The Quarky Engineer

Time to build a few more UPS batteries.

When I installed all of the electrical panels (12 of them), I put an extra box below each one to hold some monitoring equipment. I also ran 2 conduits from the panel to the box.

I’m starting to wire up some monitoring equipment. The goal is to have current/voltage/power/power factor measurements on every circuit in the house. The measuring device I decided to use is call IotaWatt, and is an open source design that has a commercial production version.

https://iotawatt.com/

Each device can measure 14 channels using clip on current probes. The device has built in Wifi, and supports streaming directly to my InfluxDB instance which is then displayed with Grafana. Best of all the price for a 14 channel device with current clamps is around $280. Given that I need 14 of them that makes a difference.

I ordered one to test back in February and I have that unit partially installed now. Very easy configuration, plug and play sensors, and pretty wide support for different current probes.

Alan LaFrance commented in my post a few weeks back about my use of folding tables in my microelectronics lab. Fixed!

I suppose these are getting close to the final pictures of the outside. Still more landscaping to do in the back, but at least most things are now painted. The hillside we planted for erosion control is doing well and will be cut on Thursday. Long term I need to decide what to do with those areas.

The view sitting on the back deck is perhaps the part of the house I like the most. Since the deck is about 20 feet off the ground it feels like being up in the canopy of the trees. It is serene, quiet, and hard to believe we are in the city of Portland. If I sit out there late at night the only thing I hear is the wind in the trees.

I have been working on getting the infrastructure for the driveway lights setup. Before paving I ran 1″ conduit along the driveway such that about every 100ft it pops up at a post such that it can feed an outlet as well as feed a conduit that goes across to the other side. Since I have power at the house and the gate, the driveway is fed from each far end so the max distance is about 500ft from each meter to the farthest plug.

The boxes on one side have three conduits – one in, one out to the next box, and one across the driveway to the other side. I used some flex pipe for connecting them to the conduit since the conduit was not lined up perfectly.

My plan is to pull 4 either 10 or 12 gauge wires along the conduit path so I have 240V if I need it, but wire the normal 120V outlets such that one side of the driveway is one 120v leg and the other side is the other 120v leg. Voltage drop isn’t a huge issue as I suspect I’ll need somewhere around 6 amps at 120Vs for the lights and the lights are driven at 12v by a switching power supply that can handle down to about 60vs. 500ft with 10g at 6 amps is ~5% drop.

I am really enjoying having a dedicate server room at home. I’m slowly getting the infrastructure setup. I built up a new pair of Dual Xeon VM servers and a dedicated SAN over a pair of 10G links. I added some more memory so my compute node has 512GBs of RAM. I spun up 10x 12TB drives for the compute storage array… and I have my VLANs getting close to ready to deploy.

A great way to spend a Saturday evening.