Updates & The Ever Popular Stuff

Okay, let’s get caught up with some stuff. Like…

Solar Update

The new solar panels are doing better than they have any right to, really. At least when the sun is shining, which hasn’t been often, alas. We’ve had lots and lots of clouds ever since the guys put them up back at the end of April. In case you missed the details, I now have 10, 420W bifacial panels up on the roof of the garage to replace the 2KW of cheap, 220W “Amazon Special” junkers that were leaning up against the back side of the garage.

These suckers start producing significant amounts of power as early as 8 AM if the sun is out. And even if it’s cloudy I’ve seen them producing as much as 1KW of power. If the weather would cooperate we’d be able to take the house almost completely 0ff-grid indefinitely, running off the battery bank at night and producing more than enough solar power in full sun to recharge the batteries and run the house.

This is a good thing because We Energies, our utility, has gotten totally out of control. We’ve had 6 rate increases since 2020, and there’s no end in sight. I just got notification in the mail today that now we’re looking at a 16% rate increase over the next two years. And I suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and several other companies are building mega sized data centers here in Wisconsin and our current electrical infrastructure simply cannot handle the new loads. Not even close. The company is buiding two entirely new generating facilities just to handle the increased load, and even with that they aren’t going to have enough capacity and are going to have to buy power from other utilities to try to make up the difference. It’s going to require also a massive expenditure for upgrading the transmission lines, new sub stations, etc. The company claims that the data centers are going to be paying for that but us consumers don’t believe that for a minute. We’ve been misled and lied to far too often to believe anything these utility companies tell us any more.

Laser Update:

I have an upgrade for the Lumos laser from Wecreat on order.

If you’re interested in my original “kinda review” of the Lumos you can find it here.

They just came out with a drop in replacement laser head for this thing that upgrades the diode laser to 15W and replaces the 3w infrared laser with a 20W fiber laser that’s capable of doing 3D embossing of metal. It’s ridiculously simple to replace the head. Just remove a single bolt and the whole laser head lifts right out of the base. Drop the new one in and bolt it down, then download a new version of their software and it’s good to go.

Or so “Pamela” at Wecreat tells me. It turns my standard Lumos into a Lumos Flex for less than half the cost of what buying the new Flex would cost me. It’s going to be probably 3 weeks before it gets here. It is, they tell me, being made right now. Once it gets here and I’ve had a chance to try it out I’ll let you know how it goes.

Cats and Laundry

This is an older photo and I don’t recall if I’ve posted it or not before. Doesn’t matter. Even if I did it’s worth running it again. Damn you should have heard her purring! She was so happy the whole bed was quivering.

Ooo! Warm laundry right out of the clothes dryer!

Weather

The weather here in NE Wisconsin has been exceedingly irritating. It’s the second week in May and we’re still getting temperatures down in the mid-20s at night. The other morning I got up and the grass was solid white with frost. I’m surprised that anything at all is growing out there.

The little greenhouse we have set up in the basement where we start our seeds is overflowing with plants, but we don’t dare put anything outside yet because if we do there’s a good chance a frost will hit and we’ll lose all of them.

We’ve gotten some rhubarb. That’s at least been doing pretty well. And the chives, of course. But chives are like weeds once they get established. I don’t know what variety we have out there but it is incredibly hardy. We’ve had them thriving out there in a corner that faces the SW and we’ve had fresh chives coming up while there’s still snow on the ground.

Stuff

I’m still making those silly coasters when the mood strikes me. Making these things is almost addictive.

When I first started this a few years ago I tried to make them all related to brewing, pubs, taverns, beer, etc. But that got old fast. Mostly because there really aren’t that many beer/drinking/brewing related jokes out there that will fit on a space as small as a coaster. And a lot of the ones that are floating around aren’t really all that funny, IMO.

So I started to slip in more snark and sarcasm and just plain silliness and no one seems to have minded so I’ve continued down that path, slipping in a more brewing appropriate joke as I’ve thought one up or found one I could steal.

