LEDs for Life?

I have spent some time thinking about lightbulbs.  Probably at least partially due to the fact that I'm pretty cheap and loved the idea of the cost savings from LEDs.  A few years after moving into my house, I decided to make all of the outdoor bulbs LEDs (recorded in this post).   Part of my motivation was that I didn't want to change light bulbs anymore and I saw LEDs as a lifetime solution.   I would joke to folks that I didn't get paid to change light bulbs.

Well, some of my outdoor LEDs have started to fail and I'll have to admit that I'm kinda bummed.  Not because they weren't the right answer for my lighting needs, they definitely were.  If my math was even remotely correct, I saved a boatload of money (on the order of $860) despite buying the bulbs for $36 each (and that was a good price - Costco - in 2013).  The reason that I'm bummed is that I have to replace the lightbulbs at all.

When I installed the bulbs, I noted that I expected them to last for 7 years.  That sounds like a very long time in the future, potentially approaching the perspective of "forever from now".  And bulb lifetime, as estimated at that point in time, was going to be based on the light output degrading to only half of what it had originally been.  Some of the bulbs, however, have not lasted 7 years.  I just replaced two: one was flickering (spending more time off than on) and the other was just out all of the way.  That wasn't the way it was supposed to be.  They were supposed to last forever!

I've replaced the bulbs with new Feit bulbs that cost 1/12th the cost of the original LEDs, but I'm just a little bit sad that the LEDs are not lifetime bulbs.

Receiver Received!

Yay!  New Yamaha receiver was just received.  Let's hope it's awesome.

3D Mapping

There are a few pretty cool upcoming devices coming that are going to help bridge the physical world with the world of 3D printing and a new generation of "makers".

The first, one most intreaguing to me is the Structure IO

The second is the Spike project, from the folks at ike gps.  This looks to draw from their heritage of

Not So Smart Meters

Undoubtedly Dominion Virginia Power spent a lot of money to install smart meters across it's system.  Mine was installed a couple of years ago, well after the 2010 installations in more dense parts of Northern Virginia.  I'm questioning how valuable that investment was based on my interactions with the data to date.

The smart meter at my house is shown below.  If you look at the meter for a while, you will see it show two different numbers.  I'm guessing it provides: maximum power consumption over the last 24 hours and cumulative kWh consumed.

Max kWh?

Cumulative kWh burned since the meter has been installed?

I only became aware of the availability of daily and 30 minute data last year when I was poking around the Dominion website.  I was intrigued that the smart meter that I already had could potentially give me most of the insights that my (now broken) TED would have been doing.  So far, though, I have failed to find anything super helpful from my smart meter data.