A Sunny Sunday at the NW Corner

Today started cool, but it quickly developed into a beautiful, sunny spring day. The PV array was pumping out the juice. We were operating in excess of 3.5 kW for several hours in the middle of the day (remember, we're north of the 48th parallel). March is going to be good on the PV front.

I continue my efforts to turn the shop into a useful space. Part of today involved me at my drill press drilling 99, carefully countersunk holes into some cleats for the deer fence. So I cleaned off most of my workbench and the space around the drill press.

Yesterday I went over to "Waste Not / Want Not" a local construction salvage place. Much of their stuff is over priced, but their used shelf brackets are great. For just under $5 (including tax) I got enough stuff to put my good quality wood supplies -- much of it leftovers from the house construction -- up off the floor of the shop and onto the wall-hung shelf brackets. This is a very good thing. I need to rig some kind of bungee-strap-based safeties on the wood supplies so they don't all come crashing down in an earthquake. I am thinking about a design and am pretty close to something good.

Now that most of the wood is off the floor of the shop, I can assemble two more low shelf units to give me a bit more storage and some more work surface area. Finally, there are garden tools to hang on one stretch of walls. Usually, I study and do computer stuff during the week. I might do that tomorrow. OTOH, I might just go out and work on my shop. Probably just as useful and plenty of fun.

I also spent an hour or two trenching along the north side of the deer fence that's going in. We're going to bury 4" - 6" of fencing in the ground beneath the lower rails. That'll keep most of the larger animals from digging under the fence.

Basically, we're finally getting to the stage where we're able to get things organized and useful. Angel's shipping materials go there. The Amigo's tools go there and there. Angel's Nailtini inventory is now in the right part of the basement and all organized. You get the picture.

In the daylight basement near the south windows, seedlings are bursting out of their tiny little nursery pots. You can almost watch the zucchini reaching for the sun. Since we're so far north, our growing season has multiple stages:

• The sprouting stage in the warm, controlled part of the basement.
• The spring growth stage in the greenhouse at the south side of the yard.
• The sunny garden area between the south side of the house and the greenhouse.

We're told that the soil takes a long time to warm sufficiently this far north. There are various things we can do to address that and the above three seem to be a fairly simple set. Of course things like chilies may need to stay in the greenhouse. Whatever works will be fine with the Amigo.

Tired now. More soon. I'll try to put up some photos of shop, of greenhouse, of worm bins, etc.

I've thought of a marvelous design for a basement wine rack. Can't wait to try it.

The Worms Arrive

This afternoon our package arrived from the Kingston Worm Farm: a pound of red worms in about a cubic foot of worm castings. The little worm guys are now snuggled into the main garden area. Angel & I hope that they thrive and tend the soil.

Eventually, we want to raise our own red wrigglers in worm bins I've built for the unheated portion of the basement, but I need to get the basement organized so that the worms have an undisturbed environment in which to do their worm thing. Maybe tomorrow (sigh).

Angel has potatoes in the main garden. She's also got seedlings sprouting in the heated, daylighted portion of the basement. Chard, kale, a couple of varieties of tomatoes, salad greens of various types, some chilies, several other things too. In the next couple of weeks I need to get some kind of netting over the main garden. Our neighbors tell us that without protection, the marauding crows will completely destroy the garden.

I am also thinking about electric fencing to keep the raccoons at bay. The main garden fences should keep the deer out.

Then there is the slug problem... I'm thinking of stringing some bare copper wire around the perimeter of the garden, but that might be too expensive.

We have about reached the conclusion that we'd like to fence the entire property in deer fencing. We have about 0.6 of an acre here, much of it south facing. Some of it could be terraced. We could have a small orchard, lots more vegetables (eventually), and perhaps another outbuilding for a separate shop. Alas, this is all beyond our financial means at this time. Had the Amigo been able to stay employed for just two more years, much would be different, but we pays for our tickets and takes our turns.

Oh, then there is rain catchment. And some solar hot water for under the (gravel) floor of the greenhouse. And some French drain work in the little setback area just to the north of the house. All these things can keep one awake at night if one dwells upon them... and one certainly did last night (yawn). Apart from the heavy excavation work and all the time I spend trying to find a job, I could do many of these things myself. I would in fact enjoy doing them.

