Apparently Cat 1 cloned herself and we got two tabbies now? Sort of a matched set? Yeah, we got two of them now. That’s Cat 1 on the right and Cat 2 on the left. Or is it Cat 1 on the left and Cat 2 on the right? Both tabby, both large economy sized kitties and I’ve already resigned myself to constantly confusing which one is which.
Cat 2 is a sort of refugee. She was a shelter kitty who was adopted into a home where a pre-existing cat decided she hated her and beat the crap out of her every chance she had. Not a good situation. So we agreed to try taking her in and see how Cat 1 would handle having another kitty in the house. As you can see, Cat 1 has no problem with having a new roommate at all. The two of them have been together about 4 days now and are getting along just fine. They aren’t exactly cuddle buddies but there’s been no hissing or spitting or growling or fighting. In fact no drama at all.
And considering this is Cat 2’s fourth home in about 3 months she’s adjusting remarkably well. She spent about the first hour here under the sofa, then decided that was boring and went and sat under the bed for a while, and the next morning she was acting like she’s lived here all her life. She’s not a lap cat like Cat 1 is, but she’s become downright affectionate towards me.
We were nervous about how Cat 1 would handle an intruder but aside from eyeing her with suspicion for the first day or two there hasn’t been any problem at all. In fact I think the two of them colluded in a 4 AM raid on the butter dish this morning. I woke with a start upon hearing a loud crashing noise and rushed out to find the two of them sitting under the dining room table and pretending they had no idea how MrsGF’s favorite ceramic covered butter dish ended up in many pieces on the floor. They would have had to get a rather heavy, covered, ceramic dish, with a quarter pound of butter in it, lifted up over the top of a one inch thick cutting board, shoved about three feet along a counter and then onto the floor, and I don’t think either one of then could have done it by themselves so I think both of then were in on it.
So, it’s spring! Yeah, sure it is. Temperature was down around 28 degrees last night. Sigh… Good thing we haven’t got anything planted out in the gardens yet. We do have flowers, though. A few of the more daring plants have been putting on a show.
It’s wonderful to be seeing color out in the gardens again.
Let’s see, what else?
Oh, I mentioned before that we were going to be getting the roof on the house and garage replaced sometime this year. We had the contractor out here Monday morning to measure everything up, give us a quote, and now we have that scheduled for sometime in late May or early June. Estimated cost for that is going to be around $13,000. That’s actually a bit less than I had anticipated so I’m pleased with that.
Once the roof is replaced I can start thinking about putting up a permanent solar array on the south facing garage roof. Hopefully I’ll be able to finally get enough solar panels up there to adequately feed the solar power system so we can fully utilize it at last. Going to have to see what the budget can handle. Might have to wait a while for our household budget to be able to deal with about 5 KW of solar panels.
Well we got absolutely hammered by the winter storm that rolled through here. Intense, heavy wet snow of up to 14 inches in some areas around here. Plus 60 MPH winds creating blizzard conditions. Even worse the snow clung like glue to power lines, poles and trees, dropping them like kindling all through this part of the state.
The result was wide spread power outages that took out power to 200,000 or more people. Entire counties were were blacked out. The entire Door Peninsula was blacked out. As of 10 AM this morning, there were still something like 60,000 people without power and some could be waiting another 24 – 48 hours before the lights come back on.
Our power went out at 4:23 yesterday morning. I sleep with a fan running in the bedroom to mask household noises that sometimes wake me up, so I woke up when the fan shut down. I wasn’t surprised at all to find the power out when I looked outside and saw the snow flying sideways driven by high winds and sticking to everything like glue.
We’d planned for something like this when we put in the solar power system, so all I had to do was throw a couple of switches on panels in the basement and everything in the house was energized again. By 4:35 I was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, and the entire house working normally.
It was considerably different in the rest of the town. There wasn’t a single light anywhere in the entire town. It was spooky. It was a really odd feeling to be sitting there comfortably, having coffee, some toast, reading the local weekly newspaper, with the entire surrounding down completely black.
This was the first lengthy blackout we’d experienced since we put the system in and it worked even better than we’d thought. We’d put in enough batteries to keep the house functioning more or less normally for about 24 hours in case of a blackout, and it exceeded our expectations. We still had about 75% battery capacity left when the power finally came back on after about 14 hours.
And just to make sure our backup to our backup, the old Generac gas powered generator and the battery charging system would work properly I tested that too and used it to recharge the batteries back up to 100% and that worked too.
this is what it looks like outside right now. Actually it’s worse than that now. I took that photo up there in a bit of a lull. It’s snowing so hard I can hardly see the end of the block right now.
Latest weather report I heard says we could see 14 inches of this stuff by mid-morning tomorrow, along with winds of up to 40 – 50 mph.
It’s been ages since I posted anything here except for the brief announcement about Cat moving in with us. But there is a good reason for that. Pretty much nothing has been going on here. At least nothing worth writing about. But now I do.
Solar, Taxes and ROI
So we just got our taxes back from the accountant so I wanted to talk about money and solar power. Especially about the 30% federal tax credit for the purchase of solar equipment. I’ve been wading through a lot of solar power related forums for some time now and there is a lot of misinformation floating around about this, so let’s see if I can straighten some of this out.
First of all, the best way to determine what is or is not a qualified purchase for the purposes of the tax credit is to go straight to the horse’s mouth, the IRS, and the agency’s information about Form 5695, which is how you apply for the tax credit. All of the information you need is right there if you click on that link up there. Stop paying attention to the self appointed “experts” on the internet and go directly to the IRS if you want information.
Note first of all that this is a federal tax credit. That means it is applicable only if you owe the federal government. It goes towards reducing the amount of tax you pay.
In our case here pretty much everything that we bought for the solar power system was allowable: batteries, solar panels, inverters, circuit breakers, wiring, switches, etc. could be applied to the tax credit. Once our accountant got done with all of it, our residential energy tax credit amounted to about $5,000. Needless to say, MrsGF and I were more than pleased with this.
So what does this mean when applied to our out of pocket costs? When everything we had receipts for (you did save your receipts and invoices, right?) was added up our total cost, including solar panels, was $16,000. The tax credit brought that down to $11,000.
So let’s now talk about ROI, or return on investment. How long will it take for our solar system to more or less pay for itself?
Since we put in the system about a year ago we saw a dramatic decrease in our electric utility bill, far more than I’d anticipated. I had estimated that if we were able to use the system as intended, it would cut our utility bill by about 1/3 when it was in operation. This should have been significantly more but at the moment we are restricted because we can’t get enough solar panels out there to really feed enough power into the system. We’re going to need to mount panels permanently on the garage roof. We can fit about 5KW – 6KW of panels up there. But the garage roof (and the house, for that matter) are scheduled to have the roofs replaced in another year. That’s how we have things budgeted, and we aren’t going to change the schedule at this point in time. It doesn’t make sense to put all those panels on the roof, only to have to take them all down again and then immediately have to reinstall them in a year or so when the roof is replaced. So for the time being we only have 2KW of solar out there on the backside of the garage. Once we get enough solar panels out there, we can take full advantage of the system and batteries and there should be a lot of days when all of our electrical needs are met by solar.
Anyway, let’s look at some numbers. Our electric bill in the year before we put in the system was pushing close to $300/month and some months even more. After we put in the system that dropped to around $150 – $170 per month. We estimate that we’re saving about $1,800 per year.
Our cost after the tax credit was $11,000. 11,000 divided by 1,800 is 6.11. So the system will basically pay for itself in 6 years. That’s assuming the rate we pay the utility for electricity stays the same as it is now, $0.16/kWh. And the chances of that rate going up significantly in the next few years are pretty much 100% considering the way things are going.
Of course our expense is going to go up when we add more solar panels, but once we do that we’ll be able to utilize the system more fully and further cut our utility bill as well.
I still need to do some work on the system. It is still in “experimental mode” so to speak. I need to make some changes to the wiring, run conduit, add a few safety features dictated by building codes, etc. But now that I know the system pretty much works well I can go forward with that.
