to my 'follow' list it simply means that I would like their updates to appear in my default stream and does not imply that there is any relationship between us. For example, I follow the Dalai Lama on Twitter because I am interested in reading the profound thoughts that His Holiness posts to twitter, but I have no reason to think that His Holiness is interested in reading the boring stuff that I post. For this reason the Dalai Lama has over 2.5 million followers on Twitter, although he doesn't follow anyone.

Google circles are asymmetric links (like Twitter) because you can add anyone you want to your circles and there is no need for them to approve this and/or add you to one of their circles. However, Google circles are not like Twitter follow lists because circles are used to control who can read your updates as well as whose updates are presented to you in your default stream. Everytime you post something to Google+ you are asked to specify which of your circle's members should be allowed to read the update (there is a special group called 'public' that you can share with if you don't care who reads this update).

By default Google+ shows you all of the updates you are allowed to see from any of the people in any of your groups, but you can also click on a circle name to only show updates from people who are in that circle. Therefore in order for you to see a particular update it will be necessary that you have added the person who posted the update to one of your circles and it will also be necessary for you to be a member of one of the circles that the person posting the update chose to share it with. Hence the logo shows intersecting circles.

My trip of a life time

I have been quite actively blogging in the past while, but for the next 3 weeks I will probably not be active on the internet very much because I am going to be on holiday in South Africa.

I am very excited because this will be my first trip south of the equator and I expect that it will be a very different country, especially during the Safari we have planned. In addition I will be meeting up with an old friend from school and college whom I had lost touch with until recently.

I am sure I will have lots of lovely pictures to share when I come back because my sister has given me the loan of her fancy DSLR camera to ensure we capture all of the adventures.

What is happening in my house when I am not there?

My ENVIr energy monitor system from Current Cost is constantly monitoring my electric usage and posting these statistics to the CurrentCost web site where I can view lots of interesting graphs.

I was recently away from the house for a few days, so it was interesting to see how much electricity was being used when there was nobody in the house. As you can see from the screenshot below, their is constant electricity usage rate of roughly 170 watts (probably a sign of the large number of electronic devices on stand-by).

I wondered what this background electricity usage is costing me. For simplicity sake I assumed 30 days in a month, so 170 watts would equate to 122.4 Kilowatt-hours (170x24X30/1000).  If I assume that my electricity rate is around €0.14 per Kilowatt-hour this means that I am using about €17 worth of electricity before I even switch anything on. This is not a huge amount of money, but it world be worth reducing if possible.

Every 2 hours or so the electricity jumps up by 100 watts or so for a period of about 10-15 minutes before dropping back again. I am not certain what causes that, but I guess it might be the fridge/freezer which needs to turn on its motor occasionally to keep the food cold.Again this might be worth investigating further, but I will have to wait until my individual appliance monitors arrive..

Banshee helps me listen to a more eclectic selection of music.

I normally use the Banshee music player that comes with Ubuntu to play background music while I work. I must say that I find its user interface very slick and easy to use (I would even say it is an improvement on the RhythmBox player that they used before).

I don't look very closely at the user interface and so it was only recently that I spotted that they have an unheard view on your music library which shows the tracks in your library that you have never listened to. I was amazed to see that I had 715 tracks in this category (out of slightly more than 1,000 tracks in total). I know this does not really mean that I never listened to these tracks, it means that I haven't listened to them since I upgraded to Banshee a few months ago.

But it still tells me that my music listening is not as diverse as it should be. As a result I have set the player to play random selections from my unheard list for the last few days and I have really being enjoying discovering old favourites, although it can be a little strange to hear the music switch from Metallica, to Vivaldi and then move on to Horslips.

My Electricity usage is now available on-line

My Current Cost bridge device arrived in the post so my electricity usage statistics are now being posted and stored on-line. The Current Cost Dashboard site allows me to draw many nice graphs to help me understand trends etc. Although my weather data is publicly visible, I decided that I ought not share my live electricity usage so freely because someone pointed out to me the electric usage data could identify whether or not someone is home which in turn could be helpful to burglars.

I will probably share some data on my historic usage, but unfortunately I can't do that yet because I don't have enough data uploaded yet to make the graphs interesting.

How much does it cost to cook at home

In my initial post about electricity consumption I compared the energy used by the various different ways of making a cup of coffee in the morning. Today I decided to look at the electricity consumption of the devices that I might use to cook something more substantial.

If I was cooking a fancy meal, I would use the fan oven which consumes about 2.5 Kilowatts when heating up and even when I turn off the oven the fan continues to circulate air which consumes about 65 watts. Large joints of meat can take several hours to cook. I know that the thermostat would probably switch off the oven several times during this period, but since electricity costs about 14 cent per Kilowatt-hour I can see the cost of cooking a joint could be significant (maybe the pre-cooked chickens are good value after all).

If I was cooking something smaller I would probably use the rings on the hob on top of the cooker. My cooker has both large and small rings to accommodate different size saucepans. I realised that there would be a difference in the amount of energy required to heat up the different size of ring, but I was surprised to see that the consumption of the larger ring (2 Killowatts) was over 50% higher than the amount required to heat the smaller rings (1.3 Kilowatts). So I must remember to use the smaller rings as much as possible.

The grill consumed about 1.8 Kilowatts, while the toaster only consumed about 780 watts. The means that the toaster is much more efficient at toasting bread especially since the bred will be toasted faster in the toaster than under the grill.

The Microwave oven consumes about 1.6 Kilowatts when switched to full power. However, since it cooks food much faster than conventional cooking it probably would save money to use it whenever possible.

The clothes drier is the one device that I really expected to consume a lot of electricity because I have often heard complain about how wasteful this device is. However, I measured that it only consumed about 1.2 Kilowatts. I suppose that if you really want to be environmentally friendly you would put your washing in the drier and eat a cold meal. This would be more fuel efficient than hanging your clothes out to dry in the open and eating a hot meal.