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Holidays Lights 2023: How Much Power?

As I’ve noted many times recently, instrumentation is addictive. Or perhaps it’s just my latest affectation? As I went about putting up our usual outdoor holiday lights, it occurred to me that I should change up how they are powered. In so doing, I’d collect some data on how much power is used by the festive presentation.

Holiday Lights 2023

The lighting design is the same one we’ve used for years. Its has a 5-pointed wooden star mounted to the top of the porch, with a cascade of mini-lights falling from the base of the star to the fence line. It was inspired by the fact that, long ago, Stella’s father had a 5-pointed metal star that he put atop their homestead in Thorndale, TX.

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Powerline Ethernet: Boldly Going Where Others Cannot Reach

asus-22.0.0Most people think that Wifi is awesome. It certainly is convenient, but I’ll let you in on a little secret. No matter how freaky your Wifi router looks….

Wifi Is Not Always Your friend!

The very nature of Wifi is in some ways problematic. It’s a lot like a hub in the bad old days. It’s essentially a single connection shared between all of the connected devices. As the number of Wifi devices in our lives continues to multiply, they must compete for access to bandwidth.

This contention for access is not always a problem. It doesn’t really matter if your Nest thermostat is slightly delayed in checking in with our largely benevolent overlords at Google. Nor does it matter if Outlook finds it’s access to the email server to be a bit sluggish. However, for real-time applications like streaming media, continuous, reliable bandwidth is utterly essential!

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