After getting my changes live last night, and making some changes to the VoIP Monitoring outages this morning, it seems the system is improving significantly.
What happens is if the first packet doesn’t appear, fine, we’ll check for another, so a maximum of around 3 seconds is spent on a provider to get a response per check.
That’s pretty good, considering that if it were to wait much longer, then a timeout situation would almost certainly occur.
We also tweaked the system a little more for timing related data.
The VoIP Monitoring Statistics seem to have bumped a little higher for some providers due to the prevention of many of the 60 second outages that had appeared as a result of something I will only label ‘the 60 second bug’.
Needless to say however, we still see regular outages on the network, despite testing DNS, and VoIP packets twice to be sure. Heh, I’m better then Santa, I make sure I have the right details, and then I check those right details twice to make sure they are right.
Anyway, the outages we see listed on the VoIP Monitoring Outages page seem to suggest we have somewhat regular outage logs for SIPme for example.
That’s not too bad, but I still want to get the monitoring more spot on. So, what I plan to do is take advantage of a redundant monitoring situation and add some failover monitoring remotely and determine if the results are echoed in a different area of the state (north of Sydney).
Eventually (as I said yesterday), I do plan to setup mirrored monitoring, so that we can get a fair level of tests done from hopefully different areas of the nation, and compile those together instead of simply one point results.
I’d use my home connection too, but that’d likely get skewed results from our own usage of the internet, and being a consumer service one would (well, one would assume at least) expect the results to be subpar to a large scale.
Hopefully tomorrow, I’ll have time to finish up the webpages, but I do realise the current layout of the site is hardly appealing to users, and so I want to work on fixing that, and then, I’ll review the task list for it after there!
The initial results though, are a lot better, and the testing seems to have been nice on the server too, with load results screeching down low.
In other news, I’ve done some more power tests out there to determine power consumption.
After reading on whirlpool about some fantasy home using 11 – 13kWH a day, I was highly intrigued, they even had a pool!
So, I tested other areas of the house. My expectation was the lounge room. My little one loves watching some of the childrens varieties of DVDs regularly (and repetitively), so that gets a good work out, that’s the TV, DVD, VCR, Foxtel and Stereo going all at once. Amazingly, I saw a very low reading. With the TV on, the DVD playing, the stereo outputting, we saw a drain of just 60W. IMPRESSIVE! I was ready to attack the TV being a high power consumer, but it uses less than a 60W light globe.
So, the next items to attack were the deep freezer. It’s a new one we bought not long ago. Plugged it in. Got 0. Must not be freezing right now. The front label shows 210kW. Hardly a worry for that.
The fridge, was next.
And here is where we cue the suspenseful music.
It sucks, according to its energy ‘star’ sticker, 1110kWH! What a big waste of power. All we use it for is keeping our food cold. If it kept US cold, I wouldn’t be concerned. But using that much for simply cooling a small area of food.
So I put it to the woman today. It’s using twice the amount of power of a NEW, larger fridge. We would halve our electricity usage, by simply upgrading a fridge, and that would have translating effects on the power bill, as does my recent change to a standby / startup automation setup for my system (but it seems to freeze :(), and for the server a shut down, restart sequence (wouldn’t come out of Standby by itself).
So, I plan to soon enough, anyway, have some true readings (appliances generally aren’t as ‘efficient’ with age, so I am metering it for a 24 hour period to get some solid results), and then, if we get readings at a level where a new fridge will simply ‘make sense’ – that’s what we will end up doing.
Having a look around today though, there’s a good variety in different sizes that can use energy more wisely than our current fridge (we could have two new fridges for what we are paying in power for the one).
I’m not concerned about Hot Water, it’s off peak and is generally 4KWH, the washing machine, not a major concern, we wash every now and then.
The bigger concern also, is the fact the fridge was sucking 1879 WATTs when I plugged the meter in. That was alarming. Later on I checked again, and it was using 0 however, so it is one that needs measuring over a 24 hour period to get a true measurement. Hopefully one that will enlighten us as to where the 5KWH difference between the 11KWH person, and us resides.
It’d be good to see a nice reduction in power consumption, it just doesn’t ‘feel’ like we are using that much (or getting our money worth).
Plus, a new fridge gives us planning for the future anyway. Kids grow, right? And the stomach grows with them, right? So, when you have kids, you need more food? And more of that food is commonly cold storage food such as Yoghurt, Soft Drink, etc.
And for Dad, well he wants cold drink to. And I imagine Mum wants cold storage as well for .. whatever she wants cold storage for…
I’m not committed to a purchase yet, just incase it somehow improved on energy usage since the Energy Rating was placed on it. I doubt it though, I believe it to have gotten worse over time, simply due to ‘the aging process of appliances’.
On that note though, power consumption tuning is becoming great, and I think we’ll be near an end to what we can learn from measuring and tweaking consumption of electricity (our lights are those good energy efficient globes, they work well for what they use (14W)), the PC’s have got timed controls to standby / shut down on them, the washing machine couldn’t be doing tooo much, the stove might be the other point of call, but we don’t use it excessively, so I’m not convinced it’s a huge drain on power.
The results will come at billing time next, when we can hopefully proclaim that we screwed the power company out of around $100 or so a year.
Enjoy!