Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Links

PSE Flex Program Review

As I mentioned previously, our electricity rates are increasing, but our power company is also rolling out some interesting programs to help people save money and reduce load on the grid. I recently enrolled in one called “PSE Flex“.

There are multiple ways to enroll:

  1. They send you a message before a “flex event” and ask you to reduce your power consumption. You get paid $1/kWh that you save and $15/year just for being in the program.
  2. If you let them remotely adjust your smart thermostat, you will get $40/year.
  3. If you let them control your EV charging, they will give you $0.50/kWh saved during Flex events.
  4. If you have a battery storage system, you get $500/year if you let them use power from it during Flex events.

I signed us up for the first item and after one month of usage, I’m very happy to report that we’ve already saved the initial $25 sign up credit plus an additional $43.21! There were nine Flex events in those 30 days. I don’t know if that’s normal or if it was ramped up because of the very cold weather we had. Either way, that’s a pretty significant savings.

As someone who spends a lot of time with “big data” I immediately had questions when they said they would credit me for power that I didn’t use. How can you measure something that doesn’t happen? They obviously had to guess and I have two ideas about how they are guessing:

  1. They look at how much power I used during the same timeframe in the days leading up to the event.
  2. They look at how much power I used in the hour before and the hour after the event.

They’re probably doing some combo of this but from my experiments, the second one seems to be the stronger signal. And with a giant electricity storage device sitting in my garage (the Tesla), I can really take advantage of this. I make sure to charge the car for the hour before and the hour after the event and whenever I’ve done that, they’ve said that I’ve saved roughly the kWh that I would have used if I had kept charging that whole time.

In most places, you power is coming from a mix of powerplants. You can see where our power is coming from by looking at the Bonneville Power Authority charts: BPA Balancing Authority Load and Total VER. Most of our power comes from hydro. That green line is wind and solar. Coal/natural gas and nuclear are at almost exactly the same level.

I had a hard time understanding why we were having Flex events when we weren’t also having peak power consumption periods. While they probably do have Flex events to reduce peak power usage, there is another reason: it can be cheaper to pay you to $1 kWh to not use power than it is for PSE to BUY the power! There’s a great explanation of this scenario in a Reddit thread but as a very quick summary, the price that PSE pays per MW can fluctuate from $40/MWh on a normal day up to $2000! Those of us on the west coast can see minute by minute pricing on this website: California ISO Price Map

I’m sure the whole story is way more complicated than what I’ve understood so far, but for now, I’ll be very happy if I can keep saving $40/month on my power bill!

benmartens February 27, 2025 Electric Vehicles, Links

Old Maps Online

I wasn’t expecting to be surprised by a website called Old Maps Online, but it has been fascinating to go back to again and again. There’s a slider at the bottom and you can scroll through time to see how various nations have changed their territories. I’m especially interested in Bible history and this has added a lot of information to my studies. Note that at the top of the page you can switch between having the map show regions, rulers, people, and key battles. You can also click on the map details to get related Wikipedia articles in a slide out panel.

benmartens February 6, 2025 Links

Stall Catchers

Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease. It is the 7th leading cause of death in the United States and it can have an outsized impact because of its sometimes long, slow progress. But what can you do to help fight against it? Enter Stall Catchers!

Every year at work we have some events that encourage more people to volunteer and this was one of the activities. It’s super easy and you can do it from your couch. The basic concept is that you look at a picture and determine if blood is flowing through vessels or getting stalled. Record your findings and move to the next one. There’s a point system and some leaderboards to encourage more participation, but that’s all there is to it. It’s simple to do in your spare time and it can dramatically speed up Alzheimer’s research.

You can read more about the science behind it or get started now at https://stallcatchers.com/. It took me a little while to get the hang of it but after a few minutes it was easy and I was chugging along making actual contributions to Alzheimer’s research!

benmartens January 30, 2025 Links

Monarch Money – 1 Year Review

It’s been over a year since I moved away from the dying Mint.com to Monarch Money to keep track of our finances. As with any tool like this, it takes a while to get everything hooked up and configured nicely, but now that it’s there, I really like it. My favorite part so far is the automated rules that do a great job of figuring out how I like to categorize our expenses. Now my periodic trips into the tool are more about reviewing the line items instead of manually categorizing them all. All that categorization is especially nice at the end of the year to look back and see where our money has been going and decide if that seems reasonable or not.

My only complaint is that it does not hook up to our Thrivent.com accounts, but I believe that’s a problem on Thrivent’s end. They were flaky with their connection to Mint as well.

If you don’t have a good way to keep track of where your money is going, I think you could do a lot worse than using Monarch Money. This isn’t a paid advertisement or anything, but I do have a referral code you can use that gets you a free month and then I get a month for free as well.

benmartens January 13, 2025 Links

Historic Aerials

If you enjoy maps at all, I warn you that learning about the content of this post may result in great loss of time for you.