V2H
In case you don’t know what that means up there in the heading, it stands for Vehicle to Home, and it’s related to EVs and their potential use to power a house during a blackout. The idea is, of course, that you have this massive battery pack sitting in your EV so why not use that power, or at least some of it, to keep essential equipment running in your home during a blackout.
There is also something called V2G, vehicle to grid, which is where the utility company wants to suck the power out of your EV to keep the grid going under heavy load conditions, but that’s an entirely different subject.
Ford made a big deal out of the V2H capabilities of the Lightning when it was first introduced, promising to actually sell you all of the equipment you’d need to do it. At the time I did a bit of research and the marketing people were saying the kit to do this would cost about $5,000, which I thought was a bit expensive, but not too horrible, all things considered.
Well last week I was talking to an actual real person who puts these things in out in California and I found out that the $5K price that was initially bandied about was ridiculously optimistic. He just put one in last week and the total cost was actually $14,000. He’s done about a dozen of these now and the cost of the installation, including labor parts, etc, has been running between $12,000 to $15,000 depending on what the electrical service in the customer’s home is like.
But $14K??? Seriously? That is a hell of a lot of money just to be able to suck power back out of your truck. Especially when you consider that my entire solar system, including batteries, inverters and solar panels, was only $16K.
That’s about it for now. Hopefully I’ll be getting back to updating this on a more timely basis!
MrsGF made the cat her own sofa. Note the cord on the right side. It’s heated. No, the cat is not being spoiled. Not at all….
Woke up around 2 AM and found her in bed with me, snuggled up against my chest. Which was fine until about half an hour later she decided she needed to groom herself, and me. So I had to pick up the little goof and put her in her bed in the living room. Going to have to remember to keep the bedroom door closed.
We have a cat again! After we lost Meg to old age we weren’t sure we realy wanted another cat. But… I can’t believe how much I missed having a cat in the house. It was like there was this empty space in my life… Anyway, once again we have cat. Meet Charlie.
Like almost all of our other cats she is a sort of rescue kitty. Her owner is going in for ankle surgery and after that she is moving into an apartment that doesn’t allow pets so she had to give her up. Then we heard about it from some of our family and without even thinking I said “We’ll take her”. And here she is.
And she is amazing. i know, I know, everyone thinks their new cat is amazing but Charlie really is. She’s 12 years old and is the most mellow, affectionate, well adjusted kitty I’ve ever seen.
We were prepared for drama when Charlie moved in. Anyone who has ever had to move a cat into a new environment or took one into a new family will know what I mean. Cats generally are creatures of habit. They don’t like change. And before this kitty came along most of our cats haven’t exactly been, well, normal. They came from a variety of unpleasant situations where they often were not treated well. It sometimes took weeks, even months or longer before a new cat moving into our home adjusted and came to realize they were in a safe environment.
With Charlie, though? Charlie was always in a pleasant, loving environment from the time she was born and it shows. Within 10 minutes of coming into the house she’d decided she liked it here. She spent some time exploring, let us pet and brush her and make a fuss over her, purred at us a lot, rolled on the floor and asked for tummy rubs, had decided which chair was the most comfortable for naps. She showed us which toys she likes to play with, which brush she prefers. She loves snuggling and when she’s happy she has a purr you can hear from three feet away.
What it boils down to is we love her, and she seems to love us and her new home. This is the third day we’ve had her and every time I see her I grin like an idiot.
The weather, I mean. I’ve never seen a winter like this before in Wisconsin. December was abnormally warm. January started out warm, then we got hit with this…
Actual real winter!
Now my back yard looks like this…
For weeks now it’s just barely been dipping below freezing at night, and during the day the termperatures have been getting warmer, and warmer, and warmer. For the last few days our high temps have been in the mid-40s. And by the middle of next week it’s supposed to hit the 5os here.
We have flowers starting to come up. The vegetable gardens are going to need to be weeded here pretty soon if this keeps up. The grass is starting to grow.
This is February. In Wisconsin. January and February are our coldest months. We generally get weeks of below zero weather here this time of year.
