My solution to call charges
Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2011 12:04 pmI'm on BT with free evening/weekend calls, and an unmodified dialup TiVo.
As I understand it, 0845 calls are normally free evenings/weekends, but calls to computers are not included, so these calls seem to cost me about 16p a day (£5 a month).
I figure that I don't really need to make a call every day - once a week is probably good enough.
Therefore I have made up a small circuit with a phone plug and a phone socket, and a 5 Volt 4-pole relay which cuts the phone line off unless a voltage is applied to the relay. The voltage comes from an old 5Volt DC phone charger I had lying around, and I control the on/off switching times by plugging that 5Volt adapter into a 7 day digital mains timer plug. I then set the timer to only switch on the phone socket for about 20 hours over the weekend. When TiVo can't connect it seems to retry a number of hours later, and the 20 hours window seems to be enough for it to get just the one connection per week, off peak. The call will be longer than a daily call as it has more data to download, but it should save me about £50 a year.
As I understand it, 0845 calls are normally free evenings/weekends, but calls to computers are not included, so these calls seem to cost me about 16p a day (£5 a month).
I figure that I don't really need to make a call every day - once a week is probably good enough.
Therefore I have made up a small circuit with a phone plug and a phone socket, and a 5 Volt 4-pole relay which cuts the phone line off unless a voltage is applied to the relay. The voltage comes from an old 5Volt DC phone charger I had lying around, and I control the on/off switching times by plugging that 5Volt adapter into a 7 day digital mains timer plug. I then set the timer to only switch on the phone socket for about 20 hours over the weekend. When TiVo can't connect it seems to retry a number of hours later, and the 20 hours window seems to be enough for it to get just the one connection per week, off peak. The call will be longer than a daily call as it has more data to download, but it should save me about £50 a year.
.