Secrets of the Digital Universe
I feel I owe you all some resolution on several unanswered mysteries that have been plaguing me for the past few months. I have found over the past fifty years that the old medical school adage to “think horses, not zebras” is more true than not and and serves us well when trying to solve mysteries. The complicated conspiracy theory of the dead neighbor having set up a ruse to steal my electricity for his own use or to conceal an illegal marijuana grow operations was, admittedly a zebra. It only made sense if you assumed that the excess energy use on my meter was not the product of some unknown appliance of mine that could not be identified by my Sense tool I had installed or by the HVAC professionals who installed $25k-worth of new and energy-efficient HVAC equipment in the house or by the three Baker Electric technicians who had covered every inch of my electrical panels following their installation of $75k worth of leading-edge solar PV and two Tesla batteries. Those were the horse-wisperers and they had come up cold. But that’s when the fun began.
The Baker Boys had installed the Tesla batteries, not as designed by their engineer who argued with me until I accepted that the AC for the house could not be on the battery sub-panel since they would use too much juice to make the batteries a viable back-up system in the event of a grid failure. So they installed a work-around called a soft-start mechanism that would prevent the AC from surging and kicking the Tesla’s off (rendering the seamlessness of the battery backup more than a little silly). It seemed these soft-start mechanisms were not working (why would we think they would?) and while fiddling with them, this particular Baker Boy wondered why the primary FAU (forced air unit) was running even after the AC was shut down. He purposely tripped the circuit breaker for that unit and asked me to look at my Tesla power app to see what effect it had. It immediately reduced the power use by 2kW. This looked very promising.
I “invited” my friends from the HVAC company over the next day and explained the suspicion to them. They checked the wiring of the FAU and told me it was exactly as it was supposed to be. They then asked me to check my Nest thermostat app, one of the dozen “smart-home” improvements I have made to optimize the functioning of the house. As we had noted, the Nest serviced by the big (5-Ton) AC unit showed the fan unit functioning while the AC was off. They then walked me through the settings menu of the Nest to the “Fan Scheduler” where I saw that the big fan unit (FAU) was set to operate 60 minutes of every hour of the day. I toggled that feature off and the Tesla consumption level immediately fell by about 2kW. Imagine that.
While there would never be an explanation as to why that setting had been toggled on since the AC unit was installed last August (assume 2kW x 10hrs/day x 270 days = 5,400 kWh = $1,350 at prevailing prices) I did want to understand why Nest has such a functionality. What purpose did the functionality serve? I was told it was used for UV and HEPA filtering, which has become all the rage in the era of COVID. I am told that the air filtration units cost about $1,300 per unit to add (the technician told me he had installed one in his home, so it was getting a good endorsement) but naturally, they are in such high demand and the production capacity is so restricted by the lockdown that the units are not available and are on allocation when the back orders start to flow. So, the moral of that story was that like everything else in the world for the next few years, we can blame this all on COVID-19. I’m fine with that since I have found my mysterious energy pig and my daily consumption should show a reduction of about 20 kWh. That shows you the lengths a retired guy will go to to save $5.
Since Kim now wants to install two air filters (as soon as they are available), this little side-trip will end up costing me $2,700, but I should make that back in 540 days or so.
The next mystery involved the only thing bigger these days in the infrastructure arena than energy and that’s internet access. There is no doubt that broadband penetration over the last twenty-five years has done more to change the global economy than anything else. And whatever that impact has been just got a huge boost from the COVID-19 pandemic. I read a McKinsey report today advising companies of what they needed to do to be prepared for the new post-COVID world. The top imperative is for companies to digitize as quickly as they can. Many businesses have been surprised at how quickly necessity became the mother of invention. They were also surprised to learn that many of their traditional meetings and activities were far less integral to success than they thought.
I’ve had two internet interactions this week worth explaining. First was a problem at my Ithaca house. We just recently tuned up the DSL internet service with a new modem. It catapulted the speed up to 3 mbps. Then, in an effort to pare my Verizon bill from $250/mo to $100/mo I ended up irreversibly cancelling my DSL service. While Verizon tried to blame their inability to restore the service on COVID (an inability to enter the house to reconnect it), what I inadvertently learned was that Verizon is trying to kill DSL wherever it can and anyone who cancels cannot restore. When I complained to one of the few knowledgeable Verizon technicians I could reach by phone, he asked why in the world I wanted DSL anyway. He pointed out that regular cell service (which I get in fine fashion at that house) has 5X the speed. He was dead wrong. Cousin Pete ran a speed test (I walked him through how to do that) and found that we get 35 mbps at the house wirelessly. That would be 11X the speed available from DSL. So I bought a $199 Verizon Hotspot device and signed up for $20/mo to leave that next to the TV in the house. That then substitutes for $250/mo for Verizon and $250/mo for DirectTV (owned by AT&T for the moment). That means my payback is something like 12 days. I think it might be time to short the telecomm companies.
In talking to my friend Steve about my internet saga, he told me he got 600+mbps of internet bandwidth from his Cox cable. I immediately got internet envy. I use Cox here for my internet so I immediately went online and found that for an added $40/mo over my $79/mo existing service (which gives me 45 mbps) I could get 900mbps from Cox. I ordered it immediately and the very next day got my new Panorama modem that was needed to deliver this monster bandwidth. I decided to try to install it myself and couldn’t get it activated. I texted with a technician from Cox who told me, “too bad, sorry, someone forgot to register your modem and you need to take it into a Cox storefront”. I asked him if he had read the McKinsey report on digitization, but he didn’t get the joke.
My internet moral is simply this, the future is the internet, so get as smart about the secrets of the digital universe as you can and then do the best you can to make them give it to you cheap.