All of the ski and snowmobile trails are closed and have been closed all season except for that one snowstorm we had. Ice fishing? Forget it. What little ice there is out there on the local lakes is now so rotten they’ve had to resort to using airboats to go out to rescue the few damned fools who’ve tried to venture out on the ice.
The sturgeon spearing season is supposed to start on Lake Winnebago on Feb. 10. Usually there will be about 6,000 ice houses out there and hundreds of trucks and ATVs. This year? If this keeps up it’s entirely possible we won’t have a sturgeon season at all.
Took me over an hour to dig the solar panels out from under about 3 feet of snow. Great fun.
After one of the warmest Decembers on record, the weather has finally taken a more winter like turn. We got about 5 – 8 inches of snow last week Tuesday into Wednesday. Followed by a full scale blizzard a couple of days later. And now this week we’ve had below zero temperatures. I’m not complaining. This is actually pretty normal for us. Which brings me to this little mini-rant…
What really frosts my cookies is how the local news outlets go almost into total panic mode whenever we have more than a couple of inches of snow or the temperatures get close to zero. This is Wisconsin, for heaven’s sake! We deal with this Every. Single. Year. This isn’t Georgia or North Carolina where an inch of snow shuts everything down because they don’t have the equipment or the expertise to deal with it. If you listened to some of the television weather reports here leading up to this relatively minor snowfall you’d think we had a category 5 hurricane bearing down on us. All things considered, this “storm” was pretty much a total bust. It caused some slight delays, we had to fire up the snowblowers and snowplows for the first time for a few hours, and that was about it. I have literally driven motorcycles in weather worse than what we had.
I sometimes wonder what the heck has happened to people. Maybe it’s because I grew up on a farm? The farm doesn’t shut down for bad weather. Never. The chores still have to be done, the cows still have to be milked and fed, the young stock still has to be cared for, the manure still has to get hauled out, no matter how cold it is, no matter how much snow is on the ground.
Solar Stuff
Speaking of weather, one of the problems with Wisconsin is that from about, oh, November through the end of February we rarely see the sun at all. So if you’re running a solar power system you’re SOL as they say. I don’t think we’ve seen the sun for more than a few hours since mid-November. And after the power flickered and even went out for a couple of minutes during the snow storm I figured I’d better check the state of my battery bank just in case I had to switch over to that. And found that the batteries were down to 48V instead of the 53 or 54 they should have been at. That meant they were down to about 60% capacity. Oops?
Well considering we haven’t had sun in two or three months that shouldn’t have been surprising. I had the batteries in standby mode all that time so they were using a bit of power to keep the BMS operating. I should have just shut them down completely but I’d neglected to do that. I don’t have provisions for charging them from the grid at the moment, so that meant I had to drag out the big old Generac and fire that beast up. It’s out there right now dumping about 30A at 240V into the charger that’s topping up the batteries. And yes, I know it’s too close to the house but I got CO detectors all over the place and it’s only for a few hours so stop clutching your pearls and wringing your hands.
That’s the problem with solar power. In ideal conditions, on paper, it’s fantastic. In the real world there are some serious issues. Like what do you do when there’s no sun?
Fly Me To The Moon
Or maybe not? NASA finally admitted that it’s goal of getting humans back on the moon anytime soon was not going to work. The date for an actual manned landing looks like it’s being pushed back to at least 2026. And I’ll be utterly astonished if they manage to do it even then. It’s proposed schedule was always completely ridiculous.
They’ve done exactly one test flight of their outrageously over priced rocket and it seems to work. But everything else they need? They don’t have any of the other bits and pieces they need to make it work. None. Zero.
They don’t have a lunar lander. They don’t have lunar rated spacesuits. They don’t have anything they need except the launch vehicle. Space X’s starship is an essential part of the planned mission, and Space X hasn’t even managed to get one into orbit yet much less prove the vehicle will do everything it’s supposed to do, including robotic in-orbit refueling of other spacecraft.
