Matt Simerson

The coldest Puget Sound winter in decades is receding and with it the heat pumps heavy period of energy use. April showers are upon us, the sun is rising higher each passing week and solar output is crawling out of the winter basement. In the past week, the solar panels produced 75% of our household energy budget. It looks like we’ll be into “solar surplus” territory by the end of April.

“Steve Jobs came to me and told me he was quitting to start his company Apple. He offered me 1/3 of the company for $50,000. … I turned him down.” — Nolan Bushnell

https://www.npr.org/player/embed/516853162/517225664

The the USA is still one of the largest manufacturers in the world. Our manufacturing sector is producing as much today as it ever has:

source: tradingeconomics.com

While it’s true that some (a small fraction) US manufacturing jobs have moved overseas (especially textiles), the vast majority of manufacturing job losses are due to automation. It is machines that have taken those jobs, not foreigners or immigrants.

On balance, NAFTA was a very big win for the USA and our trading partners Canada and Mexico. The primary reason NAFTA hasn’t helped Mexico far more is due to our ill conceived and almost entirely ineffective war on drugs.

In July I purchased a GE Geospring ($700 at Lowes in Seattle) 50 gallon heat pump water heater. I installed it myself in the basement. It’s wired the same as a typical electric water heater, so I just ran a new circuit of 10 gage wire and hooked it up.

Heat pump water heaters make more noise than traditional water heaters. If I happen to walk by the open door to the basement, I can hear it but I don’t consider it “loud.” It makes a little less noise than a dehumidifier, a lot less noise than an old dishwasher, but a fair bit more noise than my new ultra-quietest-one-available dishwasher. I’d guess in the neighborhood of 65 decibels.

Heat pump water heaters cool the area they’re in. I consider that a feature, as the basement is our “cool dry” storage area. Despite the output of cool air, the basement was about 64° before I put the heat pump water heater in and it’s still usually 64° after. That’s because the concrete floor and walls have lots of thermal mass so it takes a LOT of input to change the temps significantly.

A heat pump also dehumidifies the air. It has a condensate drain where the water obtained is drained off. Over the course of a week, the condensate measured about a quart for our family of four. Not huge, not “replaces a dehumidifier,” but welcome never-the-less.

The install docs recommend installing it in a garage or basement and I agree. You could put it in a large closet or pantry, but you’d want to have insulated doors if it’s adjacent to a “relaxing” area of the house.

Thus far, I’m very fond of my heat pump water heater.

Since the last century, I’ve been in the habit of piping my web server log files through cronolog and off to automatically selected files in the pattern /var/log/http/2015/10/23/access.log. This works quite well for me because way back when, I wrote a little log processing script called Logmonster.

After all these years, Logmonster still runs a while after midnight (via periodic) and:

• parses the web server logs by date and vhost
• feeds them through Awstats
• compresses them

Back when Logmonster was named Apache::Logmonster, it required installing cronolog and making a few small changes to httpd.conf:

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\" %v" logmonster
CustomLog "| /usr/local/sbin/cronolog /var/log/http/%Y/%m/%d/access.log" logmonster
ErrorLog "| /usr/local/sbin/cronolog /var/log/http/%Y/%m/%d/error.log"

Years later, after I got tired of maintaining Apache, lighttpd was all shiny and new and it was similarly easy to configure, making these changes to lighttpd.conf:

accesslog.format = "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\" %v"
accesslog.filename = "|/usr/local/sbin/cronolog /var/log/http/%Y/%m/%d/access.log"
server.errorlog = "/var/log/http/error.log"

Now, after spending more time than I wanted to determining why lighttpd and haproxy stopped playing nice together (Most HTTP POST commands time out. No good reason why. Remove haproxy, works fine. Replace lighttpd with nginx behind haproxy and it works fine.) so I replaced lighttpd with nginx. That required figuring out how to get cronolog type logging to work in nginx.

Nearly all my cronolog+nginx search returned only instructions for setting up logging to a FIFO, which I thought was a nifty idea. So I created the FIFOs, configured nginx, and upon startup, nginx just hangs. No idea why. It’s also requires setting up the FIFOs before nginx could start up, so I didn’t love that idea. Then I found instructions showing how to configure log rotation within nginx.conf. That’s exactly what I was looking for.

This is my solution for timestamp based logging with nginx:

log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" $status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" "$http_user_agent" "$server_name"';
if ($time_iso8601 ~ "^(?\d{4})-(?\d{2})-(?\d{2})") {}
access_log /var/log/http/$year/$month/$day/access.log main;