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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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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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!

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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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Nothing big, just a few updates:
The solar power system has STILL not been turned on. We have been waiting for just a month now since the installation was complete. Every month that goes by costs me between $100 and $200 in electricity costs. Most of the time has been waiting for the […]

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