Plus no one has yet explained to me exactly why we need to land people on the moon in the first place. Don’t get me wrong. I’d dearly love to see us putting people on the moon again. But ultimately what are they going to do there? Science? The Mars rovers have proven over and over again that we don’t need to put people at risk just to get scientific data. Putting some kind of colony on the moon? That’s a complete pipe dream. For God’s sake, why?
Exploiting the moon’s resources? What resources? As far as I know there isn’t anything, not one single thing on the moon that we need badly enough to go to the expense and risk of putting people up there. Nothing. Zilch.
Other Stuff
I’ve got two or three things on the bench I want to talk about in the near future. There’s an SDR sitting there in the box waiting to be played with. There’s a cheap video microscope that I just got that needs to be put together and fiddled with. I just got a new set of electronics tools from IFixit that I want to talk about too.
Covid For Christmas – The Great Pi Famine -Lettuce In December – Weather – Dreams
Covid
So on Dec. 23 MrsGF got an unwelcome Christmas present, Covid. Don’t worry, she’s doing fine. She still has a nasty cough but she’s feeling much better and has been testing negative for two days now so we’re hoping it’s all over. Somehow I avoided coming down with it. I took precautions, staying in the basement most of the time, eating our meals separately, wearing N-95 mask whenever I was upstairs, etc. But even so I figured I’d come down with it too. Well, I still might. She’s been testing negative for 2 days now. They say that the incubation time for the current strain is about 2 – 4 days, so I’m not going to be able to relax much for another couple of days.
And me… I’m a hypochondriac. All through the pandemic, every time I coughed or sneezed or my head got stuffed up, I was convinced I had Covid myself. And I have some pretty nasty upper respiratory allergies on top of it, so I pretty much have mild symptoms that could be mistaken for the early stages of Covid all the time.
The Great Pi Famine
RaspberryPi 4. I’m still amazed that they can squeeze a complete quad core computer with 8 gig of RAM, hdmi video, sound, 4 usb ports and WiFi into a package this small. Storage on this one is a 128 gig micro-SD card.
If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know I like to fiddle around with electronic gadgets and gizmos and tinker and build stuff. One of the mainstays of the electronic tinkerers out there as a controller of electronic equipment of all types has been a tiny little single board computer called a Raspberry Pi. They’re available in a variety of types ranging from tiny little units that are used as controllers for a variety of gizmos, to a full blown Linux computer that’s smaller than a deck of cards, the Raspberry Pi 4 and now the new, more powerful Pi 5. There are four things that make them attractive. They’re small. Very small. They are designed to make it easy to interface them to the outside world in order to use them to control robots, motors, actuators of various types, collect data from sensors, etc. And three, they’re relatively easy to use, easy to program and enormously powerful for their size.
And the fourth thing, they were cheap. Like really cheap. The Pi 4 which is basically a full blown Linux (using a variation of Debian) computer with up to 8 gig of RAM, built in WiFi, HDMI video, USB 2 and USB3 ports sold for about $40 or even less. If you ever wanted to play around with Linux to see if it could be a viable replacement for the ever increasing horror that is Microsoft Windows, a Pi 4 is an easy and cheap way to do it. Just plug in a monitor, keyboard and mouse, get yourself a good introductory book on the Pi computers, and away you go.
Sidenote: I was just reading an article the other day that illustrated just how much computing technology had advanced in the last few decades. Someone pointed out that the Raspberry Pi 4 is six times more powerful than the original Cray 1 “super computer”.
Note that I used the past tense there. They werecheap. Then the pandemic hit, supply chain problems hit, demand for Pis increased because people were stuck at home and were looking for things to do, and, perhaps most importantly, the profiteers struck. Scalpers, profiteers, scammers and the like snapped up every Pi they could get their hands on, and then turned around and re-sold them for three, four times their original cost. I saw Pi 4s, a computer that sold for about $35 – $40 originally, being sold for $250 or more.
Pre pandemic I had a half dozen or more of the things laying around the house. But I gave them to a friend who was an electronics experimenter and solar power experimenter before the drought hit. Get them back from him? Yeah, well, he lives in Barcelona half the year so that ain’t gonna happen.