I have read that with intensive (but sustainable) "urban gardening" practices, a family of four can just about live on a quarter acre. Even with our house and garage built, we've got quite a bit more than that left on this property.

cool, all-voice band

Pythagoras sends a link to a fine tune by a very talented group of guys called Natural 7.  The tune is titled "Wall of Sound".  Check 'em out and be prepared to grin.

Okay, that's probably all for today.

 

Article in EV World

Well, all that volunteer work paid off, I guess. EV World has published an article of mine. It's called So, You Want to Buy An Electric Vehicle?. Basically, the article consists of things to ask about or to check into if you're seriously considering plunking down your hard-earned cash for an EV.

The article is not in danger of being nominated for a Pulitzer, and the formatting was slightly deranged in the translation, but it's still cool to see.  If you haven't seen it already, hopefully you'll find it at least marginally interesting.  As of a few minutes ago, it had garnered over 1500 hits.  If it helps anyone, it'll clearly have been worth the effort.

There's sun trying to peek through up here at the Fourth Corner today.

Doing Some Math

There is a local exchange here -- a place where people can trade things. Angel & I aren't members, but we know a few members and have even attended a potluck. The exchange has a name: "The Fourth Corner". Why is it named that, you ask? It's because we're at the "fourth corner" of the lower 48 states.

We are just north of the 48th parallel.

Yet even in this place, infamous for overcast skies and rainy weather, a 4 kW PV array, statically mounted on a south-facing roof, an produce a decent amount of electrical energy. In fact, in the summer, the array can produce something equivalent to well over 40% of the needs of a 2200 square foot, all-electric house.

We're talking electric central heat, electric hot water, electric cook top and ovens, and an electric clothes dryer here. Again: North of the 48th parallel. 4 kW PV array. Fourth corner of the lower 48. Lots of cloudy days.

Oh, and we've got some neighbors to the south who have some giant trees that shade the array in the winter time. Only now, just past the Spring Equinox, does the sun clear the trees for essentially the whole day.

That's the background. Let's think about it a little bit.

Last year (2008), that PV system cost about $27K. That's the "out the door" price - hooked to the grid, permits, inspections, all the right stuff. Prices on such systems are falling as more PV cell capacity comes on line.

So at 2008 prices, we could put one million such systems on one million US roofs for $27B US dollars. We would probably want to focus on the million best roofs... south facing, unshaded, etc. (sadly) probably not north of the 48th parallel.

And to be fair, we'd probably want to distribute the savings in some equitable way. We're not AIG or Merrill Lynch, after all.

Imagine what an economic stimulus one million solar roofs could be. Imagine the local jobs for electricians. We'd need licensed installation companies. That means more training & certification. We'd need some standard, approved rooftop designs at specified price points. Fraud is managed by requiring installers to call for inspection and have their work signed off by certified inspectors. Once the work is signed off, the installers are paid.

Imagine the energy savings for the US economy. Imagine the reduction in carbon footprint.

With those volumes, and the right incentives, the price might drop to something closer to $15K to $20K per system.

And that might allow us to expand the program by another 10%. To do this thing right, we'd want to stretch it over 5 to 7 years. That makes it a relatively small annual budget hit.

Imagine the payoff for our country over the subsequent (minimum) quarter century life expectancy of these systems.

We could do this. Shucks, we should already be doing it.

Energy Update

Even though it's only St. Patrick's Day, the energy performance of our house here at the edge of the continent is ramping back up. In the past week we've had several days in the high teens and low 20's of kW-hr of energy produced. Even though we've had dark, cloudy, sometimes rainy mornings, the sun has come out around 10:00AM or noon and stayed out for most of the rest of each day. Result: the passive solar design of the house kicks in and the central heat shuts off.

On the very dark, cold, wet days, I frequently build a fire in the tiny Jotul wood stove in the main room of the house. We keep the blinds drawn to add to reduce heat loss through the glass. Result: the central heat shuts off and the house is very cozy.

In short, all that insulation and all those good windows, and that passive design are actually working.

Recently, several people have mentioned to the Old Amigo variations on the, "maybe I should put some solar panels on my house" theme. Now, the Venerable Friendly One is a big fan of active solar systems, but you know, it's so much more cost effective to avoid using the energy in the first place. Insulate. Get better windows. Manage solar gain and heat loss with some decent window coverings.

