Categories
Engineering House Life

Energy Consumption Improvements in the House

Now that we’ve made it through a bit of the summer, I think we really need to focus on something important.

Winter is on the way!

If I recall correctly, my home is still not quite up to snuff in terms of how much money I’d like it to cost me to heat and energize my house. I realize my home will never be 100% efficient. I also realize I’m not going to plop down money to get to 100% because that’s silly and sort of impossible. Instead, I have to pick my battles with my own castle and decide what will produce the biggest returns.

  1. Insulate
    • This is the number one project for the late summer/fall for me. I have very poor insulation in my upper floor. In fact, when we bought our house we could actually see the snow melting on the roof where the heat was escaping. Talk about watching your money fly out of your pocket! Check with a local contractor to see how much insulation you’ll need to really see some energy savings. Also, don’t forget the federal credit when you’re finally cutting that check…you could get up to a $1500 tax rebate.
    • But wait…there’s more! Don’t think that whole house insulation is the only thing to focus on. Oftentimes, the biggest culprits of letting expensive, hot air out (or in really) are the small cracks around windows and doors. Spending 40 bucks on some expandable foam, a tube of caulk, a water heater blanket and some new winterizing doorstops can go a long way.
  2. Turn it off
    • There’s no denying that the most effective way to cut energy consumption is by turning devices and lighting off when not using it. This idea, coupled with using energy when it is cheapest and most abundant, is the crux of the “smart grid” idea. For devices that aren’t managed by a central management unit such as the one in the article, most devices now have a “sleep” mode that has reduced processing instructions; the device periodically “wakes up” to check to see if anyone has requested its services and if not it’s back to sleep. Devices with low quiescent current (or the current while not doing much of anything) can show large energy consumption savings.
  3. Buy/Replace
    • Even though people probably don’t relish the idea of throwing away (or hopefully recycling) their old appliances, this is sometimes the best option. Your old freezer in the basement might be saving you trips to the grocery store (good) but might be doing it at the environment’s and your expense by increasing your electricity bill(bad). Pick up a Kill-a-Watt meter to see how much power your old junker is really pulling out of the grid; if it’s considerable, think about pulling the plug.
  4. Inspect your ductwork
    • Oy, with the not-electronics already! I know, it’s not glamorous, but it’s often the simple things in houses that can really cost you. This is a big weakness in my house and something I will have to address before this winter. Back in the 50s and 60s they must have thought it fashionable (or at least cheap) to attach boards to the underside of the crossbeams of my floors. As such, the air actually being pulled down through the cold air returns is minimal, most of the air is actually pulled down through the floorboards and back into the cold air intake of my furnace. It’s a good time in the summer to check out where your ducts are leaking air so that you can save big dollars in the winter months.
  5. Junk Water Dump
    • I saw an article a while back about the waste water from your tub also wasting energy. Think about how much natural gas/electricity it takes to get your water heater to temperature. Now think about how warm the water still is when it’s washed away all the nasty off your body. Finally, think about how cold the tap water can e in the winter. If you have a reservoir underneath your tub collecting warm wastewater and then coil the incoming cold water through it on the way to the water heater, you could possibly retain some of that usually wasted energy. Check out the link and check to see if you ever have that kind of option the way your house is set up. This could be the same for the dishwasher and the washing machine while the water is on “warm”.

I know you’ll see a lot of this information elsewhere but I’d feel silly not to encourage readers here to try it out for this coming winter. As I said above, there are many different monetary incentives to do so, both in rebates and power savings. I plan on getting the jump on these updates now so I can take advantage of the energy savings for cooling my house as well as heating it later on. If I find out about or come up with any other ways to save money and energy in the future, I’ll be sure to post them here.

What about you? Have you decided to do any updates to your home (energy-wise) while the weather is still nice? Do you have any tips you’d like to share? Just leave them in the comments!

