I’ve owned two Toyota’s in my life¹. I had a ’96 Camry that alas, I wrecked, but got fixed and drove for another couple years. Then, in 2006, I ordered a 2007 Prius Touring that by and large has been a great car… once I got it². But, starting shortly after having it serviced, I started getting the problem where the HID headlights would flicker, and then shut off. You could “fix” this by turning the lights off, and back on… but sometimes they’d go out several times during a night drive, which was no only annoying, but seriously dangerous.

Anyway, I took the car in to the dealer I purchased it from (Kendall Toyota in Eugene) in Jan of 2010 (I had maybe 46k miles on it at that time). They were only able to reproduce the issue on one side, and after being forced to call Toyota Corporate, they would only cover the bulb on one side, and labor. Fine, I declined, and went about my business. Now, this last year, Toyota settled a class action lawsuit about this very issue³. After calling the dealer to schedule the other recalls on the car (gas pedal, and HV pump), they said they had no record of me bringing it in about the lights. Convenient. So, I called Corporate since they should have knowledge. Calling them, they had the case, but no record of mileage. Awesome x 2. But, I talked to them, and they said the dealer had to reproduce the issue again because it’d been more than a year since the original issue. Ugh. Fine.

So, my wife drops the car off at 10am or so. Less than 2 hours later, I get a call saying they can’t reproduce. Seriously? 2 hours? That’s it? You have other work to do on the car, why can’t you just run the lights the whole time? Fine. So I discuss with the service guy what he can do. He says the Service Manager offered to take the cost of about $400 down to about $320. Really? Wow, how nice to knock off 20% for something that should be covered. He says he’ll call the district customer care guy. He calls me back over an hour later, and says the district guy basically said “no” and asked “how long does he expect light bulbs to last?” Seriously? You’re asking me if I’m being irrational? This started before 50k, and 5 years, so obviously I don’t expect them to last any longer than Toyota does, and when I bought the car, the salesman specifically said they’d last forever (I’m sure “within reason”). They’re HIDs. They should last quite some time. And there are known issues from bulbs in that era since they just started making them mercury free. Issues arose. They make them better now.

So, I asked what else he could do? Could I take a picture/video when it happened? Would that count? I never got an answer to that question, but I did have it happen later that night, and took a video. Anyway, he talked to the store customer service person, and he “respectfully declined” to assist. And maybe I could call Corporate back. What?! Okay… maybe I’m daft, but shouldn’t the in-store customer service rep be the “advocate” to the customer? What the hell is he/she there for? Why should _I_ have to call corporate? Maybe I’ve been wrong all these years, but I always thought of Toyota as the “Apple” of auto makers. You pay more, but you get a great car and experience. I’ve taken out of warranty, or self inflicted damage to an Apple Store, and you know what? It gets replaced/fixed… no questions asked. Because Apple knows what Bob Farrell used to say: “Give them the Pickle”. A happy, well served customer will be worth far more than arguing with them over something. I think Mike Holmes also nails it with “Make it Right”. Especially when it comes to a safety issue.

So all that done, I say “fine, I’ll just pick up the car, and call corporate”. So, a shuttle comes and gets me, and the guy driving it is extremely nice, and happens to live right next door (practically) to me. I get to the dealer, and the Service contact doesn’t say a word to me. He walks by me 3 times, doesn’t say peep. His office mate is who helps me, and I get the keys, and end up waiting in the service center and chat more with the shuttle driver, all the while, the Service contact walks by me and helps someone else. Nice. Turns out, looking at the car the next day, the tech lost 3 clips that hold on the radiator shield, and didn’t put a hose back in it’s clip. But worse, didn’t get all the air out of my coolant system. It’s gurgled for the last day. We’ll see how long that lasts after I topped it off.