Oh, and if you haven't already, get with the program on compact fluorescents. Buy the bulbs marked EnergyStar. They're generally higher quality and will actually last more like the claimed life expectancy. Apart from a little bit of low-wattage "mood lighting," nearly all the light fixtures in this house at The Edge have CF's. They are big energy savers.

Happy saving! Let us know how you're doing with your personal energy program. If you have questions, please ask.

Next Steps?

Thinking out loud here... The Amigo is faced with a dilemma: I've spent the last couple of months learning enough PHP to build a site. More accurately, the site is built with PHP+MySQL+(some)JavaScript. I only recently began learning Dojo and a little jQuery to upgrade the visuals on the site. The site works as it is; although it's got some shortcomings:

• It's weak on security. Yes, it's got password protection, but I have done only a little to protect it from SQL-based attacks.
• It's not flashy. Since I'm just starting with the higher-level JavaScript libraries, I've hand-coded a bunch of things that will look better and do more once those features are replaced. Of course there's a learning curve involved in that... Still, it's a back-end site for a family-member's small business. Customers will never see it, so basic functionality might be okay.
• What's there so far could be considered a proof-of-concept. It supports a single product line. Within the next 12 months there will be three product lines. I've done an okay job of making functions general purpose enough to be extensible to different lines, but there will still be significant work involved to bring things up.
  

Had I a do-over on this, I probably would have stuck to my original plan of Python + Django. That would probably have netted me more skills in an up-and-coming development space.

For example, the Old Amigo just learned of a local company that may be hiring in the reasonably near future. They are a Python shop. So they do their work using Python (duh), Django, and Plone. I've seen some training vids and it is clear that some combination of these technologies could have sufficed for the site I just spent three months pulling together, but that's not what I picked. 

OTOH, the Plone learning curve is notoriously difficult to climb -- especially if one is to use that technology to build a site "from scratch". We're talking UML diagrams here, for instance. Things like form-based inventory control & sales tracking sites really aren't the target for Plone.  Plus the "native" database for Plone is ZODB (Plone lives on top of Zope and the latter uses the "Zope Object DataBase" to manage its content).  This implies moving from MySQL towards ZODB; although I've read that Plone can access MySQL databases if one gets the right add-ons.

So should I jump ship? I've spoken to the owner of said company. There is no guarantee that he'd hire me under any circumstances. Would I enjoy moving to something new? Probably. I sort of found PHP to be a train wreck of a language. Do I feel uneasy starting back at the bottom of another learning curve? You bet! One good way to advance is to focus and build new knowledge on top of what one has already learned.

While the underlying concepts (think GET & POST, etc) for forms processing and server side programming will transfer, all the time invested in developing some facility with the messy PHP syntax will go for naught.

And there is no guarantee that I'd be hired.

Would it be better to focus some serious effort on some client side stuff (Dojo, jQuery)?  That's what I was doing yesterday when owner of said local company called me to chat about working for him.

I just don't want to continue running around in circles.

Nose Hair

People have many complaints about getting on in years. In most regards, the Old Amigo gets along pretty well, thank you very much. Yesterday involved several hours of fence building. Today was weight lifting and 30 minutes on the cross trainer. Friday night I taught a yoga class at the gym. It's just not too bad.

Except for nose hair. Gray nose hair is the worst, because it catches the light and looks to other folks like you've got something you should take care of hanging out in a nostril. But even darker nose hair is a problem. See, for some reason, the interior nostril follicles have gotten powerful with age. The hairs are thick, strong, and (especially) long.

They tickle at night and disturb one's rest. If left untrimmed, they'll extend right out there into space and mingle with mustache whiskers. It is not easy to be cool when one has long nostril hairs waving in the breeze. It disturbs concentration. You get the picture.

So the venerable Friendly One has taken to trimming them. Oh, occasionally, one will be plucked out in a fit of pique, but most times a weekly trim will keep things tidy.

Last night the Amigo's dreams were disturbed by Visions of Nose Hairs. I had surreptitiously pulled a hair -- from my left nostril, I think -- and was appalled to find that it was a foot or more in length. The person with whom I was speaking was aghast. I tried to explain, but there I was holding what quickly grew to become a wad of nose hair.

When we are young we often dream of going to class and forgetting an important article of clothing. That rarely happens anymore.

Now the Amigo dreams of hirsute nostrils.

Sheesh.