News and Views

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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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SRP, the local power company, sent me an email today scheduling the “commission” for next Wednesday, Dec 21, 6 days from now. So it’s nice to finally have a firm date, but it’s hard to understand why it took so long.

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The contractor was out today doing some painting and checks, and briefly activated the solar power system. It was generating about 5000 watts, most of which was flowing back out of my house into the power grid. No air conditioning or TV was on, so besides my computer, refrigerator and some lights, we […]

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They didn’t quite finish today, but all that’s left is some trim, wire termination, and a little roof repair.
Here they are installing the first solar panel:

Here’s what it looked like with several panels installed:

And here’s the finished job:

Here’s a close-up, looking up the array:

And here’s a close look at one of the clamps holding the […]

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Looks like there’s going to be a “Day 4″ post. They didn’t finish today. I guess the rain Friday and Monday set them back a little.
Most of the work today was wiring, in and out of the attic. Not much to show, but I’ll post some pictures anyway.
Here you see where the […]

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Two things were accomplished today: They cut the tiles so the mounts could extend up through them, and they fastened rails to the mounts.
Here are the rails. Tomorrow they should fasten the solar panels to the rails. Looks like the ends still need to be trimmed.

Here is a close up of one […]

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