Solar generation Nov 2010

I forgot to post this at the beginning of December so here it is. I generated 700kwh of electricity and I used a total of 0 according to Xcel.

The weird thing is that the last two months the meter for my electricity has slowly but surely gone up. On warm days when it's sunny I make some headway on lowering the number on the meter, but most days I use a bit more than I generate. So I guess the number that Xcel sends me is the total, as in I've generated more electricity total than I've used total this year. That would certainly be true. I really wish I had a better meter so I could keep track of that stuff better. There is some more data in the bill, so maybe I'll go through and compile that and see if it helps at some point.

Solar powered hornets!

Oriental Hornets harness solar energy through an entirely biological process. Maybe this will be a breakthrough that leads to our having more efficient solar energy collectors.

Or maybe it'll mean that the generation of robots that eventually destroys the human race will be solar powered.

Chevy Volt is impressive but far too expensive.

Chevy Volt gets an average of 60mpg starting from a full charge and has about a 380 mile range. It would be perfect for pretty much anything other than long drives and even there it's not bad. The problem is that it's $41,000 dollars for a small car and it's a GM car. Given how badly the fucked up the EV-1 and the Saturn line once it was absorbed back into the parent company, I really can't feel good about buying a GM car. Especially since they already got a shitload of my money against my will when the government bailed them out. But this is an innovative design...one I thought of and of course had no way of capitalizing on many years before GM.

For most people they would be able to do all their commuting and most of their in-city driving purely on electricity (assuming they install a charger in their house or have access to one for over night charging). The EPA says the all-electric equivalent mpg is 93. That's pretty damned good.

Let's compare a drive I do a few times a year in my Saturn SL1 to the drive in the Volt.
The trip is ~1000 miles and my Saturn averages about 37mpg on the interstate. I'll pick an arbitrary gas price of $3/gallon. So the trip costs me roughly $81 in the Saturn.

In the Volt assuming a full charge when leaving for the trip and the rest all the same I'd get 60mpg for the first 300 miles and then because I couldn't recharge the battery I'd get 37mpg for the rest of the trip. So that's $15 for the first 300 and $56 for the last 700 miles for a total of $71. My Saturn cost $13,000 or so and the Volt costs $41,000 (but you get a $7500 tax credit). So if all I was doing was driving long distance and all I was considering is the cost of driving that far, the Volt isn't worth it at all. Driving all interstate mileage I'd have to drive over 2,000,000 miles to make up for the difference in cost.

But of course there are many other factors involved so it's not that simple and of course if you use it as a commute car most of the time like most people would and if you have access to a plug each day then the volt only costs you on your electrical bill at an equivalent of 93mpg according to the EPA. And I only get about 30mpg in my Saturn when driving in the city. So there it would only take 300,000 miles or so of just gas costs to make up the difference in cost.

Of course, in my case I have solar panels. So the car isn't going to cost me anything in energy costs to drive on average over a year. But then any EV that is cheaper than the volt would be a better choice even if I have to rent a car every time I travel more than the range of the car. And most plugin hybrids (if they ever start making them) that is cheaper is likely to be a better deal.

So to me, while the design is cool and all, the Volt just isn't worth the money. I'd rather get a plugin hybrid toyota where I can tell it to just use electric for my commute, get almost as good mpg on a long trip as the volt and get a car brand that is radically more reliable in the long run.

What I really want is an EV that I can drive long distance, but I don't think we'll have those for a while yet. I'd certainly settle for an old style Saturn plugin hybrid, from the version of Saturn back when they first formed so that the cars were good quality relatively inexpensive cars that you could buy without dealing with sleazy sales people and get worked on without dealing with mechanics who were trying to get sell you the idea of getting a bunch of work done on your car that wasn't required, basically not having to deal with the cheating bastards I've mostly run into in car dealerships everywhere other than the old original Saturn dealerships.

But that certainly isn't going to happen...GM absorbed Saturn, Saturns sales dropped every year after that and their cars got shittier and shittier. They have possible the worst hybrid on the market and now the Saturn brand doesn't even exist anymore.

So if I'm lucky I'll end up with a Nissan Leaf or a Toyota Rav4 EV or some even better car when I have the money for a new car or when I'm forced to buy a new one when my 10 year old Saturn finally gives out.

I won't even speculate on when I'll be able to get a nice EV motorcycle like the Honda ST1300. At least some companies are making EV motorcycles so I have some hope.

