News and Views

I didn’t get a chance to post a blog while we were in Taiwan last week, but having been there several times it doesn’t seem too “postable”. Devon had the week off for Chinese new year, so we got to spend lots of time with him. We went to the Taipei Costco, which is very similar to the US version. There are lots of different foods, and most items are different brands, but the general layout and merchandise is about the same, even with the free food samples and the hot dog/soft drink combo at the food court.

We arrived in Phuket, Thailand a couple of days ago, in time for the wedding of Gisele’s nephew Tim. Today we flew to Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand. We are enjoying it much more here. The villa we stayed at in Phuket was far from town, but here we are in the middle of the city, with a great restaurant downstairs and a night market across the street.

We have arranged a tour tomorrow. We’ll probably see elephants and tigers and I don’t know what else. We’ll be in Chiang Mai for three nights, then two nights in Bangkok before heading back to Taiwan for a few more days.

We’re going on a trip.

Wednesday morning Gisele and I leave for Taiwan where we will spend a week (and part of the Chinese New Year holiday) with Devon.

Then we go to Thailand for a week, where Gisele’s nephew is getting married. The wedding is on the resort island of Phuket, but we will also visit the famous city of Chiang Mai, and spend a couple of days in Bangkok.

Finally we go back to Taiwan for another week with Devon before returning to the states.

Derek unfortunately has classes and is not able to travel with us this time. He and Apollo will have to keep each other company.

Devon was the main actor in a commercial for a new video game. The commercial was just filmed yesterday and won’t be published for a couple of months, but here’s a picture of him in costume.

I didn’t recognize him at first. He said it was just about the most fun he has ever had. He was flying in a harness, and there was lots of green screen work that will be filled in later with CGI.

The game is “Maple Story”, by the way.

Derek’s university, ASU, held a campus wide Cryptography contest, where the students competed to solve a series of ciphers, or codes.

40 students entered, and Derek and a partner took First Prize.

You can see a brief note on it here. Look for “Crypto Rally Recap” a couple of items down.

I have fun solving the simple substitution ciphers in the newspaper, but these were significantly more complicated challenges. I’m afraid he’s out of my league now.

Here’s a graph showing the energy I’ve used since installing the solar panels two and a half weeks ago. The blue is energy I have bought from SRP, and the red is energy the solar panels have generated.

You can roughly infer the weather from looking at the graph. The sky has been clear except for some high thin clouds on January 3rd. The solar energy is down a little that day. And the total energy used each day has fallen as the temperature has gone up, until yesterday when it was cooler.

Cumulatively, I’ve bought 412 kWh from SRP, and generated 580, or about 61% of my total consumed energy. There are cooler days forecast, so that ratio is probably going to come down.

I got a burr coffee grinder for Christmas this year. I’m really impressed by the difference it makes in the taste of the coffee.

The theory is that a blade grinder just whacks the beans into smaller pieces, with lots of variation in size from powder to big chunks. The burr grinder yields a much more uniform size piece.

The result is that I can make coffee that tastes stronger without the bitter taste that can result from lots of powder. It’s very noticeably better.

Here’s a graph showing the the progress of our two power meters over about 4 days. The red line is from the meter that measures the solar power we generate. The blue line is the SRP meter. The vertical axis is in kWh.

Notice the solar meter does a “stair step”, rising during the day, then completely level at night. The SRP meter, on the other hand, rises all night while we heat and light our home, then falls each day while we feed power back to SRP.

The solar meter is rising a little faster overall than the SRP meter, indicating that our solar panels are providing a little more than half of our total energy.

I estimate that in March, April and May we should generate more energy each month than we use. The days are longer, so there is more sunlight to harvest, but it won’t be hot enough yet to use much cooling. My electric bill for those months should be zero, except for the monthly service charge of $15. We’ll see — I’ll certainly report on it.

The doctor said to come back in 8 to 10 years. Glad to hear I won’t have to go through that prep again for a while!

Our solar energy system finally became active today. SRP (the local power company) was here at 9:00 am, and did the final connection.

Since then (it’s now 3:00pm) we have generated about 24 kWh. Of that, about 14 were sold back to SRP, and we have used about 10.

They installed a new meter that was set at zero this morning. It now reads 99986, showing that net energy has flowed out. I expect that after heating the house tonight with no sun shining I will wake up and find the savings erased. I noticed that when I turned on the heat pump, the direction arrow reversed, showing that we don’t generate quite enough to run everything else in the house and the heat pump too.

Peak energy during the day was 5100 watts; not bad for a winter day with the sun lower in the sky. Theoretical maximum is 8000 watts, but I will never see that due to inherent losses in the system.

I’ll publish some data after it has run for a couple of days.

Today is the 220th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution that guarantee us most of the civil rights we enjoy.

I think most of us take these rights for granted, somehow thinking that even without the Bill of Rights we would probably still have most of the freedoms we have. You only have to consider how busy the ACLU is continuously defending these rights to get an idea what would happen if they weren’t codified in law.