Ironically, the dealer sent me a satisfaction survey today. I largely blasted them. I doubt I’ll hear back, but my take away was that _I_ wasn’t the customer, Toyota and the dealer were. I just happened to be the person who had possession of the car. I doubt anything will come of it. All and all, I love my car. But at this point, I’m seriously going to look at moving to the other dealer in town for my next purchase (a plugin hybrid), or look at other manufacturers. I’ll update more if I hear anything back, but like I said, _I_ shouldn’t have to call Corporate. All I should have to want is a fix, and the dealer (who you pay extra to use for service/parts⁴), should do everything in their power to get it fixed. Period. I”m the customer. I’m the one you’re here to help get a resolution, not just tell me “sorry, we respectfully decline” or “how long does he expect bulbs to last”. Those are shitty answers. The correct answer is “Let’s get this fixed, and we’ll deal with the rest”. Should the dealer be on the hook for paying for the bulb replacement? No. But apparently they also don’t have the authority, or the desire, to step up and say “let’s fix this”. And that’s a big disappointment from the company I thought was truly better than other car manufacturers for both their product, and their customer service.

1. since I’m only been driving for 10 years, and my Prius is 5 years old at this point…
2. I ordered it, and they proceeded to get in a car for me, only to turn around and sell it to someone else “accidentally”. They managed to get another one a week or two later (or something like that), but offered no real apology for selling “my” car
3. with the conditions that the car be either under 50k miles and 5 years at the time of onset
4. which, I have always used OEM parts/filters that I’ve purchased at this dealer

Anyway, thought I should share that piece of knowledge. So, not only do you need the adapter (AP9584), but you need a APC Smart Signaling cable (2 meters 940-0024, or 15 feet 940-1524). Or, just make your own following the info on the apcupsd site.

But, new term, and new students/faculty bring new complaints. Problem is, we didn’t really have a good grasp on the temperature in there. So, today I set about fixing that.

There are really 3 things needed to get this working.

1. Copy of tempmonitor (found here, in /Volumes/Temperature\ Monitor\ 4.94/TemperatureMonitor.app/Contents/MacOS/)
2. snmpd.conf (will show REAL basic one below)
3. Script to grab temp, and report it

Really, all of this is pretty darn simple. So, here we go.

Take tempmonitor, and drop it somewhere like /usr/local/bin/, or if you’re lazy, /usr/bin/. This will let you easily say “tempmonitor” at the CLI, and get back your temps for the computer.

Then, edit your snmpd.conf with something like: sudo nano -w /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf and put in something like:

rocommunity public 10.0.0.0/24

extend ambient_temp /usr/local/bin/checktemp.sh

Note the subnet specified. That’s who is allowed to access the snmp info. I would recommend setting that, so you aren’t getting hit by random people running snmpwalk.

Last part is creating the “checktemp.sh” script. Just do something like “sudo nano -w /usr/local/bin/checktemp.sh” and put in something like:

#!/bin/bash
t=`/usr/local/bin/tempmonitor -a -l -f | grep AMBIENT | cut -d" " -f4 | bc | awk '{printf "%.0f\n", $1}'`
exit $t

For the keen eyed, yes, I’m exiting with a non-zero. This is how you force snmp to pass an integer back, rather than a string. This took me a bit to figure out.

So, with all that in place, you should be able to do “sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.net-snmp.snmpd.plist” to load up snmp. On another computer, assuming it’s in the subnet you specified in the snmpd.conf, you should be able to do “snmpwalk -On -cpublic -v2c -m “+/usr/share/snmp/mibs/NET-SNMP-EXTEND-MIB.txt” aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd nsExtendObjects” where aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd is the IP address of the computer, and bam, you should get back several things, one of which will be the current rounded ambient air temp of the computer in question (assuming it has an ambient air sensor). I’m still trying to figure out how to pass back a float, which would allow a decimal point number. The other option would be to multiply the output by 10, then have your snmp app divide it by 10 to get your decimal. *shrugs* up to you.

Good luck!

Here’s the raw numbers for electricity.

• Total Energy used in 2011: 10,475.58KWH ($485.02)
• Average Energy use per month: 872.96KWH ($40.42)
• Highest energy use day (amount): 2011-12-06 (74.63KWH)
• Highest energy use month (amount): December 2011 (1498.92KWH)
• Lowest energy use day (amount): 2011-08-18 (9.28kWH)
• Lowest energy use month (amount): September 2011 (543.04KWH)
• Mean (average) energy use per day: 28.7KWH (~ $1.32/day)
• Median energy use per day: 25.9KWH
• Mode (most common) energy use per day: 22KWH (had to round this)
• Highest energy use at a given time: 18.15kW (registered on 2011-02-02 8:03am)
• Lowest Voltage Recorded: 113.5v (registered 2011-02-02 7:59am)
• Highest Voltage Recorded: 139.4v (registered 2011-09-12 21:31am)
• Average Voltage: 121.1v
• Degree Cooling days greater than or equal to 90F: 2
• Degree Heating days less than or equal to 32F: 50
• Number of rows in DB: 525,142