Categories
Politics Renewable Energy

Thank You Steven Chu

I like it when I understand things. The universe feels like a little safer place, even if I realize feeling secure is only a state of mind. And when I watched Steven Chu talk on the Daily Show the other night, I felt safer. Not like a warm security blanket kind of safe. More like a “Hey, if stuff hits the fan, we’ll probably be able to figure it out” kind of safe.

How many times have you looked at a government official and said “Hey, they seem pretty bright!”? How about “What a great sense of humor and perspective for the situation we’re in.”? How many times have you honestly said in the past 8, 16, 20 or 28 years have you really looked at a government official and said “Hey, I bet he has science and the earth’s best interest ahead of a corporation that is whispering in his ear.”? Not too many at all.

I’m not saying that there have been scores of corrupt politicians in the past Presidents’ cabinets, because there haven’t; the people advising the President are often capable and well tempered in their decision making. I’m also not saying Steven Chu will be completely successful in the political arena, as it’s a very different world from what he’s used to. It’s just so damn refreshing to see such an accomplished scientist in a position to influence legislation, all the while weighing facts and data instead of political usefulness and opinion. Give me more politicians like him and I’ll start to feel that the government has turned a corner.

So thank you, Steven Chu. You’ve restored my hope that we can get some more renewable energy initiatives moving instead of just talked about in this country. You’ve restored my hope that renewables might be able to help pull our country out of a recession. And from what I know about you and your plans, you’ve only just begun.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Steven Chu
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes
Political Humor Joke of the Day


Also the requisite thank you to Comedy Central and Jon Stewart for interviewing him. Without you, I’d only get biased news from biased news sources 🙂

Categories
Learning Work

Who Will Do The Actual Work When The Economy Recovers?

I had an interesting conversation today with a few friends about the exodus of young people from the workplace back to school during this recession. It seems as though people in Generation Y are bailing left and right on current jobs and diving back under the safe covers of academia. And who can blame them? You get to work on interesting research (hopefully), you get a stipend (maybe) and you have better prospects when you’re all done (eh, doubtful). But that leads me to ask, “Who’s going to do all the work when the economy is in full swing again?” Let’s survey the current demographics, starting from the top:

  • The bosses — Not to sound deriding, but they aren’t doing the type of work I’m talking about here. The never have and never will…mostly because they actually have better things to do. For real. They have to meet with other big wigs and figure out where to steer the company and where the market is going and hopefully how to react in time. The work I talk about is more a “down-in-the-trenches” kind of work and I never really expected them to do that kind of work, just thought it was necessary to actually start at the top.
  • The elders — The elders are those who aren’t necessarily in charge but those that have been around for a long time and really understand how a company or industry works. They won’t be doing the work when the economy recovers…because they’ll be retiring. Think about it. How many people were likely planning on retiring in 2008 onwards who suddenly saw their investments vaporize? No, they decided they better stick it out. And though they won’t see a huge return to the days where their portfolios were bulging, I would venture a guess that if the conditions are good enough and they feel that they can squeak by on portfolio growth after they retire, a lot will take the out. If you’re pushing into your 70s, I’m guessing you’re ready for a break. Even if they stay on part time, they won’t be doing the grunt work.
  • The smart ones — The smart ones are those that drive ideas and new products. Even though they may have been around and producing good work for a while, they aren’t allowed to go anywhere. They are the geese with the golden eggs. Where would they go anyway? The people in charge of promoting them would have to replace themselves. Not likely. So they will have to do some work still, but you can probably watch for this group eying the social security line on their weekly pay stub longingly and starting to stick a pinky toe out the door. If you’re looking for a technical mentor, get ’em before they’re gone.
  • The middle — The middle is all those people that were doing the grunt work 20 years ago and did a good job. They may have run out of salary headroom and jumped over to management or maybe they needed a new challenge (I can only imagine dealing with engineers or other similar underlings from a management perspective every day). Either way, there’s little likelihood they’re planning on stepping back into lesser roles. No, they have their eyes on the upper management jobs of the elders and the other aging boomers.
  • The lazy ones — They were the ones on the team that did work every once in a while but in general only contributed when the workload really picked up. They were the auxiliary fuel tank of your company as an airplane–useful when you need it but really just weighing things down when not in use. And although we know it’s not really true, we have an inkling some of them got the ax when it fell last year. Even if you were deluded enough to believe that all the dead weight in your company was gone, the ones in this category that aren’t gone are really good at two things: not doing work and looking like they are. Count them out.
  • The young upstarts — This group has a shot at doing some of the beefy work. In fact, this group has the highest likelihood of doing the majority of the work. I should mention I also feel as though I am a part of this group and therefore have a lot of interest in studying it. “What’s that?? Jim, Allison and Mark are all going back to school? Why? Trudy is going too? What the heck? Who’s going to do their work?!?”, you say (the answer: whoever is asking that question). This newfound love of the classroom is the other reason I am interested in my own demographic. We’re all jumping ship hoping to leapfrog into the next part of our career! There doesn’t seem to be any paying of dues, does there? Welp, that’s because there isn’t. But you can’t do anything about it because everyone in this demographic is back in classes learning about managerial accounting or tort law and not actually doing any work. Now the real question: when everyone pops out of school at the end of the recession, who will be better prepared? MBA Marty or Experienced Eddy? I’d be inclined to say the second, but again, I’m biased here. If you’re in this group and not going back to school, expect more work coming your way. Lawyer Larry is busy studying.
  • The new grads — Quick! We’re running out of people that have any interest in engineering and menial tasks! Get me some workers! “Waaaaaait a second,” says Bob the manager. “All we’ve got is the new grads. There’s no way I’m hiring them without any experience.” Well Bob, too bad, you’re running out of options. Just hire these new kids and try and push them to learn faster and work harder. And do this even though those new grads have higher expectations of what employers will give them and the hours they are asked to work. You’ll probably end up giving it to them too, because what other options do you have?
  • The overseas workers — Well, there’s your answer. It’s really been more of a circular process, figuring out who will be doing all the work. Think about what’s been said and how people have reacted. “Foreign labor is taking all of our jobs!”, the workers said at the beginning. Then they thought, “Oh! I better go back to school and learn how to manage people overseas and the remaining labor in the US!”. Then they get out of school three years later, lobby for a shiny new management position and ask “Ok, where are my underlings? Hunh? No underlings?!? Well crap, hire more foreign workers, we need to get this project out the door!”. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I want to be clear about a few things. First, I don’t disagree with going back to school. I plan on doing it myself some day, in some capacity. I just disagree with the timing. I liken going back now to pulling all your investments out of the market at the lowest point back in March (maybe to pay for school?). You remove yourself from the market at a time when the most growth can occur. You remove yourself from situations that include working long hours on hard work but it’s with a team that affords you more responsibilities. I feel that the next few years will provide some great opportunities for innovation and growth in certain positions and companies. Second, I realize that some people are going back to revamp skills, especially when they feel that they cannot find employment. This is understandable and expected based on enrollment numbers from past recessions. I would only remind these people to remember to keep up their real-world skills so they can be hired right out of school. Academia doesn’t have room to hold onto you and they have a similar hierarchy as above except for one catch: those tenured professors don’t plan on giving up their cushy position until they are forced to or decide to leave on their own. If you do choose the academic track, get a comfy couch to wait/sleep/eat/live on. Finally, I’d like to speak to my targeting of MBA and Law degrees. It’s not that I think they aren’t important, because I feel that a lot of really important concepts are taught in both management and law classes. I mostly take offense to the idea of you being my boss in 5 years because of a piece of paper. I respect the people around me who are working hard and have better vision than I do to tell me what to do. If you plan on “managing” me without first working by my side or in a similar position, expect to work extra hard to gain my respect.