Damn that’s a horrible photo. What the hell happened to the auto focus on this stupid phone?

And then there’s this over there on the right. I had no idea that Zippo lighters were even still a thing, but apparently they are quite popular and allegedly “collectable” with certain persons.

Not hard to do. With the IR laser in the Lumos it takes about 15 minutes per side, half an hour or so per lighter, to do the engraving. It does a pretty good job of doing a nice, relatively deep engraving that isn’t going to wear off rubbing against someone’s car keys in a pocket or whatever.

I was surprised at the cost of these things, about $18 each. I don’t think they’re worth it, personally. I suppose what you’re actually paying for is the brand name, not really the product itself.

Custom engraved lighters pop up on places like Etsy. A genuine Zippo, engraved, runs anywhere from $35 to as much as $70.

One thing I might try is something like this over there on the left.

Yes, that is actual real color on a piece of stainless steel. That is not inked or painted or stained or anything like that. The Lumos can indeed do color engraving of stainless steel using just the laser alone. Something to do with frequencies and diffraction patterns or something? Maybe?

I’ve only experimented with this a few times because it is a pain in the neck to get everything set up right. And the type of steel seems to have a great deal to do with how well it works. I’ve gotten decent results using these stainless steel cards. But I tried doing the same thing on these bare metal “Altoids” candy boxes I get cheap off Amazon and make into holiday/birthday gift card boxes, and the results have not been encouraging there.

What it boils down to is that to do color on one of these lighters would require experimenting and burning test patterns into one or more actual lighters to figure out what settings I’d need to get the colors I want. I’m reluctant to burn through two or three or more $18 lighters just to experiment.

Success!

Well the experiment can only be described as a success. At 9 pm last night I switched the house completely off-grid. We ran the house off the battery bank all night. Solar power began to come in almost before the sun was over the horizon somehow. Not much, just a couple of hundred watts, but even so, I was surprised. We made no effort to conserve electricity. We just did what we always did.

By 8 AM we were running the entire house off the solar panels and putting a few hundred watts back into the battery bank. By 8:30 we were making 2.5 KW of solar and dumping almost 2KW of that into the batteries. By 11:30 AM the batteries were fully charged and the house running on the panels. We made 12 KWh of solar power just from sunrise to noon today.

I’m very pleased with how well this all worked. This means I probably won’t need to put the ground mount panels back up against the back side of the garage. We should be able to handle everything with just the new panels on the garage roof. Putting the other panels back up would remain an option of we ever ran into a situation where we’d need more power for some reason. But as of right now, we don’t need them.

Solar Experiment

I’m running an experiment at the moment. I wanted to do a full test of the solar system now that we have the new panels out there so while keeping my fingers crossed, I switched the whole house over to the battery bank at 9 PM last night. I want to see how well the system performs under more or less real world conditions with the whole house running off the grid. The battery bank was charged up to 100% and everything worked fine, so around 11 PM I went to bed

And I was up at 3AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. Sigh… Unfortunately that’s not unusual for me.

Anyway. it’s about 5 AM now and I just checked the system and the battery bank is at around 83% capacity and everything is just working.

It still kind of amazes me that we’re entirely off-grid and everything just works the way it normally does.

One of the things I’m trying to see is if we have enough solar panels up now to not only run the house but also recharge the batteries after they’ve been used all night. Unfortunately it seems the weather may not cooperate. Yesterday they were claiming it was going to be sunny all day today, but that forecast has changed and we’re supposed to have clouds moving in by mid-day.

One curious thing I discovered is that these new panels provide a surprising amount of power even in cloudy weather. Yesterday we had almost solid overcast skies but they were still putting out enough power to run the entire house as long as we were reasonably cautious about energy usage. Up there is a screen shot from the system showing how much power we were getting even under some pretty good cloud cover.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens. I want to keep testing the system to see just how much power we can get out of it now that we have a decent amount of PV out there and how to fine tune, so to speak, our energy usage patterns, etc. to reduce the amount of grid power we use as much as possible. I can run numbers on the calculator or spreadsheets all day long but nothing beats having actual real world data to go on.

