Desert Home

 Ever wish you had one of those expensive temperature-controlled faucets in your shower my wife did. Since there is a lot of truth to the saying, "happy wife, happy life," I shelled out the mone...

http://www.desert-home.com/2022/12/temperature-controlled-faucets.html

 After I put up a couple videos on youtube, I reviewed them. They were BORING ! Watching someone run an excavator is not nearly as much fun as actually running one. The videos took so much time ...

http://www.desert-home.com/2022/07/that-youtube-thing-videos-action-and.html

 The title pretty much says it all. I took a camera and recorded using the excavator to do some work on the yard. It took hours and  I encountered the problems we all have with cameras. Soft fo...

http://www.desert-home.com/2022/07/a-guy-i-know-suggested-using-youtube.html

Well, yes, but not as much as I would have liked. The 2022 heat wave hit here in Arizona and it was over 110F every day until today. However, today I had to repair my chainsaw instead of working ...

http://www.desert-home.com/2022/06/so-have-i-actually-done-anything-with.html

 Yes, I bit the bullet and bought a Mini Excavator.  I looked at what was available locally for a couple of months, and what I found just didn't cut it. The hoses had rotted from the sun,...

http://www.desert-home.com/2022/04/my-new-excavator.html

 I mentioned last post how I got talked into trying the Hubitat. To be honest, it didn't take too much convincing because the hub works with the old Iris switches and I have several of them. We ...

http://www.desert-home.com/2021/11/my-experiences-with-hubitat.html

Since my last post. Did anyone notice? I've been heavily involved in local politics in my area for over three years now and it finally came to an end. My side lost....  During this time the ho...

http://www.desert-home.com/2021/10/hard-to-believe-its-been-over-year.html

 Guest speaker today. Glenn has a farm and has contributed before. Farm automation is especially useful for keeping the work down somewhat and getting information. Here is Glenn's latest projec...

http://www.desert-home.com/2020/02/temperature-adventures-with-rasppi.html

As I've touted for years now I have a network of XBees that I (basically) run my house with. I monitor room temperatures in key areas, control my pool, monitor my power, etc; all without a bunch ...

http://www.desert-home.com/2020/01/introduce-end-devices-to-network-is.html

Of course blogger changed how the blog appears ! That led to a mess of my background image tileing and messing things up in the appearance. After some messing around I managed to get it appearing...

http://www.desert-home.com/2019/10/naturally-blogger-changed-somethingir.html

Several times over the years I've mentioned my Hayward Variable Speed Pump. When I got it, it was a dream come true. Here was something that could filter my pool and save me money doing it. I cou...

http://www.desert-home.com/2019/03/i-finally-gave-up-on-my-hayward.html

I've been battling my power company since 2009 or so. It started off with a bad meter and eventually wound up with my giving testimony at a hearing about their slopping and greedy way of doing bu...

http://www.desert-home.com/2019/02/yes-im-still-writing-about-my-power.html

Well, neither had I. At least not much more than topping of a tire once in a while. However, I got new rear tires on my big tractor and after a while of just sitting, one of the tires was very l...

http://www.desert-home.com/2018/12/have-you-ever-thought-about-tire.html

When I was researching supercooling as a way of limiting my power bill I kept getting readings and such that just didn't make sense. One side of my house was comfortable, the other ... not so muc...

http://www.desert-home.com/2018/07/thermostats-location-location-location.html

No, this isn't turning into a political blog, although, it would be fun, but this relates directly to my continuing annoyance with my power company Arizona Public Service. I have a few previous p...

http://www.desert-home.com/2018/07/local-power-politics-aps-azcc-and.html

I really like the PZEM-004 that I picked up just to see what it could do , in fact I built the monitor and control system for my water heater with it . This thing has really taught ...

http://www.desert-home.com/2018/07/pzem-016-another-chinese-power-monitor.html

Several times now I've mentioned my microwave oven in passing. It's given me a couple of problems over the years: I managed to explode a coffee cup and the liquid got into the turntable motor, an...

http://www.desert-home.com/2018/06/microwave-trouble-sometime-stupid.html

In my last political (well sorta) post I described how the local power company APS is organized and regulated by our Arizona Corporate Commission (AZCC) . After that post and a few I did o...

http://www.desert-home.com/2018/06/local-power-politics-aps-azcc-and.html

This is the day I got clobbered by APS (my power company) Look just before 8PM (20:00); see that bunch of spikes? My peak billing period lasts until 8, and something was sucking power befor...

http://www.desert-home.com/2018/06/supercooling-in-desert-may-22-2018-day.html

For the present, I'm going to claim that (as the British say) the water heater monitor is, "All done and dusted." There's a few tiny items I'll mention that I may do in the future to make is a li...

http://www.desert-home.com/2018/06/wrapping-up-water-heater-monitor-and.html

Well, I can now monitor my hot water heater power usage. The step-down transformer I got worked just fine and I managed to put together all the pieces and now have it out there running ju...

http://www.desert-home.com/2018/05/monitoring-water-heater-power.html

This isn't a complaint session about Amazon, they've done well by me several times, nor am I going to complain about Chinese products; a lot of the posts on this blog are about those item...

http://www.desert-home.com/2018/05/ordering-chinese-devices-through-amazon.html

Literally hundreds of these energy monitors have been sold, but judging from the various articles I've run across, not too many of them have actually been used to meaningfully monitor power aroun...

http://www.desert-home.com/2018/05/pzem-004-now-to-actually-use-it-for.html

I'm going to talk about the APS (Arizona Public Service) phone software for monitoring your power. For folk that don't live here (Arizona, USA), much of this will be of little value. It might giv...

http://www.desert-home.com/2018/05/supercooling-house-in-desert-part-3.html

There's been a lot of new devices appearing on the market for monitoring power. I decided to get one and see what was actually going on. I prowled around Alibaba for a while and settled on this ...

http://www.desert-home.com/2018/05/more-on-house-power-monitoring-prebuilt.html