(There's always a chance I'll make mistakes in basic math...if you see one let me know.)

Evolution

It's certainly a great example of evolution driving diversity to fill environmental niches, and there's no denying that it's likely to be the only reason that we few humans still exist, but I still find it creepy and weird to watch the ghouls hunting down and eating the zombies. Ghouls were just a myth and a part of popular roleplaying games as far as I knew before, but then so were zombies. Now it turns out we've got a thriving ecology pretty much world wide based on humans becoming zombies and ghouls eating zombies.

It's true ghouls will generally only eat zombies that are less than a week old or so, although they become considerably less picky when they get hungry, but since ghouls move almost as fast as humans and even fresh zombies can't out run healthy humans that means all we've got to do is cull the old slow zombies. Easy enough as long as you don't get cornered by a horde of them.

So now there are a few pockets of us humans. We encourage the ghouls to cull the zombies, and we apply a very strong evolutionary pressure to any ghouls that try to eat humans. There have even been some rudimentary attempts at domesticating ghouls but most people don't find that very appealing for long. If nothing else, the smell is...discouraging.

2012 Toyota RAV4 EV

Toyota RAV4 EV

I'm really happy to see all these EVs and hybrids hitting the market. Hopefully my excellent Saturn SL1 will survive long enough for me to be able to afford whichever EV/Hybrid I can fit in most comfortably.

like a solar hydrogen fuel cell

Lonnie Johnson appears to have invented a source of Solar Heat Electric Power. If it works it seems like it would be pretty amazingly efficient and this article makes it clear it works. I can't wait to see what kind of end product they produce. And if I'm reading this right the only part of it that is hard to make is the ceramic membrane so depending on the pressures involved it might not be difficult to just build one of those if you had the membrane.

6 minute charge delivers 375 mile drive

http://www.allcarselectric.com/blog/1050863_electric-car-drives-375-miles-at-55-mph-recharges-in-6-minutes

October solar

In October not only is the sun angle no longer great, but my neighbors huge tree shades my solar panels from about 3pm on so I'm not generating nearly as much energy.

700 kwh generated this month.

And i had to turn my heat on for a few days. Definitely going to have a couple of months of power bills to pay.

can't open boot_archive

Today I rebooted a server and switched disk0->disk1/disk1->disk0 for mirroring consistency.  I didn't
remember to edit vfstab first though, so I had to boot it to a milax live CD and edit the /etc/vfstab file.
Then rebooted.  Should be easy and smooth.

Unfortunately somewhere in there the boot_archive file got trashed, so then the system wouldn't boot at all.
So I brought it down to the boot prompt and ran

boot -F failsafe

to bring it up in failsafe mode.  At that point I should have been able to run

bootadm update-archive -R /a

(failsafe mounts the drive as /a) and it should have fixed the boot_archive and been able to boot
just fine.  However it kept mounting /a read only so the update didn't work correctly.  After a few
iterations of all that it finally worked.

Then it was back to trying to create the mirror.  There's some indication that the problem may have
been caused by creating the metadb before rebooting without finishing the mirror creation.

1 Year of Solar Electric Generation

Here are my first year totals. I sure hope I get to buy a good monitor soon. Ugh...I'm so tired of money problems.

Energy Supplied = 10.3 MWH
Yield = 477.2 USD
CO2 Reduction = 6.74 Tons
Maximum Output Power = 8097 W
Maximum Grid Voltage = 279 V
Minimum Grid Voltage = 209 V
Maximum Array Voltage = 422 V
Operating Hours = 4141 H

• Energy Supplied - Energy Supplied During Monitoring Period
• Yield - Money Earned During Monitored Period. (This is probably inaccurate.)
• CO2 Reduction - CO2 emissions avoided during monitored period if the same amount were generated by a combustion power plant
• Operating Hours - number of hours of power generation.

So in theory the power company will send me a check for $477 for the power I've generated this year.  In reality I didn't receive any money from them last year, but that may be because I generated less power than I used last year.  We'll see what happens in January.

According to the Operating Hours I got about 177 days of power generation out of the last 365.  Not bad given that the time doesn't accrue at night.

solaris syslog and logging from remote sources

I just spent two days trying to figure out why my new server wouldn't store external logs being sent to it like the old one did. I'd forgotten an entire step that is very imporant.
svccfg -s svc:/system/system-log setprop config/log_from_remote = true
This tells the system log to listen on port 514. I was seeing traffic to port 514 when I snooped, the syslog configuration looked right, but I wasn't getting anything stored. Very confusing. Luckily a lot of people have written about this so googling around for a bit showed me the answer relatively quickly.

