RE: Do we all use more electricity ?

["mark" <mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Monaghan [mailto:ha@xxxxxxx]
Anyone know if you can change suppliers when you have a backlog on your
bill?

We are on a monthly standing order (cos I'm a lazy git !), but PowerGen
never bothered to take notice of the readings

~~~~~~~~~
Funny you should mention this, but.......

New house, moved in four years ago.
PowerGen never once read the meter.
Always, "estimated" readings.
I compared the bill with the meter in September 2004 and found a huge
difference.

It was tempting to "forget I ever looked"!, however I made the
call with the
actual reading.
I owe them ?916 - Doh!

They couldn't believe my usage.
I tended to agree!
They monitored the consumption over a one month period and said the meter
was fine.
They accepted that the problem occurred due to them never reading the
meter,
and so they agreed to accept payments as and when I could send them

I did the U-Switch offers check and they said I could save ?350 per year
switching leccy and gas to Scottish Power.  I have now done that.   The
final bill arrived from PowerGen and of course they want payment in full -
now!  No negotiation!

I also this month spent ?650 with eBuyer on new goodies to allow me to
reduce leccy consumption.
Paying ?25 per month for leccy for four years, we never really focussed on
the fact that we tended to leave all the PC's on all of the time.   A PC in
each study (two), a laptop in the study, home-theatre PC in lounge, and
four
servers in the loft!  All on 24/7.    Also, I'm sure the clothes dryer
takes
loads of juice, and probably the home-theatre projector is the same.

Anyway, three of the servers were Linux and mainly used for disk arrays for
audio/video/data storage.  The fourth windows server was simply a 1TB
backup
machine for all the data on the Linux servers.   Concerned about the leccy
consumption and also the fire-risk, I set about looking for a way to dump
the 3 linux servers and replace them with network attached storage.

As of last night, that is now complete and the Linux servers are in the
garage waiting for a skip!
Network attached storage (NAS) is expensive, however I found a lower cost
way that suits our requirements.  The Linksys NSLU-2 (or slug, as most
people call it) is a tiny linux machine the size of a DAT tape that
connects
two USB2 external hard disks to your ethernet network.   I have now bought
three of them, and connected 6 x 200GB external drives to them.   I already
had some of the hard drives and the external enclosures are only ?18 from
ebuyer.

I bought a shelf for the 19" rack in the loft and they look great!  
Silent
and low-power.

I was concerned that they might be too slow to serve video across the
network.  Not the case though.  Watched a DVD served over the network to my
home-theatre PC with not a single hitch.

Also, the NSLU-2 can be hacked very easily to give access to the Linux
embedded OS.  I have done this to one of the units (the one that serves the
MP3 Jukebox) and have installed both SlimServer and TwonkyServer on it.  It
works great, although there is a problem with my Netgear MP101 that seems
to
be a known issue with Linux based media servers.  (A bug in MP101, not
Linux).

Anyway, the net result should be a home media server without the necessity
to have a PC switched on.

The fact that I have now eliminated three servers will make it hard to
determine the real savings of switching to Scottish Power.   Anyway, surely
the bills will be lower!

Cheers,
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Monaghan [mailto:ha@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 17 February 2005 12:21
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] Do we all use more electricity ?


Anyone know if you can change suppliers when you have a backlog on your
bill
?

We are on a monthly standing order (cos I'm a lazy git !), but PowerGen
never bothered to take notice of the readings and advise us to increase
the
monthly payment. My wife noticed it (after quite a while) and increased
the
monthly payments in order to bring down the size of the bill, however as
we're not getting interest charged, then I've not rushed to clear it.

We have a 5 bed detached, 3 children & a SWMBO who seem to have no idea
how
to switch things off, so any reduction is a help. Economy 7 helps, but
only
if you can get SWMBO to put the washing on a timed wash rather than going
to
bed and washing during the day :(

Another question...

How do the LV halogens compare in running cost to a standard bulb (cheaper
or more expensive) ? I've put some in our lobby & loo as the ceiling is
too
low to suspend a normal light from and still open the door without impact.
SWMBO really likes the brightness / clean light and I have some on the
bench
for the lounge, is it going to be cost effective to do all the rooms this
way ?