8 ms·

Show HN: Mac toolbar app to show electricity cutoff schedule

105 points by mhasbini 7y ago

beilabs 7y ago
We had a similar app in Kathmandu. City cut of power to certain zones on an hourly basis, the app helped tracked the powers eventual return and pending cutoff. The amount of activity in the neighborhood when the power comes back on, screams of Batti Aiyo could be heard all around. Turns out it was entirely preventable and that it was all due to an enormous amount of corruption between the Nepalese Energy authority and factories around the country. One guy came into the authority and changed it all for the better and brought all the corruption into the open. Definitely made living here just that much easier.
ohazi 7y ago
Anyone want to make this work in California with the PG&E schedule?
- master-litty 7y ago
  I do but, silly thought first, would there be any legal liability in doing so? It's such a sensitive political subject, I can't help but wonder if a third party app that fails to report outages properly could get in trouble.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    You can be sued by anyone for nearly any reason. That’s true but not especially helpful guidance. I try not to walk around afraid of my shadow or looking for monsters under every bed. In practice, someone building an app with genuine intent to track the outages would face an extremely minimal risk of legal liability. (IANAL)
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    Legal liability getting in the way of doing good things will be part of the USA's downfall. A million tiny cuts...
- l1n 7y ago
  I've done similar things using https://getbitbar.com/ https://getbitbar.com/ + https://github.com/insanum/gcalcli https://github.com/insanum/gcalcli
harel 7y ago
This is stark reminder that we should not take our privileges for granted. We don't think about continuous stream of power through our plugs as a privilege (or at all) but it's not trivial, considering so many might have the latest macbook but not always the power to run it (and to even more people the idea of owning a computer is on the same level as flying to Jupiter).
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  I sometimes wonder if this will become the norm when we green the grid and if so what people will do to mitigate it.
  - insomniacity 7y ago
    I wonder if we'll end up with individual home storage, eg Tesla Powerwall or similar. Then you fill it up when there's grid, you use it when there isn't, and you just have to manage the charge level.
    - rubbingalcohol 7y ago
      Or maybe people will move to states that aren't so badly managed that critical infrastructure is unavailable as a matter of course.
      - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
        Most critical infrastructure has its own backup system already.
      - toomuchtodo 7y ago
        Not likely. California has too much to offer most ($3 trillion economy). People will get solar (mandatory on new construction residential roofs now after Jan 2020) and Powerwalls and carry on.
        7y ago
KrystalSparks 7y ago
Great
ronyfadel 7y ago
On that note: there are currently massive anti-government protests happening throughout Lebanon, against rampant corruption in the establishment, which is behind the broken electricity sector (amongst others). https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/world/middleeast/lebanon-protests.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/world/middleeast/lebanon-...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sundvor 7y ago
That's akin to a cry out for a Powerwall plus solar panel setup!
- gwbas1c 7y ago
  The limiting factor is manufacturing capacity. Tesla limits where they sell Powerwalls and solar roofs because they can't make them fast enough to meet nationwide (or worldwide) demand.
  - ronyfadel 7y ago
    It’s also inconvenient for the generator mafia in Lebanon to have people generate their own electricity.
omarish 7y ago
Fellow Lebanese(-American) here. This is awesome. Thanks for creating and sharing it.
- swampthing 7y ago
  Funny, I have a habit of reading HN comments before clicking on the actual link, and thought the link would be about the planned outages here in the SF bay area :)
londons_explore 7y ago
How does this work? Do you have two feeds into your house, one from the power grid and one from the generator-grid? Did the generator company lay new power lines to every house? Or do you lease the generator and run it in your garage, but the generator maker somehow bills you for power consumed rather than just running hours?
londons_explore 7y ago
If I lived here, I would fit an Arduino and a bunch of SSR's to my electrical breaker box. The Arduino would detect use of the generator, and detect load on the generator (with a current clamp), and if the load was too high, start shedding power-hungry devices like electric heaters, driers, ovens, etc. The order of switch off would be programmable, and some devices like fridges or heaters could be programmed to only run on utility power to save money. Total hardware cost of $30 would pay for itself quickly in both saved generation bills as well as a better quality of life, and the design/build cost of a few days would easily be recouped by selling devices to all my neighbours.
- ronyfadel 7y ago
  Turn fridge and heaters off? How do then keep food fresh, or heat homes? It’s not how it works, in Lebanon you pay the generator “company” a monthly fee independent of your consumption, but dependent on max amperage you wish to get. The electricity already cuts off (circuit breaker) if you go beyond it (e.g. use a hairdryer). Some people “cheat” that system by pouring saline into the circuit breaker causing it to rust from the inside, this it would never break.