For the rest of the syslog configuration in /etc/syslog.conf I added local4.none to the /var/adm/messages line to keep anything from the external log from going there. Same with operator and root and all the others. Then added:
local4.debug[tab]/log/file/location

It's very important to remember that all those lines should be tab separated, no spaces at all.

Vegetable vengence

My career is over as a writer. I knew that when I got this assignment, but at the time I thought it was because I'd written an article that was political suicide and I was being sent to South America to fade from memory. Little did I know then that the story itself would guarantee that I never got another job. I have to write the story even though nobody is ever going to believe it.

I was sent out on this story with the idea that it was about some loggers being killed by natives in protest for the rainforest being cut down. A good story but not one that really propels a writer to fame and fortune. Still I planned to do my best on the story and hoped to do some good by making the plight of the natives more widely known.

That was in the early days. Long ridiculously hot humid days of trekking through the rainforest from camp to camp. Negotiating for passage, food, water, and guides into each new area. Many days involved hours on end of wondering if the latest group of militants would kill me rather than allow me through.

And I wrote. I took diligent notes. Listened in on every conversation I could hear whether in Spanish in which I'm fluent, Portuguese in which I'm somewhat less than fluent or any of several local languages in which I'm lucky if I can catch 2 or 3 words per conversation. I interviewed my guides at the end of each day, I set up interviews with local leaders of any group that would agree to speak with me. All very important, all necessary to the story. All pointless now.

The 5th week of my journey, about the time I became positive that I would never hate anything the way I hated the rainforest in South America, things started turning distinctly odd. My guide and I had managed to reach the area in which the attacks had taken place and we were haggling to get access to talk to the locals about it when the first bit of oddity started.

We were talking with a local leader when he used a phrase I'd never heard. Near as I could tell it was something about moving trees. My guide gave me a nervous look, changed to a local dialect I didn't know and began talking very quickly and quietly to the old man. The conversation went on long enough that I tried to interrupt twice unsuccessfully as my guide became more and more pale and nervous. Suddenly he said something rather loud and angry, stood up and said we had to leave immediately. All he'd say as we left was that the old man was obviously drunk or on drugs and that we were in the wrong area of the forest.

After that I got nothing useful out of the trip for about two weeks. It became more and more obvious that my guide was hiding something important from me and worse was actively trying to get me to leave. I tried to find another guide but somehow the word had gone around that nobody should work with me. With the locals unwilling to work with me and a guide who was clearly working against me I eventually had to give up.

The last couple of days were increasingly odd. My guide became so nervous that he was almost unintelligible in conversations. Some sort of stress was clearly eating at him causing his face to look progressively more haggard and his skin to turn almost gray. Fewer and fewer people were to be seen in the village and I heard several people use the odd phrase about moving trees. I tried to talk to people as they left town, but my broken speech and their obvious fear made for even more confusing conversations.

I got the idea that some sort of slaughter was happening to the south and that the killers were moving north killing everybody they found. It tried to find out more about the attackers but the conversations always broke down at this point with babbling about moving trees. Finally I thought I'd figured out that the phrase I'd thought was about moving trees was the name of the protesters that were killing the loggers. I started trying to get someone to introduce me to the group so I could talk to them about their protest and what kind of demands they were pushing with the hopes of talking them out of slaughtering people.

Then the refugees began to arrive. Every one of them was mangled in some way. Some were so torn up it was miraculous that they weren't dead. Many died trying to continue north out of town. Every vehicle and animal that could be ridden had been stolen by this point. By the time I got back to the hotel the only person that seemed to be left in town was my guide. The only thing he would talk about was our single engine plane and how now was the time to use it to get out of here before we died.

Very quickly the combination of his constant talk of leaving and the refugees I'd seen early began to make me nervous. Nervousness turned to fear and then dread. About an hour before sunset I decided I'd had enough and allowed my guide to talk me into leaving. The eerie silence and oppressive feeling in the air as we walked through town created a creepy feeling and need for haste that crawled up my spine and lodged in my brain.

We began to run. A growing susurrus began to the south as we ran. Like a localized hurricane far away but moving quickly closer. We ran faster a rising fear of death beginning to overtake my mind. Now booming and crashing sounds could be heard along with the rushing torrent of sound. Adrenaline burst through our bodies as we reached the plane and with frenzied speed tore away the chocks and jumped into the plane.

