ttystikk
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@soundiceuk - You are jacking the thread with you advertising. Please stop, or at least make your own thread.
Calbunn - This is all somewhat disturbing news, and yet not totally surprising. I'm sure that it is totally open to eventual abuse, but I'm tempted to think that it's also a technique to simply baffle customers with new and improved bullshit. "Sorry sir, but the [totally re-programmable] robot says that you've used this much electricity and you can't prove otherwise. Computers don't lie, so cough up." Yeah, and neither do slot machines... I will be buying a TED meter as soon as I save my pennies.
What it made me think of, however, was a potential solution. You being an electrically oriented sort of dude, can you critique the idea? Basically I'm envisioning an expanded trickle charger for a motorcycle battery. You plug it into an outlet, a timer turns on the charger during user-defined hours and tops up the battery and then automatically shuts of when full (or when it gets more expensive again), your lights draw from the battery instead of the grid itself. I'm sure that voltage conversion comes into play along with a bunch of other issues, but it seems like it would kill two or more birds at once:
-Program it to charge when juice costs the least
-Avoid leaving a trail consisting of sketchy usage patterns
-Use only the electricity you need
-Doesn't have an RFID so it's invisible to the Electric Co
-Draws only a little juice at any given time so it doesn't stand out
I dunno how to deal with the whole RF appliance link issue, but maybe this erases it from the beginning. What say you?
The problem with this approach, irrespective of savings from what hours one charges their batteries, is that batteries do not have 100% efficiency in storing/releasing their energy. In fact, it's between 60-75%. So much for the savings... It was a good idea though!
I do like the solar powered approach, but I'd do it backwards; sell the daylight power genrated by your solar array to the power company, at peak rates, then run your op at night on the cheap rate. I think you'd come out further ahead, since you're not using a battery but the power grid as your 'storage' device.