I believe the solution here is what a lot of people are actually doing: sitting tight and getting some work done. You need to continue to show your company you are a valuable and contributing member while maintaining boundaries on how many peoples’ work you are willing to do. It sometimes seems bleak when you see others stagnating in their career progression right in front of or next to you. However, I believe hard work and tangible results will be the true indicator or advancement and success whenever the economy rebounds. If you think your hard work should go towards a more noble cause, strike out on your own. If companies end up short on talent when the economy comes back, a savvy consultant could be flexible and fluid enough to be exactly the solution customers and companies are looking for.

What about you? What category do you feel like you fall into? Take the poll below or leave a note in the comments!

[poll id=”3″]

Categories
Analog Electronics Engineering Work

When to Try Something vs When to Study Something

Irony is having a blog post in your queue with a title such as this one and just sitting on it for weeks on end. Luckily I’ve been trying some things instead of studying them, it just so happens that those things have nothing to do with this site. I hope to discuss those on this site soon.

I am a glutton for knowledge.  Part of it is my fear of looking silly in front of co-workers when I don’t know the answer to something. Part of it is feeling like my knowledge base is lacking and the thought that I can always learn or teach myself something new. But when presented with a new challenging situation that requires you to learn the question is always the same: where do you start? Do you jump in and try it out? Or sit back and study what others have tried so as to not duplicate their mistakes?

There are two extremes

  1. You study so much and try to take in so much that you become paralyzed by information
    • I feel like this happens to Generation Y more than other generations. Not because we are dumber than others. Instead, I think we are so accustomed to having all of the necessary knowledge required to solve a problem at our fingertips (i.e. Internet, ChrisGammell.com, etc).
    • Academic thought processes often begin with simplistic assumptions about the model you’re considering. Analyzing these over and over can be very time consuming and can quickly become too complex to handle. Even analyzing the minutiae associated with a single transistor can be mind boggling. What happens when you try and expand that knowledge to 10, 10k or 10M transistors?
    • You over simulate, over analyze, over think a problem past the point of diminishing returns. An example would be designing a new type of toothbrush. You can model the toothbrush, the bristles, the handle, the shapes, everything; you can even go out and get ideas from your toothy customers about what they think they would like or dislike about your design. But until you prototype your new type of toothbrush and put it through testing (product testing, tooth scrubbing ability, will it shatter in someone’s mouth), then all of the testing and surveying in the world won’t matter.
  2. You have little knowledge of a problem or situation that you just start changing stuff randomly and keep changing until something works…without realizing the consequences.
    • This seems to be the modus operandi of the inexperienced, but not necessarily the uneducated. A gutsy, recently graduated electrical engineer may emerge from the cocoon of the academic environment ready to go out and change the world. And every resistor value of a circuit board they encounter. And mess with the capacitors. And change the model of the op amps. Oh, and don’t forget to swap out transistors. “What?? It still doesn’t work? But why?”
    • This can be as much a symptom of engineering bravado as it is bad conditioning. If the person involved has always had simple problems placed in front of them that have obvious or at least semi-obvious solutions (ahem, most introductory electronics labs), they will fix the “broken” component and pat themselves on the back. In the real world, that “broken” component isn’t broken at all. It’s just out of spec and you can’t figure out for the life of you why that unit you’re testing refuses to turn on anymore after increasing 5 degrees internal temperature.
    • You forget/refuse to read the manual. Granted, some of the greatest “tinkerers” out there can just magically turn a knob and get a broken piece of equipment to work. But the reason they can do that is because they actually turned the wrong knob about 1000 times the last time they tried to fix something like this and that knob did absolutely nothing.

A Good Mix (for me, at least):

[STUDY] My own personal mix when it comes to circuit problems starts with the problem definition. Understanding the problem is so much more important than what you study, how long you study it or how you begin to test out your ideas for how to fix it. If you don’t understand what the real problem is all that later work is for nothing! However, I try to understand the issue without going overboard and trying to understand every single minute detail; this could be just as bad as studying a possible solution for hours on end.