Okay… now this is interesting. It is now 5:22 AM. The sun isn’t even up over the horizon yet and I’m already getting power out of the panels? Here’s what the data looks like right now

This is a bit hard to believe. How can I be getting 97W of PV coming in when the sun isn’t even above the horizon yet??? Granted that’s not even enough to run the lights in the kitchen, but come on, seriously? How am I pulling any power at all out of those panels right now?

One thing this has already shown me is that the gas furnace fan pulls a lot less power than I thought it did. According to the specifications it should pull about 700W but it looks like it’s closer to about 400 or so, which is a good thing.

Anyway at the moment everything seems to be working exactly the way it should. I’ll keep you posted.

Solar

We finally got the solar panels up on the garage!

It’s hard to see in that photo up there but that’s the best angle I could get because MrsGF won’t let me up on a roof. (But she has no problem making me climb a rickety old stepladder in the house to clean the tops of the kitchen cabinets) The guys did a very good job. They ran out of daylight before they could get the wiring done but we jury rigged some connections to test them and they work quite well.

They’re 420W bifacial panels. Because they’re roof mounted like that the bifacial bit isn’t going to be very helpful, but at the time I bought them they were the cheapest panels in that wattage range. If I remember right I picked them up for about $107 each plus shipping, which by today’s prices, is ridiculously cheap here in the US.

Anyway we were testing them at the time I took that photo. You can see that not only is it cloudy, but it’s already starting to get dark. Much to our surprise they were still putting out 400W.

Of course the weather had to turn bad right after they were put up and it rained all day today. I switched them in just for the heck of it and the dopey things were putting out 300 – 500w. In the rain. I’m not entirely sure how that’s even possible.

So now we have about 4.2KW of solar up on the roof. Once I put the ground mount panels back in place we’ll have over 6KW total. That’s going to be quite a change from having only about 2KW solar.

It’s Finally Spring

the daffodils have actually been out for some time
dwarf irises.
garlic
catnip

We’ve been busy out in the gardens getting things cleaned up, hauling in compost, weeding, etc. Out in the countryside things still haven’t greened up much, but it’s getting there. Here in town, though? Everything is growing like crazy. I had to mow the lawn already last week and I’ll probably have to do it again in the next day or two. We have a whole line of cilantro coming up in one of the raised beds from seed that was dropped last fall so we’re pleased with that.

It’s still way too early to put out the vegetable plants. Its still getting down to freezing temperatures at night.

We’re scaling back on a lot of things this year because we still have quite a bit of pasta sauce, frozen green beans and peppers left from last year. We just over planted. That’s better than not enough, but we have enough pasta sauce to last us almost another year.

And best of all we have solar panels sprouting on the south facing garage roof! 10, 400W bifacial panels are going up there. I don’t think all of them will get up there today. Didn’t get started until almost 2 in the afternoon. But it looks like they have 6 of them up so they’re doing pretty good.

And that’s about it for now. I want to get out there and enjoy the nice weather while it lasts!

The Blizzard of 2026: Storm Update. Video from my front porch

Well it’s been an interesting couple of days. The storm started yesterday around noon. It’s about 10 AM Monday right now. The blizzard warning has been extended to 4 PM today. There was a few moments of a lull in the wind so I went out on the front porch with the Gopro and took this:

So that’s what it looked like a few minutes ago. And that was during a lull in the wind. The winds just kicked back up to about 30 mph+ so I came back in fast. There are times when it’s so bad I can’t even see the house across the street.

Every city, town and county around here, including ours, has declared a state of emergency and I think the governor put the whole state under a state of emergency. All secondary roads throughout this county and most of the others around us are closed. They’re telling people do not drive. Don’t even think about driving. If you do try driving and get stuck, you’re on your own. Not even tow trucks are being allowed out on the roads.

Everything, and I mean everything is closed. Outside of town visibility is literally zero and I’ve been hearing reports called in from people living out in the country of 6 – 8 foot high drifts across the roads in some areas.