The first number, since it’s largely the most important when looking at data, is the last one: number of rows. 525,142 rows. There are approximately 525,600 minutes in a non-leap year, which means given my number of rows, I have ~99.91% of possible data for the year, or about 0.09% missing. This certainly is an improvement from last year of 99.57% data.

This year, much like last, we haven’t done much to address energy usage. No new appliances, but we did replace the garage doors with new insulated ones (R=9.8). Interestingly I haven’t found that they have altered the temperature of the garage much. It seems to stay at about 52F this winter, and not a lot warmer in the summer. But, they work, they’re quieter, and they keep out the bugs, and wind, etc. Still worth it. Just wish the tax credit had been extended. =(

Looking at the data compared to last year, most numbers have gone up. The mean and median have both gone up, though the mode has gone down. My highest and lowest usage months and days are largely the same as last year, but what’s most interesting is the heating/cooling degree days. Last year I had 4565 heating degree days, and 200 cooling degree days. This year, I had 5016 and 151 degree heating/cooling days (respectively), but most exemplified by 50 degrees at or below 32, and only 2 at or above 90! 2! The previous year we 9 days at or above 90, and only 19 at or below 32. These numbers explain the higher energy usage. The set point of the heat pump, and the temperature I keep the house at (68F is the point at which it is heated, and 80F is the point that it’s cooled), explains that more cold days is going to make a bigger difference than the fewer hot days can make up for.

Looking at voltage, by and large, it’s pretty solid, but you should notice that the highest energy usage for a given time, and the highest voltage, both occurred on the same day. I believe, and I may be wrong in this reasoning, that the high voltage was the “rebound” after that high energy usage stopped. Outside this, my voltage varies very little around it’s normal set point of 120V. Averages per day and per month you can see above, and from what I’ve found reading online, this is still well below the national, or regional averages for power. But, the take away from this is that while I used more power than 2010, I still used less energy than 2009, and years before. While I don’t have TED data before April of 2009, I DO have electricity bills¹.

So my usage since 2008 has decreased by a substantial amount. And since then, power rates have stayed the same ($0.0463/kwh). This year, there is projected to be an increase by about 4%, and that may allow me to justify additional savings. I hope to install a few more LED lights, replace inefficient solar sensors with a timer, etc. But, we shall see. And, if an appliance dies, I will definitely replace it with something more efficient.

Welcome to 2012. And here’s to at least matching/beating 2011′s numbers. I’ll next post some data about fuel usage (gasoline) to see how that part of my energy use compares to last year, and the years before it.

1. comparing my TED numbers to electricity bills has revealed that, on average, the electricity billed is ~4% BELOW actual usage

Since purchasing it, and realizing it’s capabilities, I’ve had it take over the role of “backup”. It serves to host previous terms of class data, and our Crashplan PROe data. And by and large, it works very well for that. It’s hard to get real performance numbers that would be useful to most, since I knew it wouldn’t be used for anything needing high performance, and therefore only put Western Digital 2TB Green drives in it (5900RPM. Not fast). It works, and it seems to work well. My only complaint is the software. They MUST use discovery to find the Drobo, and mount the volumes. You can’t, for some reason, specify that there’s a Drobo at this address. Because of this, and some as-yet-unknown issue with the OS X Server firewall, it takes a while for the software to find the B800i, and mount the volumes. But I’m going to investigate this more in the future, or ask that Drobo allow manually specifying the location of the Drobo rather than requiring it be “found”. Also, the software seems to rely on the GPU rendering the interface, which causes issues when combined with Apple Remote Desktop (the software pegs the CPU). I’ve reported this to them, and they weren’t of much help.

All and all, I’m happy. And at the price per TB (weird that it’s gotten to that point), it’s hard to beat it for near-line backup storage. My rating, a full point off, is because of the software issues. The hardware seems quite solid.

Rating: ★★★★☆