mending things

I am on an Economy 7 electricity tariff. E7 , as it's abbreviated, offers lower cost electricity at night, but with slightly higher day rate and standing charge. The original reason for E7 was so the Electricity providers to reduce the peak demand. In very general terms, the electricity we are using now is being generated now. This means that the grid has to anticipate peak demand, fro example the ad break in the middle of "Coronation Street" , when millions of viewers get up and switch electric kettles on. By encouraging people to use electricity during off-peak times i.e at night, less generators have to be bought online. Also the mix of generators determines the amount of CO2. For live CO2 data from the grid see http://realtimecarbon.org/ You can see that the mount of CO2 released in grams per unit is at it's lowest at night. Also lowering peak demand means less power stations needing to be built The biggest household use of electricity is heating water and space ...

Over the years I have accumulated a number of old PC hard drives. Some were mine, other from neighbours & friends who asked if I could "fix their PC". It occurred to me that I had a burden of responsibility for these disks, if someone got hold of them they might be able to extract confidential data. In each case I had determined that the disk was dead or dieing, having failed the manufacturers full surface test (via Ultimate Boot CD - UBCD ), but conceivably the disk could be attached and read on another computer. They might contain personal data - so I decided to put these disks beyond recovery. First you have to dismantle the hard drive. this involves removing all external stickers from the disk , and with a torx driver (purchased from your local hardware shop - in my case the always helpful W. C. Baker of Fleet ), remove all the bolts which hold it together. An excellent video of how to dismantle a similar hard drive is here : Once the disk is in bits th...

My latest gadget, which I have had for a few months is the Current Cost CC128 . This device displays how much electricity we use , in real time. It also gathers historical data which I can download to a computer for analysis. There are quite a number of these type of devices from Owl, Wattson and others and they all work in broadly the same manner. The device has a display unit , as seen in the picture. It communicates with a sensor which you install alongside your electricity meter via a wireless connection. The sensor unit has a clamp which loosely attaches around the cable leaving your electricity meter. That's it ! Takes about 2 minutes to install and does not require an electrician. Nor does it interfere with your electrical supply or wiring in any way. Completely non invasive. I had previously had an Owl device which worked very well, but did not record historical data. I passed this unit on to my mother-in-law who is using it in France, where it also works well. I chose the...