Shades of Grey

There is a mole in Morley Town Hall. I was independently contacted twice yesterday with some furtive news of goings on in the Council Chamber after the last Annual General Meeting in May. It was followed by an extraordinary General Meeting, the publically posted Agenda of which was rather opaque. Now I wasn’t there (as I had some drying paint to watch) but the story I was told was that the Public were excluded for a short while then the meeting finished and they all toddled off to the Mayor’s Parlour as normal for drinkies & cucumber sandwiches. Now exclusion of the general public has to be for good reason, generally if publicity would prejudice the public interest by reason of the confidential nature of the business or for some other reason stated in the resolution. My Baker Bible gives the following reasons for treating business as confidential:-

• engagement, terms of service, conduct and dismissal of employees;
• terms of tenders, and proposals and counter-proposals in negotiations for contracts;
• preparation of cases in legal proceedings;
• the early stages of any dispute

Now the mole tells me (third hand) that it popped its head out of the skirting board to hear a motion to approve funding of up to £5,000 in order to retain the services of a solicitor. Now moles have poor eyesight so it wouldn’t have been able to tell that the only people in the Chamber were the Councillors (24 of them, if they were all present and correct) and the Acting Town Clerk. They have pretty good hearing though, and moley was surprised that nobody questioned why such a thing would be necessary and no reason for wanting to do such a thing was offered. This suggests to me several possibilities: that mot of them knew why, they were coached not to say anything, they were unable to get clues from their friends on the public benches or they were too thick to actually realise what was going on and ask. Bearing in mind that there are 23 Members of one quasi-political grouping and 1 Member of another widely detested one it is quite possible that it is a heady cocktail of all four possibilities.

I was invited to a product launch a few weeks ago. The product was some form of additional power monitoring device for a system I’m familiar with used to measure and control data centre power distribution which was of some interest but nothing to get too excited about. Another teaser was that it was being held in the (Christopher) Wren Suite of St. Pauls Cathedral which is the sort of place I like looking at. There was also a free lunch!

TANSTAAFL, of course, but for various reasons I had to decline the trip. However, the account manager sent me some info today which I perused with polite interest. Then, my pay closer attention policeman gave me a cerebral tickle and I read it again. Could it be, surely not?

What the device is is actually well known and fairly common. You fit it over a mains power feed and it acts as a tiny transformer, generating an output relative to the current flowing in the wire. They are extremely common in electrical engineering, both as in-fusebox power sensors and clamp meters where you open the clamp jaws to allow the cable inside and then close the jaws again to take a reading. The real pisser with them though, is that you have to separate the wires out, the live (the hot), neutral and earth. This makes them rather difficult for in-line measurement of existing gear you don’t want to turn off, like big computers and telco systems. You can always get them fitted in the building wiring, but it is a bit of a faff.

Why does it only work on a single wire? Because if you put a clamp round a flex the current going to the appliance and back again effectively cancels itself out giving a zero reading (Like when you get one of the batteries the wrong way round in your TV remote).

Now this new product spec sheet didn’t quite add up. It mentioned patents, current capacity and cable sizes, even grommets that made it fit properly round the cable non-invasively. It talked about being able to calibrate it to be even more accurate for specific cable types, but it didn’t say what I wanted it to say, that it could clamp and measure the current flow in a piece of flex.

If someone could invent one of those, they stand to make a lot of money. We pay Electricians a lot of money to clamp in our distribution panels and give us power consumption tables. We paid a lot of money for a rack based power distribution system that could measure and track power consumption, but retrofitting such a system into existing computer racks is time consuming, difficult, disruptive and introduces risk.

Well, it won’t excite too many people outside of Facilities Management & Electrical Engineering, but as they said in The Full Monty, “Gentlemen, the lunchbox has landed.”

This box of tricks does exactly that. It is proprietary at present and only works as part of their system, being a niche product for legacy equipment that isn’t readily retrofitted with intelligent power distribution strips. It will qualify for Carbon Trust tax rebates as it fits in with the current green strategy of energy conservation- if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

I’ll have a hundred of them please Debbie, although this does not constitute a formal order!