Snowpocalypse!!!

If the weather reports are to be believed we’re going to get hit hard from Sunday afternoon through Monday morning. It looks like the worse of this storm is going to hit us directly with a combination of freezing rain and heavy snow, with the possibility of up to 24 inches of snow total.

All the towns around here have already declared states of emergency and put on street parking bans into effect, businesses are already announcing closures, etc.

The thing is, though, I’m not sure any longer if I can believe anything the weather reports tell us. They’ve completely blown just about every forecast for significant weather events here for the entire winter. Predicted “massive snow storms” have turned into an hour or so of a rather gentle rain or a light dusting of snow.

Anyway, we’ll see. Come Monday if you see a selfie pop up here of an old, overweight, white haired bearded guy standing up to his eyebrows in a snowdrift, you’ll know the weather service finally got something right.

We’re about as ready for it as we can be here. The snowblower is gassed up and ready to go. The batteries for the solar power system are fully charged and those can carry the house for about 24 hours if the power goes out, and if that’s not enough, we have the old Generac generator and extra gasoline to recharge the batteries if we need to.

If we do get hammered, I am not optimistic about what’s going to happen to our power. Just some 50 mph wind gusts down in the Milwaukee area yesterday or the day before knocked out power to over 20,000 people. The last time we had a significant late season snowstorm it knocked out power to almost the entire northern third of the state for days in some areas. Sherwood, a small town about three miles from here, didn’t have power for 3 or 4 days, for heaven’s sake.

This is a test

trying to figure out how to post files to be downloadable by my readers. This should be simple. I hope. If you click the link below it should let you download a file called “reader.zip” which is a .SVG file of the image over there on the left. I have to compress it into a zip file because for some bizarre reason WP will not let me upload a .SVG file to my media library.

Anyway you should be able to download a file called “reader.zip” by clicking on the “DOWNLOAD” link below.

readerDownload

.SVG is a vector graphics format that is commonly used with laser engravers and you should be able to directly import it into the design software used by most brands of engraver. So try downloading it, unzipping it, and checking that you get a usable image. If you have problems please let me know.

This image is public domain, a scan taken from an image published well over 100 years ago and is available free from several other sites on the internet. Feel free to use it for whatever you wish.

If this works I hope to be able to share some of the designs I make myself for the laser in the future.

Video experimenting

So I got this real deal on a Gopro 12 and I’m thinking of using it to make content for this place but here’s the thing, I only have a limited amount of storage space here. A lot of space, really, but these videos can run many hundreds of megabytes in size so it doesn’t take long to suck up a lot of storage space. So I’m experimenting with uploading them to my Youtube account and then just linking to the video from here instead of storing them here. I tried this once before with some other incredibly boring stuff that was almost as mind numbingly dull as these new ones are, like this one of me

So here we go. If all goes well, this should be a video of a cat being petted.

That’s Marvelous Mercy the Wonder Cat. She’s about 13 years old and was a shelter kitty. She got adopted once, then the brought her back to the shelter for some reason. Then my youngest son adopted her. But she didn’t get along with his other kitty. She got along pretty well with our other cat and here we are. She was very shy and nervous at first but she’s turned into an absolute sweety.

Now this should be a video of this silly and ridiculously complicated marble run thing I just finished building a couple of weeks ago.

Finally I stuck the Gopro inside of the Vision laser and got this. The fun stuff doesn’t start to happen until about 1 minute into it.

When it’s actually cutting it looks like a blowtorch for heaven’s sake. I’d never seen what it looks like underneath the workpiece before. No wonder they tell you to never, ever, leave a laser engraver/cutter running unattended!

Well darn, this seems to actually work. So maybe you’ll have some more incredibly tedious, boring, mind numbingly dull videos to look forward to in the future! I even got a mount for the bike. Ooo, just think! The possibility of hours and hours of videos of nothing but endless miles of backroads while you start yawning and falling asleep at the computer! Ooo, the excitement!