Here is the treasurer's report on Cyberspace Communications, Inc. finances
through December 31st, 2003.
Beginning Balance $4,041.40
Credits $651.00 Member contributions
$17.00 Miscellaneous donations
$140.00 Donation to pay for speakerphone
$1.68 Interest on our savings account
------------
$809.68
Debits $80.41 Pumpkin Rent for January
$45.97 Electricity for December
$0.00 Phone Bill (see below)
$135.00 DSL December 15 through January 15
$10.22 Paypal fees (income = $270)
$22.83 Winter Personal Property Taxes
$140.00 Speakerphone (see below)
------------
$434.43
Ending Balance $4,416.65
Our current balance breaks down as follows:
$4,170.11 General Fund
$163.99 Silly Hat Fund
$60.00 Spare Parts Fund
$22.55 Infrastructure Fund
The money is distributed like this:
$1,046.40 Checking account
$3,370.25 Savings account earning 0.65% interest annually
We had two new members (kd3hw and garrigan) and one returning member
(fhoda) in December. We are currently at 84 members, 81 of whom are
paid through at least January 15th. (The others expired recently and
are in a grace period.)
Notes:
- It was a good month for Grex!
- This month's phone charges totalled $90.83. But we received a
refund for the $168 in installation charges we paid to SBC last month,
which covered the bill and left us with a credit of $77.17. So next
month's bill will only be about $13.
- Because we have a board member who will be connecting to meetings
by phone next year, mary bought us a speakerphone for $140. We tried
it out at the last meeting and it worked great. After a little bit of
discussion of whether we should return it and maybe try to find a
cheaper one, mdw offered to donate $140 to pay for the phone just so
we would all shut up and move on. His generous offer was accepted. :)
- Grex pays personal property taxes to the City of Ann Arbor on the
equipment it owns. The payments are divided into winter and summer
taxes, with the winter ones being about half the size of the summer
ones.
Thanks to everyone who contributed in December:
arabella, dang, dpc, fhoda, garrigan, jep, kd3hw, mdw, mooncat, other,
russ, siamiam, tod, wlevak, and two people of whose logins I am
unsure.
If you or your institution would like to become a member of Grex, it
only costs $6/month or $60/year. Send money to:
Cyberspace Communications
P. O. Box 4432
Ann Arbor, MI 48106-4432
If you pay by cash or money order, please include a photocopy of some
form of ID. I can't add you to the rolls without ID. (If you pay
with a personal check that has your name pre-printed on it, we
consider that a good enough ID.) Type !support or see
http://www.cyberspace.org/member.html for more info.
62 responses total.
Great report, MMArk!
Whoops, I realized I forgot something. One $12 check which I deposited in November bounced. So there should be an additional $12 debit for the check and a $5 penalty. The person who bounced the check has promised to replace it and to pay the fee. So subtract $17 from our balance. I've corrected the copy of the report in ~aruba/reports/0312.txt .
OK, another thing I forgot. (Normally I would roll these things into next month, but since it's the end of the year, I'd like to get it right.) We moved cyberspace.org from Verisign to Dotster, and paid Dotster $8.95 to register it through 1/12/2006. So make our end-of-year balance $4,390.70.
Grex lost nearly a thousand dollars over 2003!
See the next item.
re 2 Isn't it the person that issues the bounced cheque supposed to pay the penalty, and not the depositer?
I think it' standard practice for both parties to get charged something.
Does grex now have to pay personal property tax on the new phone?
Yes, I'm afraid so. It's not in the Pumpkin, though, so I'm not absolutely positive. I should read the fine print on the tax return.
Perhaps Marcus could own the phone and lend it to grex once a month?
That would leave Grex short one Board member if there was a problem getting the phone to the meeting for any reason. I think a Grex officer should keep the phone, and Grex should just pay the taxes.
I don't see how Grex owning the phone solves anything. If Grex owns it and an officer keeps it, and the officer can't make it to a meeting for some reason, you've got the same problem.
This response has been erased.
That might present problems for the local dialins. ;>
Scott and I measured the current Grex and NextGrex are drawing, and it's 13.25 amps. We have been paying for 5.5 amps for the past 2 and a half years, so the electric bill will jump significantly next month. Hopefully before long we'll be on only one machine. I guess we should say a big thanks to Jan and Valerie for footing the bill for NextGrex's amps up to now.
I thought that newer computers were supposed to use less electricity.
Yeah, if the new computer is drawing almost twice as much power as the Sun, that would be pretty surprising, wouldn't it?
It's just that much more powerful.
(thanks, Jan and Valerie, for footing the bill for NextGrex's amps up to now!)
(Thanks, Carson. Mark said we should say it, but didn't say it ...)
THanks, Jan and Valerie, for footing the bill for NextGrex's power up to now!
I wonder why the power drain is so much larger for the new machine than for the Sun?
I wonder if there is something else going on, like the old equipment drawing more than we realised.
This response has been erased.
Re resp:23: I guess we'll find out when the old machine is disconnected.
We should get nuclear fusion to power the Sun .
Right, the old hardware hasn't been changed in a long time, but perhaps its power needs have for some reason. Dunno. If we needed any more incentive to get Grex onto the new machine, this is it.
We've got more disks running in current Grex. too.
DTE Energy tells me our building is on the "D3" rate, which means the total cost for electricity, including credits and taxes, is $.097451312/kWh. Using that figure I calculate our electric bill at $108.47 per month, which is $62.50 more than it used to be. Ouch. I hope it doesn't stay at that rate for long.
I assume the calculation is taking into account the computer power supply's power factor? Modern computer supplies tend to be highly capacitive.
I have no idea about power factors.
It's a complicated topic, but in a nutshell if a load isn't purely resistive, it can be using far less power than simply multiplying the current by the voltage would indicate. (The extreme example would be a purely capacitive or purely inductive load, which would draw current but use no power.) If that's how the calculation was done, we're probably overpaying by quite a bit. Didn't Grex used to own a watt-hour meter, like is usually installed on the side of a house, for measuring its power use? That would be the most accurate way to do it.
Never did get a usable number out of that watt-hour meter. The current measurement was taken with an analog clamp-on inductive ammeter.
Did you take an average over time, or a momentary reading?
A momentary reading. I've never seen Grex's power use fluctuate significantly, other than the occasional use of a monitor.
I'm wondering if the technology of Next grex's power supply might be newer enough to make that difference. Worth looking into?
I would almost guarantee that we're overpaying. Computer power supplies are very capacitive. Unfortunately, without a wattmeter, it's hard to say by how much we're overpaying. What was the problem with the watt-hour meter?
How would one look into it?
Hmm...according to this page, some PC power supplies now have power factor correction built in, so I could be wrong: http://www.dansdata.com/gz028.htm I'm not sure how you'd find out what the power factor of NextGrex's power supply is, though the power supply manufacturer might know. I recommend looking at the above URL, because it explains the concept of power factor far better than I did.
Does Grex have a separate meter?
Grex is not metered separately from the rest of the building by the electric company. We do happen to own an electric meter, though, donated by Jim and Sindi. However, it doesn't work. (This is like bad news-good news).
(Nonetheless, all of our equipment is plugged into it.)
So how is grex' electrical bill determined and split out from the other residents of the building if J&S' meter doesn't work?
Every now and again, Scott et al try to measure how much electricity we are drawing, we do some arithmetic, and that's what we send the landlord, until we do some more measuring.
Re #41: Why would Jim and Sindi need a -- wait. They don't, which is why
they donated it. I get it.
I know gas prices are way up, but electricity shouldn't have moved all that
much. And that bill is large.
The electricity rate hasn't changed much at all - in fact it's decreased a little. But our usage jumped from 5.5 amps (last measured in 2001) to 13.25 amps. It's possible it changed sometime inbetween, but I'm pretty sure our equipment was the same right up to when NextGrex moved there at the end of December.
(Joe, go back to response #15 and start forward; I think the numbers might make more sense then.)
BTW if anyone else has an inductive ammeter and would volunteer to check Scott's reading, that would be great.
Valerie and I had been wondering why our power bill were so much higher lately. Maybe it was NextGrex.
How much would it cost to purchase the equipment needed for Grex to accurately gauge it's power usage?
These days the downtown library has a couple power meters which can be checked out for a few days, I think for free.
What is our meter not doing correctly? I think we have it because Detroit Edison was getting rid of it for some reason. I can ask Jim. Or maybe it came from the Reuse Center.
What you want is an AC wattmeter, not an ammeter. The current the computer is drawing doesn't tell you how much power it's using unless you know the power factor. I think wattmeters are fairly expensive, normally -- at least $200. It'd be nice if someone had one Grex could borrow. What the power company uses on your house is a watt-hour meter. It measures power used over time, which if you cancel out the units works out to a measurement of total energy used.
This response has been erased.
AHAHA< YEAH< DEWY DECIMAL SYSTEM
There were no power meters at the library today. They don't have "hold" system, so it's just a matter of being there when some are available. I stopped by Madison Electric to see about getting a power-meter. The going price is $500.00 for a permanently mounted meter. He did a back-of-the envelope calculation to show that the maximum cost for a single 15-amp outlet is in the neighborhood of $30.00, at two cents per KWh, which he said was about the highest DTE charged. Did you slip the decimal point, Mark? (A bit later, I'll find my residential bill, to see what rate I'm paying.)
(15A*120V*24hours*30days)/1000=1296 kWh 1296kWh*$0.02=$26 plus tax. Makes sense to me.
Well, the math does. I don't know where he got the idea that DTE charges a max of 2 cents per kWh, though. I'm paying just over $0.08 per kWh in my apartment.
Yeah, the rate for our building is $.097451312 per kWh, if you include the credit and 6% sales tax. Dunno where he got $.02.
Haha! My power's at four Canadian cents per kilowatt hour!
This response has been erased.
TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE
You have several choices: