The Lance J. Technoweb

I spend tens of thousands of dollars a year.  I spend it on all sorts of things to live my life - on my house, my car, healthcare, food, clothing, energy, and so forth. Much of the money I spend immediately goes away to some distant corporation - a quick glance at my credit card statement shows that 90%+ of my spending goes far, far away.  Sure, a portion of it might stay local.  But the majority of it certainly does not. Instead, maybe its better to try to get more of my money to stick around town a little longer.  Imagine spending $20,000 to buy a new car.  The vast majority of that money goes away to some international corporation owned primarily by foreign investors.  Instead, maybe it's better for me to give $1,000 to my local mechanic to fix my car.  Then he can spend that money on his family... local folks who need to live their life. Imagine spending $2,500 a year on household energy.  Instead of giving 100% of that money to OPEC an...

I did it again.  I cut my building's lighting electric usage by yet another third. Now I'm using a light-sensing photocell to automatically switch lights on and off in my building.  These lights used to be on 24x365.  Now the lights switch off when there is adequate ambient light. It would seem that a photocell would save about 50% in lighting costs, as the average 24 hour period is about 50% daylight.  But it isn't that simple:  For safety reasons, I want the lights to come on before it gets dark, and I want the lights to turn off after it gets bright out side.  Furthermore, not every day is loaded with full sunshine.  After chugging through the numbers, I pessimistically calculate the my lights will be on about 65% of the time. When I started this lighting efficiency effort, I was already considered efficient: I was using CFL bulbs in all my fixtures. Yet I was still able to reduce my lighting costs by about 85%. Further savings are g...

I just replaced a K4221 Photocell with a new one. The old photo cell failed in the "on" position, which is actually a great failure mode - I use the photocell to control indoor and outdoor lighting, and for safety reasons its important that it works.  So the lights being stuck "on" is a decent failure mode. But the photocell was stuck on for, um, many years.  I didn't really notice that there was a photocell, and was just accepting that the lights were on 24x365. Now with the photocell, my lights will be on roughly 16 hours a day. That saves a third off of my lighting bill.  In the scheme of things it will only save me a couple hundred bucks, but hey, rather I get it than OPEC. My photocell has a tough job.  It is to turn on necessary indoor and outdoor lighting when it starts to get dark outside.  But the challenge is that the photocell is positioned so it receives a lot of artificial light from the urban street, and it is unreasonably complex for me to...