Aside from having a very cool name, parasitic power is an innovate way to recapture already spent power. This power can come in the form of wasted heating or cooling of a building for example. Last week the Southern Methodist University activated the first commercial Green Machine from ElectraTherm. The unit recycles residual heat from the building into electricity. So far, the 50kW Green Machine has exceeded expectations. The company also says owners can recoup the units cost after about three years.
home hacks1902 Articles
What It Takes To Go Solar
ExtremeTech has posted an article detailing the process of adding solar power to a house. The author included some interesting detail about his personal power consumption, and details about the process of selecting his contractor too. The total cost of the installation came to about $36,000 after state and federal rebates for going solar.
It’s not a homebrew setup, but it’s good to see an article detailing all that is involved. We’ll take you through the tech side of it after the break.
The Integrated Desk
Since it happens to be the day after a nice holiday break, many of us are finding ourselves back in front of our desk once again. Perhaps some of you never left it the entire weekend. In any case, it seems fitting to take a look at a few interesting integrated desks we’ve come across lately. Follow through after the break to see our favorites.
Smart Car Sensing With RF
In order to tell his home automation system that he’s home, [Jim] mounted a RF transmitter in each of his cars. When the car is on, the transmitter is powered up. The house picks up the transmitter signal when the car arrives or departs. With that information, he was able to set up some stateful rules that can be activated when people arrive or depart. Some people prefer to use APRS and read vehicle location from the transmitted GPS coordinates, but this is a bit cheaper and doesn’t transmit your position to the entire world all the time. The useful range is about 100 feet, so this can work even if you have to park in the street.
Plumb In Your Espresso Machine (cheap)
A while back, I wrote up a how-to on some mods I made to my ECM Giotto espresso machine. After giving it some break-in time, I finally wrote up my cheap plumbed in espresso trick. Plumbing kits use a $50 solenoid that requires special plumbing. My version uses a $12 fridge solenoid, easily adds on to my previous mods, and only requires some tubing size adaptation.
DMX Light Control For Home Automation
Generally, the only time I’ve ever seen DMX in use is for stage productions. [Dan] sent in his home light control project – he used a RS-232 to DMX interface and a bunch of commercial DMX dimmers. His light switches were replaced with potentiometers connected to the system via CAT5 cabling. The POTs send 0-10v up the line to the dimmers, and the manual control can override the automated(DMX) settings. The system is simple, robust and responsive – avoiding the delay pitfalls usually incurred by systems like X10.
Arduino Controlled Espresso Machine
The arduino is really starting to become prevalent for hardware hacking. [Nash] used one to take control of his Gaggia espresso machine. (They’re really decent little machines) He popped in a LCD display, some solid state relays to control the pump and the heating element, and an AD595 to interface a K type thermocouple. It looks like an excellent hack, but for the love of god man – get a better grinder!
He describes the original mod here, and added a small gallery of internal shots here. From the latest comments, it looks like the guys are RepRap project are even interested in the thermocouple PID control that [Nash] implemented.