After the pandemic, when I couldn’t get them for a reasonable price any more, I switched to using Arduinos for the fiddling around I was doing. But while they and other microcontrollers are extremely useful and fun to play with, they aren’t computers.
But now prices have finally started to settle down. They’re still over priced when compared to what they were before the pandemic, about $75. But that’s cheap enough that I’m willing to get one and start playing around with it.
To make a long story short the nice fellow from UPS dropped one off here (two, actually) and I spent a couple of hours setting it up, updating the software and fiddling around with it last night. So you might be seeing some more stuff pop up here concerning Linux and the Pi in the future.
If you want to fiddle around with one of these yourself and you’re new to the Pi I’d recommend you get something like this from a company like CannaKit in the photo below.
No, I don’t get a kickback from CanaKit or anything like that. There are a lot of disreputable vendors out there, but I’ve bought stuff from CanaKit several times now and they provide exactly what they advertise, ship quickly and their prices, while a bit high, aren’t horrible.
It includes everything needed to get the thing up and running. The Pi 4, a power supply for it, HDMI cables to connect a monitor, a case for it along with a tiny cooling fan, heat sinks for the CPU and two other chips on the board, and a micro-SD card with the operating system pre-installed. It’s more expensive than buying a bare bones Pi but it has everything needed to get it operational. Just plug in a keyboard and mouse, and a monitor.
Lettuce In December
From about the end of may through September we had fresh greens whenever we wanted them out in the garden. All we had to do was go outside, clip off some of the lettuce mix we’d planted, and graze to our heart’s content. I really missed that. And then I was in the basement doing stuff and saw the little portable green house we used to start seedlings in the early spring with the grow lights and heater and thought why the hell aren’t we using that to grow some fresh greens? So we did. And this is what we ended up with.
We didn’t put in a lot because we weren’t sure it was going to work, but as you can see it worked very well indeed. We got more than enough for a couple of good sized salads plus a bit more. And yes, it tasted very, very good. 😊
Other Stuff
The PreciseRF magloop antenna continues to work surprisingly well for me. I was concerned about it’s survivability when set up out in the weather but it’s been holding up well despite the rain, snow and colder weather we’ve had. But the real test is yet to come when it gets really cold here. It’s been abnormally warm here all through December. Even now, on Jan. 3 at 4:30 AM, it’s 35 degrees out there. We’ll see what happens when it’s -30 and blizzard like conditions.
Weather
If we ever get cold weather, that is. Temperatures have been running well above normal here. I vividly remember one New Year’s Eve before MrsGF and I got married. When we got out of the pub where we’d spent the evening it was -34F with a stiff wind and everything, including the car, was frozen solid. We spent the night at a friend’s house and managed to get the car started the next morning, somehow.
It was brutally cold for weeks that January. On Jan 1 after I got back to the farm I had to put a new alternator on one of the tractors. It was so cold that the insulation on the wires the old alternator shattered when I bent them. I managed to get the tractor running well enough to pull it into the heifer barn and then close everything up. 30 or so young heifers put out a lot of heat and it was warm enough in there that I could get the job done. The heifers thought it was great fun. They were all crowded around watching me.
What’s Coming Up
I got a woodworking project going. This is a joint project by ES (Eldest Son) and myself. One of his hobbies is doing stained glass so I’m making a backlighted frame for a piece he did. That promises to turn out to be pretty interesting. More about that when it gets closer to completion. That’s still in the planning stage.
One thing, though, dear sweet lord has good quality lumber gotten expensive! I’ve been spoiled. Years and years ago I bought a whole pickup truck load of very good quality, kiln dried, white oak about 1 1/4 inches thick, 6 feet long and of various widths that ranged from 6″ up to 13″. That’s pretty much run out now so I had to actually go out and buy wood and prices of good quality, furniture grade hardwood are absolutely nuts.
I don’t really have plans for the Raspberry Pi. It’s something I wanted just to be able to play around with Linux and mess around with. If something develops from that I’ll let you know.
