Do you have a plan for how to keep your fresh food cold in the event of a power outage? Here's an Amazon link for a similar unit: http://amzn.to/2gKrPew and the insulated Transit Bag (highly recommended): http://amzn.to/2gJVzbj Part of my plan is to use this 12v fridge/freezer that I purchased 13 years ago for camping and off-roading. It's an ARB 40 liter model, but similar units are available in the Engel and other brands, they're all very similar. They can run off either 12v DC or 120v AC power. More information below on current models: - http://arb.com.au/products/arb-freezer-fridges/ I wanted to determine how much current and power this fridge requires to stay cold for 24 hours. For the test, I pre-cooled the unit with 2 gallons of liquid inside for ~5 hours. Then I reset the power meter and recorded the amp- and watt-hours for 24 hours of operation. The fridge was outside in 55-75 degree temperatures for that period. I found the overnight (16 hour) consumption was 12 amp-hours for 24 hours, it was 18.35 amp-hours and 218 watt-hours. For comparison, my Energy Star refrigerator uses about 1400 watt-hours in 24 hours. And I looked up what an Energy Star mini-fridge uses and that is about 600 watt-hours per day. Now this 40L (1.4 cu.ft.) fridge is at the low end of mini-fridge size, but at 1/3 the energy consumption, it makes an attractive off-grid solution. I was able to run mine continuously on about 90 watts of solar panels and a couple of 35AH batteries. One other reason for doing this test is that I wanted to see how much capacity I would need if I wanted to set up a portable solar system for use in my truck. That way I could set up some folding panels and charge a battery during the day to run the fridge at night for extended camping. A 100W folding solar panel runs about $200, add in a small charge controller and battery and a decent portable system would cost under $300. I would not classify myself as a "prepper", but if I can do some basic preparation to be a little more comfortable in a power outage situation, by all means I'll do them. I now know I can plug in the fridge into my solar power system and just leave it on if I need it. That makes it just like my house refrigerator, I never think about it, it is just there and works all by itself, same with this 12V fridge. That is one less thing to worry about in case the power is out for an extended time. Anyone looking for an off-grid refrigeration system might consider something like this. There are also the 3-way powered RV refrigerator/freezes, that run off 12V, 120V and propane/LPG. I don't have LPG at home, so that was not an option for me. One advantage of these 12V fridges is that they tolerate running at extreme angles, unlike the propane models that ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xevi10W_uCo

Reworked the PLEG code to work with the positive/negative power readings that were unlocked in the previous video. It's amazing what knowing the actual power and direction of flow makes in the code. Before, it was a guessing game and now it's a simple computation. This is my first time working with "conditional values" in PLEG along with logic expressions in actions. The Vera controllers use the Lua programming language and PLEG uses a Lua-like syntax as well. On thing that's "missing" is you can't have assignment expressions, like a=b+c. Instead, you need to make a condition called "a" and determine it's value as the result of (b+c). Then you can use the value in "a" as a variable in other expressions. I like to keep expressions simple and compute just one thing at a time. This helps as you can see the intermediate results. The key to this computation was to keep everything in floating point. My original code was integer-based and had a problem when it kept ignoring small ~1 watt changes in power. Over time those small changes would build up and until there was a big change of 7 or more watts, nothing would happen. With the floating point code, you keep accumulating the changes and once that rounds up or down to a different number, a change is made. The other key point is to have only ONE variable tracking the dimmer setting. Before I had tried to use a counter to handle incrementing/decrementing the dimmer setting, then writing that counter value to the dimmer. This was before I figured out the "conditional values" and was an easy way to add or subtract numbers in a variable. However, this created a problem in that the counter and the dimmer could get out of sync. Moving to just having a device property that follows the dimmer setting solved that issue. With only one copy, it can't get out of sync. It also allows manually adjusting the dimmer to see how the code reacts. Also tried to incorporate features into the code to reduce Z-Wave network traffic as well as spread that and the CPU load out in time. This should help reduce bottlenecks and synchronization issues. For example, the time delay between getting the power sample and then acting on any changes allows all the computations to take place before the logic that makes changes runs. More to come, seeing what other features are possible with this code... Subscribe for more content like this Comment, rate, share & click the bell icon And as always, thanks for watching Intro/Outro: Louisiana Fairytale by Austin Rogers https://web.archive.org/web/20170402222425/http://drfiddle.com/show_tune.php?id=94 ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXlhLOUYIow