Folding Forum

My electricity is priced based on demand and constantly updated (pilot program). They send me a text if the price exceeds 10cents/kWh and there's a website where you can monitor the prices in real time (www.thewattspot.com and https://il.thewattspot.com/login.do?method=showChart ) It would be so great if there was a way for the PC to monitor these prices and shut down the folding temporarily when prices and demand are high. My rig goes from about 150Watts idle to 400watts under full load. The utility sends an electric usage report card quarterly and I get a "below average" using 113% more than comparable homes. Somehow this year I'm up 40% from last years usage !!!

Now that it's getting cooler I can turn folding back on (shutdown for summer for heat and high electric prices). I know some are against nuclear energy, but mankind could do some great things if we had enormous amounts of cheap energy, not just for research but living conditions around the world. The environmental danger pales in comparison to global warming (or the gulf oil spill) and the US Navy and Europe operate a lot of these things safely. It's not the solution for the long term, but it will be a long time before renewable sources are able to supply the massive amounts of energy we demand.

Anyway, just had to throw that in. This is one of the times I wish I knew how to write computer programs.

There are applications that allow you to control a PC remotely via a mobile phone. You could also login in to the PC remotely using tools like VNC and shutdown the client. Sorry, fah has no live monitoring functionality.

As for nukes, it's a shame the military dictated the original development path of nuclear power, chosing to follow a path where creating the fuel for power generation also resulted in by products that were useful for making nuclear bombs, and also tons of nuclear waste that last thousands of years.

If they had followed an alternate path (Thorium instead of Uranium), we'd all be using nuclear power with little waste, and what waste there is has a much shorter half-life. Our economy would be different as well.

Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke