Hello world. Yes, yes, I realise it’s been a while <blows dust off last blog posts>. Did you miss me?

Well, I’ve returned with a vengeance … oh, now that I’ve said that, it sounds a bit fierce. Well, I’ve returned at least. So what’s prompted this return, you ask? Well, apart from being fed up with seeing Steve Jobs’ face staring back at me every time I visit my blog, I’ve been rather busy this last 6 months. Lots of developments, and probably plenty to blog about, but there’s one thing in particular that’s on my mind at the moment: I’m moving house! Yay

With the pending move … err .. pending, I’ve taken the time to step back and review exactly we want to take with us. No, I don’t mean things like wardrobes, Star Trek place-mats and light sabres - of course they’re coming with us, but I’ve been thinking more along the lines of services, Sky subscriptions, broadband, servers and so on.

Crikey Oli, what percentage of that went into powering all those servers, gadgets and gizmos?
This all began when I started looking at exactly how much we’re paying for all the services our home uses, and trying to find ways to reduce out annual bills. The biggest saving I was able to make straight away was electricity, which was reduced from a whopping £2’900 per year to a still-whopping-but-less-terrifying-£1’900 per year. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Crikey Oli, what percentage of that went into powering all those servers, gadgets and gizmos?” Well, the answer is surprisingly low. Our enourmous electricity bill is mostly heating and hot water, and although I was able to reduce it by a staggering £1k a year, that was only through a revised meter reading, and transferring to a new tariff with a different energy provider. The bottom line is our house still costs a bomb to heat, and there’s very little we can do about that.

So we’ve fixed the problem by upgrading to a new house. Home 3.0, in fact. And it’s a house packed with 21st century gizmos, such as a hot-air reclamation system and – possibly the most exciting part – an electric garage door. Sweeeeeet Oh yeah, and it’s got nice big windows; it’s next to the canal, beautiful views across the valley, ya-da-ya-da. All that girly stuff … AND it’s got at least THREE good locations for those servers

But here’s the rub: The house is actually bigger than the one we’re in now. And as a consequence it costs more to rent, and has a higher council tax. So I bet you’re wondering why we’re moving to a more expensive house, when this all began with an attempt to save money? Well, if you knew me better, you’d know that’s precisely the messed up way I think.

However, jokes aside, while the house IS more expensive to rent, I have very high hopes for reducing the cost of running it (compared with our current home). It has as a class C energy rating, which is ‘acceptable’, but with a hybrid central heating and hot-air circulation and reclamation system, this 21st century home should, in theory, take all that lovely warm air we’ve paid for that’s merrily drifted to the top of the house, and draw it back down to the bottom of the house. In addition, the house has huge south-facing windows, which even on a cold day happily heated the house to around 19 degrees with the heating system turned off!

Don’t worry folks, I don’t normally get this excited about heating and air-circulation … it’s just a phase

The house has oodles of decent storage as well, not to mention a decent sized garage. I think I’ll finally have a home for our backup and media servers.

Now for the amusing part of this post: “So, Oli … where is this new house?”, ah well you see it’s … erm … it’s about 200yds that way <points ‘that’ way>. In fact, the photo above was taken through the windows of our current home.

Aren’t we adventurous!

We’re moving in about 4 weeks, so I apologise in advance for the deluge of gas- and hot-air reclamation system-related posts!

Oli