First, my general thoughts on battery backup units are that it’s really more of an insurance rather than a preventative measure. When I buy them, I treat it as more of a 2 year insurance policy (2-3 years is the average battery life from my experience). So my buying decision is usually a upper limit cost being 2-3% of the total value of everything that’s going to be plugged into it and a lower limit being two to three times the wattage required for everything being plugged in. I also only buy APC or CyberPower now. I’ve had several off brand units that were cheaper and the battery wouldn’t last as long nor did a good job of taking noise out of the power signal.

Then in August, while cooking dinner, I heard the loudest thunder/lightning sound. The power goes out for about a minute and then all the beeping stops and assumed everything was back to normal. Usually at this time, I’ll start getting emails from my NAS that the power went out and if the NAS will start to shut down. No email. So I check my phone and saw no wifi connection. Great, the router went out. So then I just started to take an inventory to see if anything else went out. All the TVs survived, but looks like all the DirecTV boxes are gone. I check all the computers, they all powered on fine. Then I checked the NAS. Dead. I have about 2TB of data and am just praying that the drives are still alive. The NAS is the only thing plugged into the battery side of the APC unit. I went ahead and checked everything else on the non-battery side and they’re all dead too. I checked the rest of the house and looks like everything else survived. But of course I forgot the check the garage til the next morning when I was leaving for work. Garage opener and the sprinkler system also dead. So all in all, the total damage ended up being just a little more than my homeowners insurance (I generally chose higher deductible, lower premium since the cross over point is usually a couple of years). Luckly, the modem and DirecTV boxes were all fixed for the cost of a service call. The sprinkler controller was like $15 on ebay and I swapped out the garage opener to the screw type, something I should have done earlier since the previous one was the loud chain system.

So I start the APC claim process. I looked online to see if anyone else had posted their experience of the process to see what I could expect, but didn’t really find anything with detail. I was basically trying to see if I should just buy a new NAS unit and wait to get reimbursed or wait it out without access to anything on the NAS for a couple of months. But I went ahead and decided to get a replacement unit since I don’t think I could have survived the two months without that data. First the phone call to start the claim. When calling the APC number, there’s no option to file a claim. I finally got a hold of a human and was finally sent to the right department. From there, the process was fairly straightforward. I just gave them the basic info and they were going to ship me a new UPS unit with a return label for my current one. I also received a 10 page questionnaire to fill out. Pretty basic stuff about what happened and the devices that were plugged into the unit at the time of the incident. They also asked for the replacement cost of everything. I looked online to come up with a fair value. The NAS was new, but the other stuff were older and out of production. So I came up with a number and shaved several percents off to a nice round number. The longest part was drawing out the schematics of my setup including all the wiring (power, ethernet, phone, coax). I have 3 units in my office and drew it all out. If anything, it was actually nice to see the entire setup on paper/power point (I probably should go ahead and do the rest of the house).

Then came the wait. I was told to wait a few weeks to hear back about the decision. A month passed after they received my unit and haven’t heard back from them yet. So I decided to call back. Again, I go through the option tree to get a human and get transferred. I gave them the claim number and they can’t find it. They were able to find a new claim number with the serial number of the unit which I thought was odd. Then they transfer me again because I wasn’t at the right department. I ask for the number/extension of the right department before the transfer. They gave me a number and was told to follow the tree. I wrote it down and was transferred over. Of course the new phone number was the same as the old, but didn’t realize it quick enough. So when the next person answered, I again asked for their number and extension. Same number and was told to follow the phone tree. I asked for which options to hit, but he didn’t have an answer. I decided to just forget it and hoped that I wouldn’t have to call in again. So he asked for the claim number, so I gave him the ‘new’ number the previous rep provided. Can’t find anything. Go through the whole search process again and they found it. It was my original number. So now I’ve wasted 15 minutes with the previous rep for nothing. He looks up the case and told me that my unit was received and in queue to be bench tested. So the 45 or so minutes on the phone wasn’t a total waste. The next call about a week later was pretty much about the same, so decided I would wait at least a couple weeks before I go through that again.

Finally on October 20th, I get an email saying my claim would be approved! They sent additional forms to finalize the process, which I faxed back immediately. And I go to check the mail last week and find this check.

Overall, the claim process was not too bad as long as you don’t try to call in too many times. Hopefully, I won’t have to go through this again for many years, but I will probably only buy APC units from here on out.

Update 7/17/2010: Received full amount from both services.

I sold both an iPhone 3G 8GB and iPhone 3Gs 16GB and received the quoted price for both, $111.10 and $296.50 respectively.

I first started a couple years ago using P3′s Kill-A-Watt, but obviously that was limited to just one outlet and no way to log the data. Then came along the TED5000 from The Energy Detective which also integrated with Google PowerMeter. I got mine back in October and have more data than I know what to do with. I’ve been playing with it and trying to analyze and correlate the data and I’ll post some nice charts and plots of my findings in future posts. But for now, having the TED5000 has been quite useful. As an engineer, I’ve always wondered how my behavior would change if I had all the data possible. For example, I’m always taking different routes to work and recording the time (travel time and departure time) and fuel consumption to optimize my commute. And I believe some of the concerns with counting calories is the adverse behavior of possibly under eating. However, I really don’t see any pitfalls other than maybe never turning the air conditioner on.

After reading other users of the unit, my first goal was to bring down my baseline usage. Basically, I checked every device that is always plugged in to see if it’s worth the $1/W/yr to keep it plugged in. With 6 UPS units in the house and a HEPA air filter pretty much on all the time, I was only able to get it down to ~420 Watts. Prior to getting the unit, I had done some basic energy efficiency updates including checking for leaks around door and windows and replacing all 28 normal and 22 R40 bulbs. So my next step was playing with my programmable thermostat to see if there’s any way to even cut down one cycle per day, but with temperature not in the 100s yet, It will be a few months before any results. Now as to my day to day behavioral changes, I find my self actively turning off lights I’m not using, even if I plan to return to the room in a few minutes. With the TV, rather than muting it, when I receive a phone call, I turn it off if I expect it to be a long call or just turn off all the other components if I expect it to be short. I also find myself channel surfing a lot less – if there’s nothing on and the DVR queue is empty, the TV is off. With Google’s PowerMeter, it pre-budgets the electricity for my based on historical analytics (or maybe just a simple average). So for Earth Day 2010, I’m currently under budget for the day and look forward to keeping my watts down to a minimum.

So this script will give you a reminder to change your payment method whenever you make a PayPal payment.  The script will change the background to Red and also provide a pop up notice.  You will first need to install the Greasemonkey Firefox plugin if you don’t have it already.  After restarting Firefox, you can either head over to the project page at Userscripts or click here to install. I’ve also included the source code below.

// ==UserScript==
// @name		paypal change payment reminder
// @namespace		http://userscripts.org/users/dchoe
// @description		to remind you to change your funding source to credit card.  the background will turn red if your funding source is still set to instant transfer
// @source		http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/53710
// @version		0.1
// @include		https://www.paypal.com/*
// @include		https://payments.ebay.com/*
// ==/UserScript==

function changeStyle(css) {
	var head, style;
	head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
	if (!head) { return; }
	style = document.createElement('style');
	style.type = 'text/css';
	style.innerHTML = css;
	head.appendChild(style);
}

if (document.location.href.match(/paypal\./i)) {
	if (document.body.innerHTML.match(/instant transfer/i)) {
		if (document.body.innerHTML.match(/instantAch/)) { return; }
		else {
			changeStyle('Body {background-color: #CC0000}');
			alert('Change Payment Type');
		}
	}
}

if (document.location.href.match(/ebay\./i)) {
	if (document.body.innerHTML.match(/from  bank account/i)) {
		changeStyle('Body {background-color: #CC0000}');
		alert('Change Payment Type');
	}
}

All you have to do is copy the code below and paste it anywhere before </head> (closure of your head tag). You will have to make two edits. First change the tracking code on line 3 to the one assigned by Google. Then change the domain name on line 4 to your domain. Be sure the include whatever sub-domain, if any, you are using (include www if you’re using it). The outbound link tracking will work for any links going to any other domain or sub-domain. In Analytics, these links will show up under Content as a page view. The page will show up as a hit in a directory named out – ie an outbound link to www.google.com will be tracked as a /out/www.google.com/ page view.

For WordPress users, if you don’t want to manually edit your theme or your theme doesn’t let you add anything to your <head> tags, install the Add to Header plugin.

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
	onload = function(){
	var tracker = 'UA-XXXXXXXX-X';  // change this
	var domain = 'any.domain.tld';  // change this
	var code = "var _gaq = _gaq||[];_gaq.push(['_setAccount', '" + tracker + "'],['_setDomainName', '" + domain + "'],['_trackPageview']);(function() {var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';(document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(ga);})();";
	var newScript = document.createElement('script');
	newScript.type = 'text/javascript';
	newScript.innerHTML = code;
	document.body.insertBefore(newScript, document.body.firstChild);
	var allA = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
	var domainRegex = new RegExp ( "http:\/\/" + domain.replace(".","\\.") , "i");
	if ( typeof(allA) != "undefined") {
		for (i = 0; i < allA.length; i++) {
			var newAttr = null;
			var newAttrText = null;
			var oldAttr = null;
			var href = allA[i].href;
			if (!href.match(domainRegex)) {
				newAttrText = href.replace(/http:\/\//i,"");
				if (newAttrText.length > 0) {
					if (allA[i].getAttribute("onclick") != null) {
						oldAttr = allA[i].getAttribute("onclick") + ";";
					}
					newAttr = document.createAttribute("onclick");
					if (oldAttr == null) newAttr.nodeValue = "_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', 'out/" + newAttrText + "'])";
					else newAttr.nodeValue = oldAttr + "_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', 'out/" + newAttrText + "'])";
					allA[i].setAttributeNode(newAttr);
				}
			}
		}
	}
}
</script>

Note 1: For sites with higher traffic, you may want to save the code above (sans the first and last line) as a .js file to leverage browser caching. Then just copy and paste the following inside your head tag. Of course you will need to point the src to where you uploaded the file.

<script src="http://domain.tld/path/to/script.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
</script>

Note 2: If you have previously used Google Analytics, be sure to remove all other instances of their tracking code.

This time around, I’ve decided to also have a photo blog rather than a normal photo gallery.  So my photos will be on my other site – http://dustinchoe.com and everything else here.