  - hokumguru 7y ago
    The average refrigerator is insulated enough to keep food fresh for a moderate amount of time - provided the door remains shut. How that shutoff affects the compressor is a different story, however.
pandizzle 7y ago
South Africa also has rolling blackouts every few months. We have apps to notify us when it'll happen on our phones. A lot of us have accepted it as normal by now.
- mikorym 7y ago
  Yup, only trouble is the app says "stage 3 loadshedding" and then your power is on. The next day the app says "no loadshedding" and hey look, the power is off. This varies a bit, in rural areas it can be much worse, but often the municipalities are the culprits there. Even in some JHB suburbs you are never quite sure if it is the muni or loadshedding, but recently I have noticed that the FB hordes somehow manage to sniff out the exact transformer that failed...
tibbydudeza 7y ago
"We actually have a whole market of private large generators owners that sell you electricity to mitigate this." Do they use the existing municipal infrastructure or do they need to lay new cables ???. We have rotational 2 hourly load shedding on bad days here in South Africa as our state owned power company has no spare capacity and the power stations are old so they tend to break down often. Our local FTH internet provider discovered the first time that happened after fiber rollout in our area when all their ONT's went online at the same time asking for authentication. It was clear they never planned for this.
- netsharc 7y ago
  I'm guessing they put a generator per building, and if you pay them, they'll wire your unit up to the generator? Probably split the cabling after the meter (you wouldn't want the municipal meter to be counting power you're buying privately) and allow for a 2nd set of cables as input, with a big switch to toggle between the two.
  - jek0 7y ago
    There's one privately owned generator in the neighborhood with cables running to each buildings. https://browse.startpage.com/do/show_picture.pl?l=english&rais=1&oiu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailystar.com.lb%2F%2Fdailystar%2FPictures%2F2019%2F03%2F16%2F734293_img650x420_img650x420_crop.jpg&sp=24d278f526e42ded4d077f122ebe032c&t=default https://browse.startpage.com/do/show_picture.pl?l=english&ra... The owner sells a fixed monthly fee per 5 amp, so there are individual breakers for each apartment. https://www.alamy.com/detail-from-a-wall-electric-cables-and-fuses-in-the-open-beirut-lebanon-image280512641.html https://www.alamy.com/detail-from-a-wall-electric-cables-and... Notice the "green light" in the picture. This is to inform people in the neighborhood that it's "generator's electricity", so they cannot use washing mashing and water heaters. The cable from the generator reaches the house after the meter, there's an automatic switch to take current from the generator only when there's no electricity from the government.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
mikorym 7y ago
This would have been useful in South Africa if that key assumption "thankfully the cut-off are almost always on schedule" had held. EDIT: We still have apps though. It's just a mystery sometimes when your power is on and the app says "STAGE 4 LOADSHEDDING [U R SCREWED]" and strangely the power is still on. The converse is more annoying of course.
burtonator 7y ago
Hello from California where we're one of the world's largest economies and still have electricity cutoffs. Thanks, Pacific Graft and Extortion!
peterburkimsher 7y ago
I needed something like this when I was in India for 5 months! Except there was no generator, so I'd just sleep my laptop when it ran out of battery. At least I didn't try using a desktop. I was interested in monitoring it at the time, so I wrote SMC voltmeter, an app to measure the input voltage. If you're interested in auto-detecting the power source to your laptop, my open-source code might be useful, so please give it a look! https://hackaday.com/2015/04/21/reading-analog-values-with-a-magsafe-port/ https://hackaday.com/2015/04/21/reading-analog-values-with-a...
Scapeghost 7y ago
In my decrepit corner of the third world we call it "loadshedding" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout) It's been a fact of life here as long as I've been alive and there is no indication that it'll improve in my lifetime either. Even now as I type this there has been no electricity for 1 hour and won't be until another hour. There are about four 2-3 hour blackouts every day throughout the year. We have always had to schedule every technology-related activity around it. When I was a kid, if there was a blackout during our favorite TV show, we had to go to someone else's house that had electricity or a generator. We scramble to finish chores that rely on electricity when there's a blackout imminent. Of course there are always random unscheduled blackouts too so you can't really predict them. Even now in almost 2020, almost every person here has a smartphone and quite a few have Macs etc but we still don't have 24/7 electricity. Almost every middle class house has their own generator and solar/UPS system. I've never been able to participate in online groups or activities like gaming, collaboration or freelancing for long because of this (on top of unreliable internet too), because I can't expect people in better countries to re-accommodate their schedules around my periods of forced downtime.
- azinman2 7y ago
  Where do you live?
djbelieny 7y ago
You could get something like an iotawatt hooked up to your wifi with CT sensors on your mains breaker and get live readings of your power usage as well as "sense" when the power changes from Public to Diesel Gen. https://iotawatt.com/ https://iotawatt.com/

