Conservation via HA...

[Digger]

The best way I've found to save money is to use HomeSeer to ensure that my thermostats do not get turned lower than 74 in the summer and above 74 in the winter. My wife and especially kids love to "flip" the thermostat way up and down. HomeSeer monitors this and immediately adjust it back down.

I wish I had your energy costs. My monthly electric bill is $300 down from over $350 last year and my monthly gas bill is $105 down from $150 a few years ago.

 

[forgets]

I'm interested in your fanless mini-ATX computer... especially after my Kill-A-Watt told me how much $$$ I spend on my CPU. How did you acquire it? Do you have any links?

Sure, my home automation server is a mini-itx (not atx) they're kind of a new breed of computer, it's only 6.7 inches by 6.7 inches (the tradeoff being you can't switch processors, and you only have 1 pci slot), and they even have nano-itx now, which is even smaller, my system is a 1.2 ghz jetway HYBRID J7F2WE1G2E which is fanless, so couple that with a fanless enclosure, 1gb of ram, and a pretty quiet hard drive ( i have a wd caviar 250gb) and you really have to be right up next to it to even hear it, and even then it's just the hard-drive.. i'm powering mine with a 60 watt fanless psu, all inside a 1u case, so it's very small and slim and quiet.. and it doesn't use much power to boot (i don't think i've ever seen it use all 60 watts).
the thing with mini-itx is that it's not going to allow you to play games on it, i use mine to stream music through my concerto to 3 different sources, and it doesn't strain the processor, neither premise sys, which i'm trying out for home automation rules, since it's free.. ! i have mine with a ad4com daughterboard, which means it has 6 onboard com connectors, so it can control a lot of things.. it's a pretty sweet machine..

if you go to mini-itx.com and mini box.com, you can get a sense of what the motherboards look like, and of course, you can buy easily on ebay just search for mini-itx or jetway fanless to see the one i have..

as for the water heater, i'd like to go solar on that, but i have reservations about having all the tubes and the collector sticking up out of the roof especially since we just entered hurricane season.. plus i see the titan tankless water heaters on ebay all the time (plenty of other companies just rebadge them as their own) on buy it now for $220 and it's an install i could easily tackle myself.. and it's a lot less moving parts.. just like to know if you ever got your solar system hooked up through the elk, and how much that's cost you, if it's in a ballpark i could do, i'd really like to consider going solar.. can you give me any links to who you've used, and how deep are the discounts you're talking about.. thanks!

 

[hult]

Sure, my home automation server is a mini-itx (not atx) they're kind of a new breed of computer, it's only 6.7 inches by 6.7 inches (the tradeoff being you can't switch processors, and you only have 1 pci slot),

I have three different VIA EPIA mini-ITX motherboards (including a pair of the original ones) all of which can be fitted with two PCI cards. EPIA and others make a two-fer PCI slot extension.

Also, the pair of EPIA MII-1200's I have also have a PCMCIA and compact flash connectors built in, giving one (effectively) three+ slots. Be forewarned though, that you should divide by about 2 the VIA EPIA processor speeds to get rough approximation of P4 performance. There are Duo and P4 versions from other manufacturers that are faster (but use more power).

Here's a link to a mini-ITX power calculator that lets you virtually build up and assess power consumption of a mini-itx configuration with drives and so forth.

http://resources.mini-box.com/online/power...rsimulator.html

The mini-ITX is 17 x17 cm
VIA has since come out with the nano-ITX which is 12 x 12cm a
and has nnounced the pico-ITX 10 x 7.2 cm

http://www.via.com.tw/en/initiatives/spearhead/pico-itx/

HTH ...Marc

 

[politics123]

as for the water heater, i'd like to go solar on that, but i have reservations about having all the tubes and the collector sticking up out of the roof especially since we just entered hurricane season.. plus i see the titan tankless water heaters on ebay all the time (plenty of other companies just rebadge them as their own) on buy it now for $220 and it's an install i could easily tackle myself.. and it's a lot less moving parts.. just like to know if you ever got your solar system hooked up through the elk, and how much that's cost you, if it's in a ballpark i could do, i'd really like to consider going solar.. can you give me any links to who you've used, and how deep are the discounts you're talking about.. thanks!

Alas, I have a 12-12 roof 35' high... getting panels up that far requires some speciality equipment. So, I've hired a Pro in the $5k range for a dual-panel, closed loop, drainback system.

Check Out: www.kingsolar.com for great products. A simple 4x8 setup is ~$2600 plus shipping. If you have a flat roof, this is pretty easy to install.
Incentives: http://www.dsireusa.org/library/includes/i...p;RE=1&EE=0
It says you can get a $500 Florida Incentive. You also can get a 30% federal tax rebate ( (2600-500)*.30=630) for a net DIY cost of around $1470 + S/H. I didn't realize tankless systems were that inexpensive on EBAY. When I priced out a Bosch, it was in the $2k range!

I'm going to use a Goldline differential controller for mine. Until Elk ships a 1-wire interface, there isn't much hope of doing this within an Elk.