News and Views

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 […]

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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 much […]

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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 the day, […]

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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 meter that […]

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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 local power […]

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Gisele got a new car to replace her 2003 Honda Accord. After more than 2 weeks of researching and test driving, we decided on a 2012 Hyundai Sonata. We got all the cool options, including navigation. It is only a 2.0 liter 4 cylinder, but turbocharged and delivers 274 HP, more than most V6 engines. […]

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Devon passed round one of the singing contest, and is going on to the next stage, which I think is next weekend. Here’s a picture of him someone took from the TV: Here’s a picture that was in the local newspapers, with a caption from the English language paper: I didn’t understand this before, but […]

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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 weren’t using […]

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