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 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.

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.

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 company, SRP, to make the final connection to their grid. It will take them less than an hour to do so, but they don’t seem in any hurry. I guess they don’t want to buy power from me.

After winning through the first round of the singing contest in Taiwan, Devon decided to sing a Chinese song in the second round and then forgot the words. So that’s over. But he has since started doing a short daily TV spot on the local news where he teaches some topical English expressions. Here’s a short clip someone took with their camera phone. Because he has to record a segment every day for the next 6 months, he will not be able to come home for the holidays, but we hope to see him in Taiwan in February.

Gisele likes her new Hyundai just fine, but it has been raining lately so she has left it parked in the garage and driven her old Accord. We wouldn’t want the new car to get wet. And we wouldn’t want to park it at the gym because someone’s car was broken into there once. And we wouldn’t want to drive it after dark because, well, just because something might happen. I wonder if she’ll ever let Derek take over the Accord. 😉

Derek’s finishing final exams this week before the winter break. He’s been working hard, with a heavy course load. He hopes to complete his BS in Math next summer. Then, who knows?

Apollo hasn’t had any seizures since we started him on Phenobarbitol 3 or 4 months ago, when he had 3 in one day. We’re hopeful that this will keep it under control.

My shoulder continues to get stronger. I have full range of motion, and nearly normal strength. I can only play basketball every other day, however, or it gets sore and inflamed. That’s probably just as well for the rest of my body…

And that’s all I can think of for this update.

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. It is very peppy, but gives over 34 MPG highway.

She originally planned to get another Honda Accord, but they have fallen in the ratings. The Sonata beats the Accord, Altima and Camry in most reviews and in owner satisfaction. My brother Don agrees, as he has owned a Sonata for a few years and is very happy with it.

One of the cool features is a smart phone app that will let you remotely lock, unlock, flash headlights and sound the horn (to find it in a parking lot), and (coming soon) remote start. The remote start is not available yet, but rumors are that it should be out in January.

You can also locate the car on a map, and if you lend it to your teenager it will report back if they exceed a set speed or go outside a set range. Of course, we don’t have any teenagers, but still a cool feature.

Here it is in all its red beauty.