Dreams
Dreams are weird. At least mine are. I was up at 3 AM this morning and just couldn’t get back to sleep so I came out here dealt with my email and then started writing this up. I do vividly remember the dream I was having when I woke up. I rarely remember my dreams, but when I do they are often extremely vivid and detailed. This one was like that.
MrsGF and I were having dinner at a rather fancy restaurant with a very nice young couple from India. I have absolutely no idea who they were or why they were in this dream. Nice people, though.
When MrsGF and I left we went out into the parking lot and the car, my Buick, was gone. We thought we mis-remembered where we’d parked it so I pulled out my phone to use the app that tracks my car. And my phone didn’t work. It had been infected with some kind of malware that just kept cycling through obnoxious ads over and over again.
There was a strip mall nearby and a T-Mobile store was there so we walked over there. They were about the close but a nice young woman kept the place open. She got me a replacement phone right away, restored all my stuff and got the phone working. We went back to the parking lot and activated the tracking app and yeah, the car was gone. We called the police and they found it, and the thief, rather quickly.
Elon Musk had stolen it. He’d been at the table behind us and had overheard me making disparaging comments about how utterly hideous his “cybertruck” looked so he’d gotten huffy, hacked the electronic systems in my car and took it.
Still, it’s better than the vivid, realistic dream I had about painting the garage. That was the entire dream, painting the garage. That was it. It was so boring that I bored myself awake.
I suddenly realized this morning that I haven’t posted anything here in a while. That’s because there hasn’t been much going on. Now that the fall cleanup is all done, the gardening season is wrapped up and all that, the solar system is more or less working, etc. I haven’t had much to really talk about. And now I do. So here we are.
Let’s get this vexed business out of the way. (Vexed means mildly pissed off, by the way.)
Doesn’t this look like fun?
Here’s the deal. I have my old gaming computer sitting on the workbench right now. After it went Pffft a couple of years ago I replaced it with an MSI gaming laptop, shoved the old one in a corner, telling myself I’d get around to looking at it “real soon now”, and it’s been there ever since until I started cleaning out my radio shack/mad scientist’s lab/workshop the other day. This thing wasn’t cheap. There’s a pretty hefty Core i7 processor in there, a decent Nvidia Geforce graphics card and 32G of high speed RAM. Even by today’s standards it would be a pretty decent computer so it would pay to spend some time trying to figure out what’s wrong with it. It would make an excellent auxiliary computer to run the laser engraver, 3D printer and amateur radio equipment and the like.
What happened was that we were in the middle of a late fall thunderstorm. A nasty one. In the space of about 5 minutes we had multiple momentary power failures and brownouts, and the computer just stopped working. So I have no idea of what’s all wrong with it and I can’t diagnose what’s wrong because the power supply doesn’t actually supply power any more. I suspect the power supply may indeed be the only thing wrong with it. So the first thing to do is get a working PS for it.
And, of course, I don’t have one on the shelf. Need a power supply for a TRS-80 Model II? I got one. Need a power supply for a Ti 99/4A? I got one. But not for this thing. And they want something like $150 for one, and I’m not willing to drop $150 on a PS for a computer that might not work anyway.
So I decided to take a stab at fixing the thing’s power supply.
Power supplies are not complicated beasties, all things considered. I used to repair power supplies for laser scanners, cash registers, and misc. equipment all the time back in the bad old days when I was a technician for a POS company. (No, not POS as piece of s**t, POS as in point of sale equipment)
So I yanked the sucker out. It was indeed dead as the proverbial doornail. So popped off the screws and took off the cover and…
What? Seriously? The damned thing is glued together?
Yeah, they glued everything. Great bloody gobs of rock hard glue or epoxy deliberately gluing the components together to make it damn near impossible to repair. Take a look at this:
That big coil is glued to the capacitors, which in turn are glued to each other. The other coil there is glued to two more capacitors. in the left center you can see another glob of glue where another component was glued to something else. I couldn’t even get the fan connector disconnected until I spent five minutes with an Exacto knife, a small screw driver and a pliers chipping away at the muck to free the connector.