The plane being a well cared for corporate asset it's engine caught immediately and I'm sure every flight instructor I'd ever had spun in their graves as I completely ignored all safety precautions in my near insane haste to just get the plane in the air and away from this place. The noise completely overwhelmed even the sound of the prop.

As the tires left the pavement there was a horrible moment of vertigo as the plane seemed to suddenly accelerate radically. We were approaching the trees at the end of the runway entirely too quickly, far more quickly than the plane could possibly travel. As I reached for the throttle to try to slow our acceleration enough to give me time to get above the trees my mind was suddenly wrenched with a brain splitting visual shift that nearly made me pass out. Desperately I pushed the throttle to full and pulled up with all my might on the stick.

I swear we passed within 5' of the grasping upper limbs of the trees as they strode with ghastly speed across the fracturing ground.

self-healing PV

Now there's a fantastic idea.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/self-assembling-photovoltaic-technology-can-keep-repairing-itself

August solar production

1100 kwh this month! Woohoo! 9.14mwh total so far.

cron and locked user accounts

When a user is created it is locked, which shows in the shadow file with a *LK* in the password field and a result of LK when you run passwd -s against it. When an account is locked, cron will not run for it. The way to fix that without giving the account a password is to set it to be a non-login account. You can change *LK* in the shadow file to NP for "No Password" which will change the passwd -s output to NL for non-login. That way the user still can't login, but it can run cron.

The reason I would want something like that is so that there is no way to do a password attack against the apache or mysql users, and yet I can set up a crontab to run as those users. Particularly useful when setting up mysql backups/dumps.

adding an application to smf in solaris 10

create the method file in /lib/svc/method, usually easiest to find something close to the app you're installing and modify the file. For example apache2 comes installed, but I put the latest version in /usr/local/apache2 so I just use the files that are already there with path modifications.

Then you need to add a manifest. Those are stored in /var/svc/manifest and usually if you're adding your own you would put it in the /var/svc/manifest/site directory (or so I've heard). Again the best way is to get one that is close and modify it or use it as a template. I've found that the one installed with the system works just fine with an upgraded version of apache in /usr/local/apache2 but best to check to be sure.

Then you import it:
svccfg -v import /var/svc/manifest/site/http-apache2.xml

Then the normal SMF controls should work for it.

creating solaris zones

This is the basic set of commands to create a whole-root zone (a zone that does not share drives with the global)
[root@stamp zones]# zonecfg -z dplweb
dplweb: No such zone configured
Use 'create' to begin configuring a new zone.
zonecfg:dplweb> create -b
zonecfg:dplweb> set zonepath=/opt/zones/dplweb
zonecfg:dplweb> set autoboot=true
zonecfg:dplweb> add net
zonecfg:dplweb:net> set address=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
zonecfg:dplweb:net> set physical=eth0
zonecfg:dplweb:net> set defrouter=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
zonecfg:dplweb:net> end
zonecfg:dplweb> verify
zonecfg:dplweb> commit

Plumb the nic for the zone
ifconfig nge1 plumb

Then use zoneadm to install the zone
zoneadm -z dplweb install

Then start that puppy up.
zoneadm -z dplweb boot

Then you'll have to login to the console to finish installation.
zlogin -C dplweb

July solar generation

New totals!
8097 watts max
8.04mwh generated for a total of 1080 for this month.

solaris partitioning and some random info

The network management ports on solaris servers are usually 100mb full connections.

The network management gui is quite useful for updating the ILOM/bios/firmware and is a good place to find the serial number.

As of Solaris 10 U8 10/09 the partitioning I'm using is:
12gb /
12gb /var
256 mb for metadata slice
and then I put everthing else in the /opt slice because that's where I store my localzones and downloads.
I set up swap equal to twice the memory installed

The solaris default install that comes on the hardware is set up with very little swap and about the same / as I set up, but nothing set aside for /var or /opt. They leave a good deal of space unallocated though so it's always easy to add more partitions.

Using the install option of turning off network services really helps lock down a new solaris server. I've found that to be quite useful.

New SCiB battery is really impressive.

http://www.scib.jp/en/

They claim 6000+ cycles without harm and 90% recharge in 5 minutes.
Nominal Voltage 12V
Nominal Capacity 4.0Ah
Max. Charging Current 8.4A
Max. Discharging Current 8.0A (continuous)
25A (within0.3s)
Size Approx. 145 x 109 x 48mm
Weight Approx. 1.0kg

Damn...that's impressive.

New lower 1BOG solar prices!

1BoG has negotiated new even lower discounts for solar installations in Denver. 15% lower than the the price I paid last year. That is too awesome, although I certainly wish I could get that deal retroactively.

Or at least get a monitor for my system.

Power bill.

My power bill for June was $19.22. I used 0 electricity and 0 gas. That's $19.22 just for being connected to their service and the idiotic fees they charge.

I think I can live with $20 power bills for 6 months out of the year.

May 2010 stats

6.96mwhs generated so far. Thats 110 kwhs less than last month, but then May is usually a rainy month there. New max of over 8kw, so that's pretty amazing for a 6.7kw system. One thing I need to look up is that I think the system is a 6.7kwh system which means it should only be able to generate 6.7kwh. Doesn't mean it can't generate over 6.7kw, just that it can't do it for an hour straight.

Get on the Hope Train.

Nobody really remembers anymore who originally had the idea to use the train. Most figure it was Thud, because he thought about this stuff long before the disaster. We'll likely never know now since all the people that were around in the beginning are dead now. Hell, Thud bit it holding the door while the first group got on the train once it was fitted out the first time. The rest have died over time, same as will happen with the rest of us.

Whoever thought of it, it's worked out brilliantly. Once the solar panels for PV and heat were installed, and the outside of the train was a bit better armored, it was damned near fool proof. No danger of running out of power, so we can always leave. Nothing is big enough to keep us from moving down the tracks. No number of zombies would be able to stop the train, and they aren't smart enough to pull up the tracks. We sure can't move fast because the tracks deteriorate over time, but they'll last years without any trouble.

The best part is that we have no reasonable limit to what we can pull. So we've got dozens of sleeper cars, a few extra engines, dozens of storage cars, pretty much anything we need. The chainlink fence attached car to car makes it so the walk between cars is safe from the zombies and is easy to maintain. Nice and flexible so even curves aren't a problem.

And when we need more food or water, we just pull up to the loading docs of the big warehouses and send in a heavily armed and armored group to get supplies. See, we've got a couple of cars that are full of vehicles we've modified for just this purpose. Forklifts with fully enclosed cabs, bobcats fitted out the same way and even some SUVs we've modified so we can transport more people. We've got enough people and enough vehicles that if we can see someplace we want to raid, but the tracks don't go directly there we just fit out a raider group and send 'em over.

Of course, nothing is perfect. Even with all the precautions we take
we occasionally lose people. And of course we have to have a two day quarantine on anybody that leaves the train, in case they were infected. It's amazing how small of a wound can cause an infection. If you're really unlucky you can even get infected without a bite or wound, but that takes a pretty new zombie for that to happen. And mostly we wear face masks and protection to avoid all that. But it's amazing how seemingly clever zombies can be pretty much just by acting randomly. We found one climbing in through the sewage system!

Recently we've had some very good luck and some good news. We managed to find some government research train cars a few months back, so the few scientists we had were able to make more progress on researching what is happening with the infection. And then just last month we saved a group trying to fight there way out of a hospital when we stopped to get more medical supplies. Turns out they had been holed up in there doing research on the infection for months, but had finally run out of water and didn't have much food left. We just happened to roll up to the underground rail dock as they were about to try a desperate run on a warehouse about a mile away. Suicide trip, they didn't even have any armor on their vehicles, just normal cars and a small mail van.

So we're making some great progress, and finding out all kinds of new data on the infection. Turns out the zombies will eventually die out from lack of food if they can't get living humans to eat. We occasionally see them try to eat animals, but it doesn't work for long. Animals don't become infected either, or we'd be toast.

So as depressing as it is, our big hope is to gather as many people together as we can and keep them uninfected and just wait for the zombies food supply to run out. We're still hoping for a vaccine, but that won't help the zombies...dead bodies don't recover.

Ok, enough blabbing...time to suit up. We're hitting what we hope is a large warehouse full of scientific equipment. The more tech we've got the better our chances of our docs finding a solution to our problems. This raid is going to be a bit more hairy than most...for some reason the building is pretty much surrounded by zombies. Could mean people are holed up in there, but we're not sure.

Anyway...peace.

