Well, that was fun! I’m pleased to report a resonable turnout of people interested in the subject matter of last night’s webinar. We had about 20 people join the presentation live. Further, a number who could not attend have inquired about the availability of a recording. So, here’s the video:
You can also download the slides in PDF format.
As promised some weeks ago, I’ve created a presentation that describes our experience arriving at a strategy for whole home backup power. Since there seems to be some interest in this sort of thing, I’ll be presenting it via Zoom on Thursday, July 25th at 7pm CDT.
The presentation draws upon the experiences from Hurricane Ike in 2008, Winter Storm Uri in 2021, the derecho in and Hurricane Beryl in 2024. It traces our evolution from a wholly ad hoc approach, to running our entire home (including 4T AC) from a portable inverter.
Several times a day I think to myself, it’s time to administer the meds. But then it isn’t. Not anymore.
You see….Miss Gwen passed earlier this month, at age 14y1m. That’s quite an achievement for a Labrador. Especially for one that had her litany of issues. I won’t bother to enumerate them, but over time they were many.
Even so, she was a happy grrrl. That was her gift. She loved basically everyone and everything. Except peas. She didn’t like peas. This we only recently learned.
Gwen came to us in February of 2011 by way of Southeast Texas Labrador Rescue. We’re told she had been found abandoned in a Walmart parking lot in Humble, TX. It follows that from the very beginning she suffered from separation anxiety.
Around here we make significant use of power-over-ethernet. If something can be powered from the network…it is. Sometimes that means the device itself supports POE. Occasionally it means the device is connected to a “POE splitter.” That’s a little device that receives 802.11af standard p.o.e. and breaks out a 5v or 12v DC feed. This is how we power the little IoT hubs from Philips Hue and Lutron, and some Raspberry Pi’s.
Some time ago I did a little exploration of POE extenders. These are like little network switches that receive ethernet with power from one cable, allowing it to be passed onward to 2-3 POE capable devices. The theory here is that a single run of Cat 5E can power 2-3 IP cameras, up to the load limit of the port on the switch. If the switch is capable of POE+ it can readily handle two or three cameras connected to a single port.
Recently I learned of a different kind of POE splitter. These are a wholly passive arrangement. Just some wires and connectors. They leverage the fact that Ethernet does not use all 8 conductors in the cable. So, by shifting which pins use which wires at both ends of the cable, you can effectively turn one cable pull into two Ethernet drops.
At the switch, a combiner component connects two ports to a single cable. At the far end, a splitter component breaks the feeds out to separate Ethernet jacks. Power can be delivered over both connections.
It’s dead common to have a camera position at the peak of a roof gable, or the corner of a house, where you might like to have cameras looking in each direction. This harness makes that possible without pulling two Ethernet cables. And retains the ability to power cycle each camera by cycling power to the associated port.
While not fancy, these wee beasts are simple and cheap. Just $15 a set. That seems quite attractive for some common situations.
Since the crazy storm of May 16th took out power for much of Houston, there has been a lot of chatter about strategies for backup power. So much so that I posted to NextDoor to see what interest there might be in a seminar on the matter. My intent being to share our own experience and that of a few friends who have followed a similar path. The response was very strong, the thread resulting in over 160 comments in just a couple of days!
So, I guess I have to get busy crafting the presentation. While I do that, and for the very impatient, here is a list of related items I’ve written previously:
It will take me some time to tie everything we’ve learned into a single (hopefully) coherent presentation. Given the level of interest, it will most likely be conducted as an online webinar. Details to follow as it progresses.
It now seems half-a-lifetime ago that I used to commit an hour or two every Friday to join Randy Resnick’s VoIP Users Conference (VUC) calls. That long-running project developed a global community of like-minded geeks, addressing a broad range of technology topics.
If you’re not familiar, VUC was a live call-in podcast that ran from 2005 to 2018. There were around 800 episodes, with numerous guests from the far corners to the communications ecosystem.
It started on a service called Talkshoe, accessible via telephone and SIP. After interviewing ZipDX founder David Frankel (VUC381) about his (then) new project it transitioned to the ZipDX wideband conference platform. Sponsor Voxbone (now part of Bandwidth) was able to provide dial-in access numbers in dozens of countries. When Google introduced Hangouts, VUC naturally transitioned to that new video platform, but always maintained integration with the telephony realm.
One of the things the project required was post-processing of the recording each week, to ensure consistent sound level for all the various participants. In a podcast, dramatic changes in level from speaker-to-speaker is very jarring to the listener.