Why would they do this? Someone suggested that they did it to prevent parts from coming loose in shipping. That’s nonsense. This thing is built like an efwording tank, for heaven’s sake. I could drop it off the roof of the house and the only damage would be a slight dent in the heavy steel case it’s in. Gluing down the connectors, maybe that would prevent the connectors from coming loose. But why in the world would you glue capacitors to coils? Or transistors to inductors? The only reason I can think of is to deliberately make the thing virtually impossible to repair so you have to buy a new one.
Now I could go off on a rant about planned obsolescence and manufacturers deliberately making equipment impossible to repair to force you to keep buying new instead of just fixing a broken item, but I will refrain from that. At least for now. Perhaps at some future date when I feel in the mood for a good rant I’ll delve into that.
So what did I do? Ordered a new power supply, of course. It’s the only way I can fully test the stupid thing, and if it does still work, which I suspect it does, I’ll need one anyway.
Growing Lettuce. In December.
So we have this sort of small, portable green house thingie that we use in the early spring for starting seeds before the weather is nice enough to plant stuff outside. Last spring we upgraded a bit, adding a heating pad and grow lights so we could keep it in the basement instead of having to move all the furniture around in the living room to make space for it in front of the windows. That worked out quite well, by the way.
So MrsGF and I got to thinking, we have this green house, we have grow lights, we have that heater, and we have lettuce seed left over, so why not try growing lettuce down in the basement?
So we did. And well, damn, it seems to be working. Within just a few days of setting it all up and planting some lettuce seed in a few pots with some potting mix, dozens and dozens of little lettuce plants popped up.
Hopefully in another week or two they’ll be big enough that we can have some fresh lettuce.
And A New Radio Receiver
On the electronics front I just got this little beastie in a couple of weeks ago, a Mlahit software defined radio receiver. SDRs have been around for years now but I’ve never had one before because I frankly wasn’t all that interested in them. I have enough old fashioned analog radios or hybrid radios to play with to want to dabble with these things as well. But I’ve been curious about these things for a long time so I saw this one and it looked reasonably good and the price was fairly cheap so I bought one on impulse. I haven’t had time to do more than play with it a bit. sometime in the next week I’ll have time to take a closer look at it and I’ll talk more about it then.
Solar Update
The solar power project has been … Interesting? Oh, nothing has gone wrong with the equipment. It’s still working exactly as it is supposed to. What’s interesting is that our electric bill has been literally cut in half ever since we put the system in, even though we haven’t used it that much. It’s been so cloudy here the last few weeks that we haven’t even been able to use it at all for several weeks now. So I haven’t even had the system switched on except for a few days in November.
But our electric bill was still half what it was last year. So what the hell is going on?
When we decided to put the system in we took a close look at how we use electricity here and made some very minor changes. We went through the house and replaced the few remaining incandescent and fluorescent lights with LED lights. We put all of the electronics in the house on power strips. You may not know it but almost all of your electronic equipment like your TV, radio, etc. never actually turn off. The displays may go dark, but they’re still drawing power. We bought a combination countertop convection oven/air fryer that works so well we almost never use the oven in the conventional stove any longer. We’ve become better at turning off equipment and lights when they aren’t really needed. All little things like that which haven’t altered our lifestyle but which, when you add them all up, have made a huge difference in the amount of electricity we use.
So oddly enough the solar power system has, in a way, been successful even when we aren’t using it because it caused us to reevaluate how we use energy in the house and make relatively insignificant changes that have cut our energy usage dramatically. Last year in November our electric bill was $310. This year it’s $157.
So even though we haven’t been able to switch the house over to solar on a regular basis, it is still, indirectly at least, responsible for cutting our utility bill in half. Weird out things work out sometimes.
Postscript
Just before I was going to publish this the new power supply for the computer arrived and… Yeah, it’s still dead as a doornail. I’m afraid the MB is cooked. I’m not even sure if I can salvage any of the parts out of the thing. I’m not sure if it’s worth the effort to dig into it further. Right now it looks like that right before the original power supply failed it dumped a huge power surge into the computer’s motherboard and other equipment connected to the PS. Oh, well…
grouchyfarmer 