105 points by mhasbini 7y ago

We had a similar app in Kathmandu. City cut of power to certain zones on an hourly basis, the app helped tracked the powers eventual return and pending cutoff. The amount of activity in the neighborhood when the power comes back on, screams of Batti Aiyo could be heard all around. Turns out it was entirely preventable and that it was all due to an enormous amount of corruption between the Nepalese Energy authority and factories around the country. One guy came into the authority and changed it all for the better and brought all the corruption into the open. Definitely made living here just that much easier.

ohazi 7y ago

Anyone want to make this work in California with the PG&E schedule?

master-litty 7y ago
I do but, silly thought first, would there be any legal liability in doing so? It's such a sensitive political subject, I can't help but wonder if a third party app that fails to report outages properly could get in trouble.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  You can be sued by anyone for nearly any reason. That’s true but not especially helpful guidance. I try not to walk around afraid of my shadow or looking for monsters under every bed. In practice, someone building an app with genuine intent to track the outages would face an extremely minimal risk of legal liability. (IANAL)
- londons_explore 7y ago
  Legal liability getting in the way of doing good things will be part of the USA's downfall. A million tiny cuts...
l1n 7y ago
I've done similar things using https://getbitbar.com/ https://getbitbar.com/ + https://github.com/insanum/gcalcli https://github.com/insanum/gcalcli

harel 7y ago

This is stark reminder that we should not take our privileges for granted. We don't think about continuous stream of power through our plugs as a privilege (or at all) but it's not trivial, considering so many might have the latest macbook but not always the power to run it (and to even more people the idea of owning a computer is on the same level as flying to Jupiter).

tonyedgecombe 7y ago
I sometimes wonder if this will become the norm when we green the grid and if so what people will do to mitigate it.
- insomniacity 7y ago
  I wonder if we'll end up with individual home storage, eg Tesla Powerwall or similar. Then you fill it up when there's grid, you use it when there isn't, and you just have to manage the charge level.
  - rubbingalcohol 7y ago
    Or maybe people will move to states that aren't so badly managed that critical infrastructure is unavailable as a matter of course.
    - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
      Most critical infrastructure has its own backup system already.
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      Not likely. California has too much to offer most ($3 trillion economy). People will get solar (mandatory on new construction residential roofs now after Jan 2020) and Powerwalls and carry on.
      - 7y ago

KrystalSparks 7y ago

Great

ronyfadel 7y ago

On that note: there are currently massive anti-government protests happening throughout Lebanon, against rampant corruption in the establishment, which is behind the broken electricity sector (amongst others). https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/world/middleeast/lebanon-protests.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/world/middleeast/lebanon-...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sundvor 7y ago

That's akin to a cry out for a Powerwall plus solar panel setup!

gwbas1c 7y ago
The limiting factor is manufacturing capacity. Tesla limits where they sell Powerwalls and solar roofs because they can't make them fast enough to meet nationwide (or worldwide) demand.
- ronyfadel 7y ago
  It’s also inconvenient for the generator mafia in Lebanon to have people generate their own electricity.

omarish 7y ago

Fellow Lebanese(-American) here. This is awesome. Thanks for creating and sharing it.

swampthing 7y ago
Funny, I have a habit of reading HN comments before clicking on the actual link, and thought the link would be about the planned outages here in the SF bay area :)

londons_explore 7y ago

How does this work? Do you have two feeds into your house, one from the power grid and one from the generator-grid? Did the generator company lay new power lines to every house? Or do you lease the generator and run it in your garage, but the generator maker somehow bills you for power consumed rather than just running hours?

londons_explore 7y ago

If I lived here, I would fit an Arduino and a bunch of SSR's to my electrical breaker box. The Arduino would detect use of the generator, and detect load on the generator (with a current clamp), and if the load was too high, start shedding power-hungry devices like electric heaters, driers, ovens, etc. The order of switch off would be programmable, and some devices like fridges or heaters could be programmed to only run on utility power to save money. Total hardware cost of $30 would pay for itself quickly in both saved generation bills as well as a better quality of life, and the design/build cost of a few days would easily be recouped by selling devices to all my neighbours.

ronyfadel 7y ago
Turn fridge and heaters off? How do then keep food fresh, or heat homes? It’s not how it works, in Lebanon you pay the generator “company” a monthly fee independent of your consumption, but dependent on max amperage you wish to get. The electricity already cuts off (circuit breaker) if you go beyond it (e.g. use a hairdryer). Some people “cheat” that system by pouring saline into the circuit breaker causing it to rust from the inside, this it would never break.
- hokumguru 7y ago
  The average refrigerator is insulated enough to keep food fresh for a moderate amount of time - provided the door remains shut. How that shutoff affects the compressor is a different story, however.