May 2010 power generation and some solar data

5.9mwhs total so far. Max generated was 7750 although I'm really wondering about that, because I've never seen that large of a number on the monitor and I've seen it at noon on some pretty clear days. Who knows though. I only generated 1170kwh last month. That seems much too low. I wish I had the money to put a good monitor on the system.

So some things about solar panels that weren't clear to me initially:
When the grid power is out, the power to your house is out regardless of what the solar panels could be generating. The stated reason for this is for the safety of work crews as the house could be putting power into a grid that is believed to be dead and a worker could accidentally electrocute themselves. This is blatantly bullshit since no assumption of that sort should ever be made by professionals. In addition, it would be a trivial tech solution to make it so that power didn't leave the house if power wasn't coming form the grid. It is, in fact, one of the simplest electronic gates made.

Another is that I'm not allowed to have any sort of storage device because then I wouldn't be generating enough electricity for the grid to make up for what they paid for my installation. Really the reason is that they want to be able to charge me for some power when it's dark. See they charge more than they pay. Maybe someday I'll be able to buy my way out of the contract and install a nice big whole house UPS. It'd be great to get one of the new power cell UPS systems that uses the new catalyst to make it more efficient to store power in water.

96% efficient solar cells

http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223000119&cid=NL_eet

Now, obviously it'll be a while before we see those, but I'm hoping that in 20 years when my panels need to be replaced, I will have already replaced them with something much smaller and drastically more efficient like these.

April 2010 solar generation

Total on the meter is 4.73Mwh for a total of 1.07mwh I generated this month. Since I didn't use any more than I generated last month, and the meter has been rolling back slowly all month, I'm sure I generated much more than I used. This is awesome.

save or copy vtoc on solaris 10

To capture it to a file:
prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c#t#d#s2 > out

To use it to format another disk:

prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c#t#d#s2 | fmthard -s - /dev/rdsk/c#t#d#s2

This comes up because I had a drive get wiped and need to fix the partitioning before I could restore the backup. So now I run a script weekly that keeps the vtoc in a directory and also mails it to me so I have it stored elsewhere. Very convenient in really horrible situations. But also convenient if you need to create a mirror of a drive you've already created.

Another goal reached! 0 total electricity used from the grid!

I generated more electricity than I used this month. That's much earlier in the year than I expected that to happen. This is a big goal, finally generating more than I'm using, and what I am using is supposed to be from wind sources, although I know that's at least partially bullshit. And once I've had a chance to do some more insulating and whatnot, I should generate more than I use all but 2 or 3 months out of the year except on the coldest winters. Woohoo!

This is how my brain works though....I have signed up for, and pay a premium for, electricity that is 100% generated by wind. But I pull from the grid just like everybody else, so the likelihood of the electrons I'm pulling actually coming from a wind source are pretty minimal since it's all mixed in with the much more predominate source of coal. Well fine, as long as wind is generating sufficient power to cover my usage, it's at least in the system so I'm helping cut down on the amount that has to be generated by coal by subsidizing the wind sources. Except I have no way of knowing that, and I'm positive that Xcel would gladly double dip on anything they thought they could get away with. So while I know they have a shitload of turbines around here, and I have heard they generate a lot of wind energy, there is no real way for me to know if my needs are covered by that source or not. For all I know there are 2000 of us all slotted for that one allotment of wind generated energy, all paying the premium for it, but since it can't really be separated out of the general grid, we're all double booked for it.

But now...now I know where the majority of my electricity is generated. Right on top of my own fucking house, that's where. And if I had the money, I'd buy one of those Phillips house grade UPSs and install that fucker and know that every bit of the electricity I used I generated without ever touching any of Xcels energy. But...I'd have to pay my way out of the contract with Xcel to do that...so it'd cost me something like $23,000 on top of the cost of the UPS and the installation.

So...we'll save that for a day shortly after I win the powerball. Which I don't play, because I understand math too well.

Some more random solaris/unix/geek stuff

Latest OS update: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp

Sun contract info:
go to http://ibis.sun.com/support and login
click on Account
Do a blank search


NetBackup client install (need win32 base and to untar packages)
first install base
then install the updates

ILOM
serial connect
cd /SP/network
then set pending properties to how you want them, then set commitpending
= true and it'll set the properties
set pendingipdiscovery=static
set other "pending" properties
then cd to other SP services and enable the ones you want
set ilom password

backup speed
put 65536 in /usr/openv/netbackup/net_buffer_sz
adjust /usr/openv/netbackup/SIZE_DATA_BUFFER and NUMBER_DATA_BUFFERS

package updater for RHEL 5.4 (Red hat enterprise linux) is pup. Seems to work pretty well.