[TRY] Once I have a grasp on what the problem is, I try the obvious stuff. You’d be surprised how often it can be the really dumb things that trip you up. And those might not even be the problem you’re trying to fix. You could try to troubleshoot a blank screen for 20 minutes, throwing your best ideas and debugging techniques at it before you realize, “Whoops!” you never plugged in the display cable. Or you can’t get your software to work once you load it onto your electromechanical whizzbang toy…but you actually loaded the wrong version of the software or the toy doesn’t have any batteries in it. The silly things will waste your time and throw you off the trail of the real problem if you’re not careful.

[STUDY] Next is researching the problem to see if it has happened before. Some of you out there will have unique situations, like making a new analog chip that no one has ever made before. But I’d guess more of you will be encountering problems that can be researched. Even the analog chip designers will see issues that are similar on some level to other products or models within a corporation. Oftentimes the best troubleshooters are those who are able to compartmentalize problems and then analyze where those problems came from and research how others have fixed it in the past. I’d rather have a boring problem that someone else can easily tell me how to fix than one that I can’t figure out at all.

[TRY] After trying and then studying all of the really obvious stuff, I start to go back to my resources–either online or in print–and start to search for information on the topic. Obviously the online information is much easier to search, but I also have some trusted books that I turn to on a regular basis. I might see a chunk of a circuit that looks familiar and try flipping through the pages to see if I can’t find a similar circuit. If that doesn’t work or the circuit looks extremely foreign to me, I’ll go back and study some of the basic properties of the components within the circuit to see if there might be a certain property the designer used that I have overlooked. And if all else fails, I’ll start to ask around to try and gather others’ knowledge of the circuit. True, this isn’t quite studying, but can often be more effective. I try and balance asking others for assistance only after I have tried to solve the problem on my own and not made any progress. I think it is important for my personal growth to struggle with a circuit before asking for help and I think it’s important to not get in the habit of running off and asking for an answer so I don’t waste the other person’s time. However, I don’t want to be so stubborn that I waste my time and the time of those who are paying me.

[STUDY] Alright, so now you know what the circuit is and how it sort of works. But you also know that you need to change the circuit in order to make it work better. What now? Next I would try and write out any equations I know that are relevant to the circuit. Not necessarily any equation, that could end up being a waste of time. Keep it simple and make sure you know where the currents and voltages are in different parts of the circuit. If there are components (such as capacitors) in the circuit, include basic equations that can help to describe their behavior. If you don’t need 3 chalkboards to do so, try and figure out the transfer function (relationship from input to output). If you have a circuit that is too complicated either break it down into smaller pieces and try and figure out the transfer function or take the plunge and try it out in SPICE. This will help you to better understand how the circuit might behave when presented with certain inputs. All of these exercises are done in order to present you with a solid starting ground for when you actually construct the circuit, so you know what to look for and what behaviors to expect.

[TRY] After all of the studying and simulating and pondering about this circuit, you should have at least enough knowledge to begin building up and trying the circuit. This is an important step in any circuit creation process because of the nuances the real circuit will show you. Perhaps you forgot to model a realistic op amp in your SPICE simulation and it was outputting 500 A. Perhaps you didn’t realize in your equations that a resistor will have different properties depending on how much current you actually put through it and that your circuit happens to be particularly susceptible to those changes. Perhaps you completely disregarded a simple concept such as bandwidth and your circuit is now oscillating so hard it breaks. All of these things will be uncovered when you begin to build up your circuit and try out different inputs. Once you realize what some of the realistic problems are you can go back and modify your assumptions and models and start to delve into whatever topics you believe will get your circuit to the optimum operating point.

Finding the right balance between slowing down and taking your time to figure out a circuit or jumping in and seeing what works can be a fine art. Sometimes projects are on a very tight schedule and need a product cranked out the next day (think startup). Sometimes you have one shot at making a final product or else your company will fail (think chip fabrication). Finding your own personal mix will take time and trial and error.

What is your personal mix of trying vs. studying that gets the best results? Leave your tips and tricks in the comments!