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Household hardware

I have written before of my bad luck with my external hard drive, but there had been a few more more failures at my house, not related to computer hardware though, mostly related to household appliances: both the dishwasher and the washing machine decided to break up.

On the bright side the washing machine is under a 5-years warranty (I extended it when we bought it, my parents didn’t want to) and the dishwasher was quite cheap at the time. I’m going to replace the latter with a new AAA-class (highly energy efficient) appliance, possibly with programming support so that my mother can make smaller loads (for instance when she’s alone eating at home) or make it run early in the morning while we sleep. Since the problem, at least with the washing machine, is with the hardness of water (it’s full of calcium) I’m also considering adding a filter to the tap the washing machine is connected: the boiler already has one based on polyphosphate “salts” (not sure if they are actual salts, I’m sorry but my chemistry is not really that good), and it seems to work decently well; finding something that would be refilled with the same stuff is better since it’d be less stuff to buy, and keep at home.

Luckily there has been also good news: I finally replaced the light fixture in my room with a 4-way (from a shitty 3-way that always looked like falling down); the new fixture uses GU-10 sockets, and was designed to hold four 50W halogen lamps (which would give it a 200W total energy use, which is definitely too much for my bedroom). I bought instead four GU-10 LED lamps, 78 LEDs each, declared between 2.3 to 3W the lamp. They are bright! They are brighter than the three CFLs that I used to have at the beginning, which, total, consumed around 30W. Sure there is still the problem of cost (€47 of the four lamps, from Germany), and the size (the fixture had some glass container that was quite nice to the eye, but the LED lamp does not fit in it), but it seems like that kind of technology is really flying.

I’ll have to see if I can get more LED lamps around the house, saving money with energy efficiency on lights will probably allow me to hide the money I spend on computers turned on all day long…

Comments 3
  1. Where did you find bright enough GU-10 replacements?I’m using some 1.4W and 1.7W GU-10 replacements here in the bathing room, but they aren’t bright enough at all, yet is the angle of radiation (24°) satisfying.Regards, Elias P.

  2. I found them on eBay on a German seller having a shop called Del-ko; I already bought from them before, so I was likely to trust them again.

  3. Speaking of LED lamps – I cut my electricity bill by 25% year-over-year. Granted, I#d been on holidays a little longer, yet, this saved me a few hundred €. Greatly recommended! Btw: I’m from germany, so let me know if your supplier ever runs out of ’em. Those LEDs are available at most retailers, and now that the EU has banned the sale of regular bulbs from 1/1/10, more ppl are going to switch to LED’s anyways.

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