• 3 Posts
  • 539 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Not OP.

    That sucks. Especially having to make poor people financial decisions, you often can’t afford to make changes that will save you money in the long run. Been there done that.

    Still, there may be some things you can do to save electricity.

    Cheapo line meter. I use one on my well pump. It shows usage over time. You can figure out what’s using the most juice. It does 200v as well as 110 and clamps on. Does have to be wired in to for it’s power supply and ground.

    Also, Kill-a-Watt clones. $9.99. Shows you how much plug in things use.

    Offhand things that might help:

    • Hot water heater on a timer and turn down the thermostat. There wil be bitching.
    • If you have an electric stove, inductance stoves are supposed to be the most efficent, but you probably can’t afford one. Electric kettles for boiling water probably beat using a stove to heat water.
    • Use a kill-a-watt to figure out what is using juice when appliances/TV/PC/etc. is on standbym
    • Check freezer temp, it may be colder than you have to have it, turn up the thermostat.
    • Check anything with a motor that plugs in with the kill-a-watt, like box fans to see if they’re pulling too much juice, when the motor bearings get shitty, you’ll pull more over coming friction.
    • Use that clamp meter to check things like whole house blower fans, bathroom fans.

    Good luck.








  • I’ve not worked with infrastructure PLCs but have some familiarity with industrial PLCs.

    The mode switch probably actually is an effective countermeasure. It’s common to leave machinery in Setup Mode all the time as you can’t change the program or parameters in Run Mode. I.E. you usually trust your crew not poke buttons they shouldn’t. Only in large factories do you find Run Mode being used, even large shops often leaves it in Setup.

    As to gateways and firewalls, the amount of machinery exposed rawdog to the entire interwebs is truly frightening. A lot of industrial equipment have exposed ports that are completely unsecured. Think RS-232 style comms that allow program and even parameter editing.

    I would imagine that many sewage trearment facilities are even less technologically sophisticated than a medium size machine shop.




  • It seems you’ve thought deeply about this. I’ve done so as well.

    It really fucking freaks me out that such a large chunk of our society is detached from objective, verifiable realty. A fair amount of what they believe is pants-on-head crazy vengeance fantasy. Another big chunk has spooky parallels to literal Nazi propaganda such as the Protocol of the Elders of Zion, it’s so similar that it’s obviously just borrowed. It’s shocking that more people don’t see it for what it transparently is.

    I have no clue what can be done about it. I don’t know how society heals this or reinforces the value of facts, sanity, and critical thinking.

    You got anything? Any thoughts about where we go from here? How to unfuck their heads? Where does this end if they aren’t deprogrammed? How long will we be trapped in this?

    Genuine questions because I ain’t got a fucking clue at this point.