pandizzle 7y ago

South Africa also has rolling blackouts every few months. We have apps to notify us when it'll happen on our phones. A lot of us have accepted it as normal by now.

mikorym 7y ago
Yup, only trouble is the app says "stage 3 loadshedding" and then your power is on. The next day the app says "no loadshedding" and hey look, the power is off. This varies a bit, in rural areas it can be much worse, but often the municipalities are the culprits there. Even in some JHB suburbs you are never quite sure if it is the muni or loadshedding, but recently I have noticed that the FB hordes somehow manage to sniff out the exact transformer that failed...

tibbydudeza 7y ago

"We actually have a whole market of private large generators owners that sell you electricity to mitigate this." Do they use the existing municipal infrastructure or do they need to lay new cables ???. We have rotational 2 hourly load shedding on bad days here in South Africa as our state owned power company has no spare capacity and the power stations are old so they tend to break down often. Our local FTH internet provider discovered the first time that happened after fiber rollout in our area when all their ONT's went online at the same time asking for authentication. It was clear they never planned for this.

netsharc 7y ago
I'm guessing they put a generator per building, and if you pay them, they'll wire your unit up to the generator? Probably split the cabling after the meter (you wouldn't want the municipal meter to be counting power you're buying privately) and allow for a 2nd set of cables as input, with a big switch to toggle between the two.
- jek0 7y ago
  There's one privately owned generator in the neighborhood with cables running to each buildings. https://browse.startpage.com/do/show_picture.pl?l=english&rais=1&oiu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailystar.com.lb%2F%2Fdailystar%2FPictures%2F2019%2F03%2F16%2F734293_img650x420_img650x420_crop.jpg&sp=24d278f526e42ded4d077f122ebe032c&t=default https://browse.startpage.com/do/show_picture.pl?l=english&ra... The owner sells a fixed monthly fee per 5 amp, so there are individual breakers for each apartment. https://www.alamy.com/detail-from-a-wall-electric-cables-and-fuses-in-the-open-beirut-lebanon-image280512641.html https://www.alamy.com/detail-from-a-wall-electric-cables-and... Notice the "green light" in the picture. This is to inform people in the neighborhood that it's "generator's electricity", so they cannot use washing mashing and water heaters. The cable from the generator reaches the house after the meter, there's an automatic switch to take current from the generator only when there's no electricity from the government.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

mikorym 7y ago

This would have been useful in South Africa if that key assumption "thankfully the cut-off are almost always on schedule" had held. EDIT: We still have apps though. It's just a mystery sometimes when your power is on and the app says "STAGE 4 LOADSHEDDING [U R SCREWED]" and strangely the power is still on. The converse is more annoying of course.

burtonator 7y ago

Hello from California where we're one of the world's largest economies and still have electricity cutoffs. Thanks, Pacific Graft and Extortion!

peterburkimsher 7y ago

I needed something like this when I was in India for 5 months! Except there was no generator, so I'd just sleep my laptop when it ran out of battery. At least I didn't try using a desktop. I was interested in monitoring it at the time, so I wrote SMC voltmeter, an app to measure the input voltage. If you're interested in auto-detecting the power source to your laptop, my open-source code might be useful, so please give it a look! https://hackaday.com/2015/04/21/reading-analog-values-with-a-magsafe-port/ https://hackaday.com/2015/04/21/reading-analog-values-with-a...

Scapeghost 7y ago

In my decrepit corner of the third world we call it "loadshedding" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout) It's been a fact of life here as long as I've been alive and there is no indication that it'll improve in my lifetime either. Even now as I type this there has been no electricity for 1 hour and won't be until another hour. There are about four 2-3 hour blackouts every day throughout the year. We have always had to schedule every technology-related activity around it. When I was a kid, if there was a blackout during our favorite TV show, we had to go to someone else's house that had electricity or a generator. We scramble to finish chores that rely on electricity when there's a blackout imminent. Of course there are always random unscheduled blackouts too so you can't really predict them. Even now in almost 2020, almost every person here has a smartphone and quite a few have Macs etc but we still don't have 24/7 electricity. Almost every middle class house has their own generator and solar/UPS system. I've never been able to participate in online groups or activities like gaming, collaboration or freelancing for long because of this (on top of unreliable internet too), because I can't expect people in better countries to re-accommodate their schedules around my periods of forced downtime.

azinman2 7y ago
Where do you live?

djbelieny 7y ago

You could get something like an iotawatt hooked up to your wifi with CT sensors on your mains breaker and get live readings of your power usage as well as "sense" when the power changes from Public to Diesel Gen. https://iotawatt.com/ https://iotawatt.com/