Energy monitoring - deal from NSTAR

[Rich Braun]

This evening I remembered an article which caught my eye in the Sunday Globe;
it turns out there is a short-term discount available to us geeks who like to
tinker with low-power devices (or big mondo-power ones like the PDP-6 one of
my DEC friends once tried to buy, over his wife's dead body).

This is a device with an LCD display that would fit in with any other wireless
gadgeteria you might have from Brookstone or Sharper Image.  What it does is
provide a real-time feed from your electric meter.  You can put this display
next to your PC or bed or TV or wherever, or carry it around with you, and
know how much current all your lights and computers and treadmills and
wall-warts are drawing.

In the past I've posted about the popular P3 Kill-A-Watt device, which
measures one device at a time.  By measuring the whole house, you can derive
the consumption of any given device by turning it off to see how much the
overall consumption drops.  Sounds a bit more convenient.

More importantly, this is something you can keep in place all the time, and
use it to remind you about whatever you (or the kids or other family members)
have forgotten to turn off.

There are a number of such devices on the market but they tend to cost upwards
of $200 - more than you're likely to save in a year or two on your electric
bills.

The article mentioned a $29.95 price tag; I googled and couldn't find
*anything* in this price range.  But I finally remembered where I saw the
article, went to the website (got the $150 list price) and then entered my
electric utility name (NSTAR).  That gave me the steep discount.

I'll post more about this once I get mine to see how well it works and how it
compares to the Kill-A-Watt.

Interested?  You have to place the order before 30-Jun unless they extend the
promotional period.  Find it at NSTAR's website, their home page talks about a
PowerCost Monitor.  There are other electric utilities in MA/NH, I'm not sure
if the others have the same promotion; to get the discount you have to enter
your utility service account number.

Now back to Linux...  I've been biting my tongue watching the flamefest about
MySQL.  I happen to be consulting for a company that handles a whole lotta
webhits with its MySQL servers.  Haven't tried to quantify performance at this
point, though.  Today a coworker had me run a script to post a couple Kb to
each of 570,000 records, it took over 7 hours on a Dell 2950 (16Gb RAM,
2.66GHz quad Xeon)--I suspect the script could be more efficient, I doubt that
swapping out the database would make that much difference.  But like most of
the others here flaming on this topic:  I'm not a DB guru.

-rich


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