Infrared heating – Good, bad, or ugly?

A couple of years ago (yes, this has taken me a couple of years from idea to implementation) I was thinking of re-doing my bathroom and decided that I didn’t want a radiator on the wall anymore, so I started to investigate what other types of heating were available. There was under floor heating, in-wall heating, or infrared heating

All appeared to have their plus and minus points. My original intention was to eventually convert all the upstairs rooms to use whatever I decided to go with, and maybe even replace heating in the whole house. Idealy, I didn’t want to use the boiler (and therefore gas) as I didn’t want to rely on gas, and I can hear the boiler (even though it’s been replaced recently with a far quieter one) when it’s being used. The only noise I want in the house is noise I make (for) myself. TV, music, whatever. I don’t want a background hum of some device

I started looking at infrared heating. Everything I found was a ‘thing’ that you had to mount somewhere, losing precious wall or ceiling space – All the reading I did also stated that you shouldn’t have anything in front of the infrared heater, so that severly limits which walls are suitable to mount any heating to

Mounting something the ceiling seemed more viable, but all the heating options I saw were frankly ugly and intrusive. They were also set off the ceiling so they would be dust and condensation traps which didn’t sound like a great idea

After many fruitless searches, I finally came across a company called ASTECtherm who provide an infrared heating solution which you plaster in to the ceiling. I already had some great electricians from SolarOrb who had installed my solar panels and battery system. This solution seemed like a good option for me to try

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Reducing power usage part 2

Since posting part 1 of reducing power, I received the order of my ASRock and have re-used the hard drives from the previous Shuttle I had. The Shuttle wasn’t loud by any stretch, but the ASRock is incredibly quiet. To the point where I have to check it’s still running!

After previously being impressed with how long my hard drives have lasted, one went pop during a power failure. That’s a bit disappointing, but the drives are only Western Digital Blue’s which are just generic consumer desktop disks.

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Reducing power usage part 1

A good 7 years ago, I bought a Shuttle SX38P2 Pro which has been running pretty much 24/7 ever since. Recently the PSU fan has been struggling, but I can’t complain for the time it’s been in use. Over those 7ish years I’ve suffered a single drive failure.

# smartctl -a /dev/ada0 | grep Power_On_Hours
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 081 081 000 Old_age Always - 13972
# smartctl -a /dev/ada1 | grep Power_On_Hours
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 015 015 000 Old_age Always - 62738

As the fan was struggling, I contacted Shuttle to ask about replacements but received no reply. That was disappointing, but I guess understandable as the model has been discontinued (I didn’t think the cooling was model-specific though).

Continue reading Reducing power usage part 1