Year: 2013

When I moved into my house 16 years ago, the furnace was already old, but it worked. The air conditioner was not as old, but it worked too. I had a Georgia Power energy consultant come by back then who said the air conditioner wasn’t that bad. It’s not a name brand of any kind, and I have had to call the repair man a couple of times, but for the most part the system has been pretty reliable. I’m not sure how efficient, but the bottom line is I don’t spend a huge amount on heating and cooling throughout the year, maybe $500 based on the increased usage of power and gas during the summer and winter respectively. So if it wastes energy, it isn’t costing me much.

But when I replaced my refrigerator and started saving a significant chunk of electricity every month, I started thinking I could do better. And that’s true to some extent except that the air conditioner only runs hard for about three months whereas the refrigerator runs all year long. Plus the refrigerator was pretty cheap compared to central air conditioning system.

The other thing is that there are federal tax credits for making your home more efficient, and Georgia Power offers rebates for improvements as well. When I replaced the windows in my house I found that additional cost for meeting the federal tax credits was way more than the tax credit itself and the differences in performance were pretty minor. So for windows I didn’t even try to get the credits, even though the new double pane windows were a big improvement over the original single pane ones.
Continue reading “New Air Conditioner”

A guy came through the neighborhood recently offering home energy assessments. He would do an assessment and then use that data to determine what kind of improvements could be made to increase the energy efficiency of the house, the cost being offset somewhat by Georgia Power rebates and federal tax credits. My air conditioner is over 20 years old and the furnace may well be original from 1950’s. Some of the solutions his company offers are sealing ductwork, adding insulation, and encapsulating crawlspaces, so you kind of know going in what the recommendations are going to be.

Encapsulation means they completely seal off the crawlspace. Usually you want to keep a crawlspace ventilated so that moisture and mold don’t build up, although in winter, when the air is dry, it is okay and maybe recommended to shut the vents (some vents automatically shut during cold weather). With encapsulation the house is sitting on an insulating bubble of air. To keep moisture at bay, they completely seal the dirt floor using plastic sheeting and tape and then glue the edges of the sheeting to the walls and columns. There is already a vapor barrier down of plastic sheeting, but the encapsulation is supposed to be nearly airtight. To keep the bubble of air in the crawlspace from losing heat or cooling, they insulate the inside of the exterior walls of the foundation with an inch of spray foam. Encapsulating like this can be more effective than just putting insulation between the floorboards of the house, which is sometimes recommended (I don’t have any insulation under the floor now). There may also be some amount of air conditioning or dehumidification involved in the encapsulated crawlspace. One nice side effect of encapsulation is it also keeps bugs and other critters out of the crawlspace which has been a problem in the past.
Continue reading “Energy Audit”

I got my new camera today. It was overcast, but the sun wouldn’t set for another hour and a half, so I went ahead and took a picture outside on the back porch. From about 20 feet away, I zoomed all the way in with both cameras aimed at the box the new camera came in. While the Samsung has a bigger and better photo sensor and a higher quality lens, the Canon has a much greater zoom at 10x instead of 2.5x. The Canon claims 14 megapixel resolution and the Samsung 20 megapixels, so maybe the sensor could make up a little for the disparity in zooming ability. Not really. I cropped out 400×300 portions of the pictures taken by both cameras and saved them as jpg files. Here’s the Samsung:

and here is the Canon:

It’s really too ugly a day to much more in comparison, plus the Samsung is kind of complicated, so I need to figure some stuff out. Both pictures have a good bit of noise which isn’t that surprising at full resolution. The picture I took was in smart mode, which is the automatic mode. I do have to manually zoom in by turning the ring on the lens, but it took care of the focus and exposure. Both cameras were sitting on a stool and took pictures on timer so there would be no shaking.

Here is the data from each picture, automatically selected by each camera:

	Canon	Samsung
f-stop:	f/5.6	f/5.6
shutter:	1/13 sec	1/40 sec
ISO:	800	800

I had my old camera for a while. It was a Canon SX100IS. It had a really nice zoom lens (10x), took nice pictures (8 megapixels or MP), and had a lot of neat features. One of the features was a panorama assist mode where it would help you take panorama pictures by showing you the edge of the previous picture so that you could line things up using the screen to get enough overlap between pictures. When I lost that camera this year, I wanted to get something similar. Jeb had gotten one in that series as well, but it was maybe a SX130. When I went shopping there was a SX160 out, but the SX150 was cheaper, so I got it, surprised it was only about $115. It had a little more zoom power (12x) and took higher resolution photos (14 MP). It uses 2 AA batteries, meaning I can have plenty of backups available and they don’t require a special charger or overpriced replacements. I’ve had that camera for several months now and took it on my trip out west where I really put it to work.

However, the new camera isn’t quite the same, which maybe isn’t surprising since it was about half the price. It lost the panoramic stitch feature (which I missed out west, trying to do it a couple of times without assistance and not getting any usable results; one other trick is to make sure the exposure settings are locked so that all the pictures have the same exposure). Also I had a hard time getting the exposure to work out right and found I was needing to tweak it constantly, trying to get it just a little darker or a little lighter to get a good result. I still managed to get some good pictures. Also, conditions were challenging with overcast skies most of the time and a lot of pictures taken late in the day without a lot of light, which is a challenge for any camera. But one time I was taking a picture of a lake that looked pretty green to me and it came out brown. I knew I could do better than this.

Continue reading “Better Camera”

Hotlinking is a practice where you insert an image on the web somewhere by using the address of an image that is on another server that doesn’t belong to you. Many forums ban hotlinking, but many others don’t care. If it is a product for sale I don’t feel like the person selling the product would care that much since it is helping to get word out about the product, but I still think it is wrong. To me it is better to copy the image and put it on my own server and then link to someone else’s and use their bandwidth, though I realize not everyone has a server. Even that is wrong. For the Flashlight Wiki, I always get permission to use someone’s picture, give them credit, and host it on the site. There are websites that let you host images for just this purpose like photobucket, but there are restrictions.

Going over the web use statistics for Flashlight Wiki, I was finding a huge number of referrals from an Indonesian website. I was getting over 4,000 hits from that page. Plus the page had a couple of other versions that were generating another 1,000 hits. But these weren’t real referrals, they were just hotlinking images stored on flashlightwiki.com. This page did at least have the Flashlight Wiki listed as a source and 25 people clicked on that link to see the original page.

The page was actually a translation of another page with extensive hotlinking done on Budget Light Forum. That post generated another 2,000 hits and no actual referrals because the author didn’t include a link to the wiki. Here is one of the images that was used (hotlinked!):

Ultimately, I’m not being hurt that much. I get a certain allowance from my web host service for bandwidth and I only go up to about 10% of the maximum allowed. But the hotlinking represents more than half of the referrals from sites that are not search engines.

One way to combat hotlinking is to swap out the image being hotlinked with another one then the page using the image will see the new image. It might say “NO HOTLINKING” or “IMAGE REMOVED” or something like that. There are some great ideas out there if you look for hotlinking images. One time Jeb accidentally hotlinked an image for one of his websites and the indignant site owner swapped out an image of a hamburger, just to send a message. I thought that was pretty funny, so here is what the Indonesian page discussing LED’s (which hotlinks a bunch of images, including the one above) now looks like:

The only thing is that my wiki is using that picture as well, so I had to upload a copy of the correct picture to the wiki and then link my pages to the new image (interestingly, the wiki software won’t let you upload two images of the same thing, so I had to change the original image first and then upload the old image, so for a few minutes the wiki was showing the new image). None of the wiki pages link to the old image anymore. So it was kind of a pain, but a fun way to send a message.