Now that you’ve been warned, check out Historic Aerials. For any address, you can scroll back in time and see satellite images of what it looked like in previous years! You can even click the Compare button, choose a map on each side, and then adjust the transparency slider back and forth to really spot the differences.

benmartens October 31, 2024 Links

Best of YouTube

It’s time for another “Best of YouTube” post. We subscribe to the ad-free YouTube because it’s the streaming service we watch the most. Yes, there are lots of garbage videos there, but if you want to learn something, there is an endless flood of educational content too.

First up we have a video from Donut. Honestly, this might be one of the last videos I watch from that channel because my favorite hosts left to do their own thing at the new Big Time, channel, but this is still a great video. In 15 minutes (and what appears to be a single take), they explain every part of an engine:

If you have even a passing interest in engineering, check out Stuff Made Here. Every video is a home run, and his most recent video is no exception. He set out to make the world’s smallest bicycle. It’s incredible how much energy he puts into these ideas!

And finally, here’s a shoutout for the Practical Engineering channel. There are so many interesting videos with solid explanations of things that you might take for granted. He recently had a good one that goes into detail about how French drains work which is worth watching even if you already think you know, but for this post, I want to highlight “Why Railroads Don’t Need Expansion Joints.” Think about it… you have a thousand miles of a solid metal bar baking in the sun. That must expand and contract a lot! How do they deal with it?

benmartens September 19, 2024 Links

Homebuilt Tunnel

Usually when I do a “Best of YouTube” post, I feature about three different videos. This time I’m only going to mention one. For the past few years, Colin Furze has been building a tunnel from his house to his shed. He has been releasing videos periodically showing his progress, but he recently combined them into one magnificent 2.5 hour video. If you haven’t seen this project before, grab some popcorn and settle in for a treat!

benmartens December 19, 2022 Links

Furze Tunnel

Colin Furze is a madman. Many YouTubers talk about burnout, but Colin keeps outdoing himself. He’s built a hoverbike, jet bicycle, and screw tank to name a few. Years ago, he built an impressive underground bunker in his back yard, but for the past couple years, he’s been working on an even bigger project: connecting his house, shed and bunker with a tunnel!

Check out his playlist that goes into all the details, but this is an incredible undertaking. Currently he has connected his pantry to the shed and now he’s heading out towards the bunker. In a recent video he also mentioned that he wants to connect to his driveway so that an elevator can lower his car down into the tunnel. He knows no limits!

benmartens April 15, 2022 Links

Best of YouTube

After 2.5 years, I’m back with another “Best of YouTube” post! How have you found anything to watch without these incredibly valuable posts? I’m definitely not claiming that these are the best videos I’ve seen since that last post, but I don’t think any of them will disappoint you.

Frank Howarth’s meticulous combination of math and woodworking resulted in an amazing wooden globe. He went into great detail about the process and the complexities of getting this all to work correctly. Wonderful! If you like this one, his followup video where he makes a stand for the globe is good as well.

The Swiss Army knife that I’ve had since I was a child has a sewing awl in it. I’ve never had any idea how to use it. If I had to do it in an emergency, I probably would have poked the awl and thread through, pulled the thread out of the awl and all the way through the hole, rethreaded the awl on the other side and poked it back through. Now if I have to do it, I’ll know there is a better way… but I probably won’t remember the details so I’ll be stuck with the same dumb approach as before.

It’s a traditional old man joke to see a flyover at a game (remember when we didn’t have parenthetical comments after talking about public events?) to say “There’s our tax dollars hard at work.” It turns out that those flyovers are actually valuable training opportunities and not just ostentatious displays of money burning.

As penance for the last 2.5 years, I will not just give you a fourth video, but I’ll give you hundreds of videos. I recently started watching the very popular Donut Media channel. I wouldn’t call myself that much of a car guy but the production value of these videos is fantastic and most of the videos interest me. They put out videos every day and they have a variety of content types. My favorite so far was a “High Low” series where they bought two identical trucks and then outfitted them with overlanding gear. One truck would get an expensive version of the item while the other truck got the budget version. You can see the whole season in this playlist or just watch the summary video. That playlist also includes a previous season where they did the same thing with 350Zs.

benmartens November 12, 2021 Links

Best of YouTube

About a month ago I wrote a post about how people on the internet are manipulating your emotions. Destin from Smarter Every Day completed four videos that are extremely helpful in understanding what’s going on and how to protect yourself from it. This is the kind of thing that I think will be critical to teach our kids as they grow up in a world that looks very different from our childhood. (Video links: 1 2 3 4)

Matt Cremona built a ridiculously nice tool storage cabinet. The highlight for me was how he used bookmatched pieces of wood surrounded by epoxy. They look incredible and the process for making them is wild as well. The video below should link directly to the point in his video where he talks about them, but if not, jump to 4:26.

Rocket powered golf club? Yes please!

benmartens May 9, 2019 Links