Statistics for March 2010

3.66mwh total with a maximum of 7661W. That means that in March I generated a 1MWH of power. My meter has not advanced (on average) the whole month. It also means that for the second time I've generated more power than the system is rated to generate. Now witness the full power of this fully installed and operational solar electric system.

This really is so totally cool. I'm damn glad I got this done.

BMW Z3 EV conversion by Tim Catellier

http://ev.gearboxmagazine.com/2010/03/16/tim-catelliers-2000-bmw-z3-ev/
This is an article about my friend Tim who just finished converting a BMW Z3 to all electrical. I've been reading along while he's been building it, and spent an excellent day hanging out talking and checking out the car when I was down in Phoenix last. I've got to say he's done an exceptional job on this and really proved he is an extraordinary man especially when it comes to resolving difficult problems. Many of the problems he ran into would have stopped me dead.

Here's his blog in case you're interested.
http://evz3.blogspot.com/

Incredibly efficient solar panels.

http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13325

Flexible solar panels that can usefully absorb 96% of single wavelength light and 85% of all light and convert it to electricity. That is unbelievable. I could replace my entire array with about 1/3 the panels, or triple my energy production. I sure hope they get to market with a reasonable price soon.

February Solar generation

Generated another 630 kwh this month for a total of 2.66gwh. Surprisingly the maximum has also gone up, not only wouldn't I have expected that in February, but it went up to 7460 which is quite a bit above the 6.72 for which the system is rated. I'm not sure what that means, but I'm damned glad it's working as well as it is.

solaris NIC admin and named configuration

on new sun servers to administer nics
dladm show-dev

-----------
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/excerpt/dnsbindcook_ch05/

named-checkconf to check named configuration

named-checkzone to check a specific zone

Contingency Planning.

A story:
Following the contingency plan was simple when the alarms went off. It was well written, concise and obvious. When I reached my assigned place I discovered the next stop was to read "Green Book Number 17". Green Book Number 17 was difficult to find at first because it was so small. Merely a thick paper cover and a single sheet of paper.

The single sheet of paper said only "Find box 17 on the lower shelf and follow instructions."

Box 17 was one of only a few boxes on the shelves and was about the size of a shoe box, only made of heavy metal locked with a combination lock. Likely the combination lock for the 6 digit number I'd been told to memorize last year.

The top of the box had a 3"x5" card on top that said "Open box while alone in locked room immediately." Simple enough, the room I was assigned for emergency use was just down the hall so I stepped in and locked the door. Everyone outside was going about their duties in an orderly fashion so no need for me to interfere.

Sure enough the number I had fit the box I had. Inside the box was quite a surprise, not what I'd expected at all. A box of syringes, a small mirror, a headlamp, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a box of sterile wipes, a 9 mm hand gun and 4 boxes of shells. Also a sealed red envelope with INSTRUCTIONS printed on it.

Inside the envelope was a set of simple instructions I found hard to grasp. Simple to list, difficult to execute.

"If you are following instructions which have led to opening this box, the base will be completely sealed in less than 10 minutes. Follow these instructions as quickly as you can, time is against you.
1. Look in the mirror. If the whites of your eyes have any bright yellow coloring find your next in command and give them this box. If not follow the rest of these instructions.
2. Inoculate yourself immediately.
3. Find your next in command and check their eyes. If no yellow is visible inoculate them immediately. If their eyes are yellow at all, shoot them in the head.
4. Repeat these steps for every person in your section of the building.

If in 4 hours no others have developed symptoms use the intercom to begin trying to contact Central Command.

Solar taxes.

One of the steps in this process that I've sort of doubted all along was the claimed tax refund from installing the solar. Well, I did my taxes and wow was I surprised. Not only did I get several thousand dollars back from my taxes for installing solar but I have an even larger hold over for next year because my deductions were too large. So I get a huge return this year (which is very good since it's going to save my ass) and next year I get a bigger than normal return.

At this point my total outlay for the installation is going to be about $13,500 for a 6.72Kwh system. Then I'll get another chunk back for it next year, probably dropping the total price to around somewhere around $11,000. I won't know for a while yet exactly what my payoff period will be for the system, but at the very least it's making it so that my hot tub increase in power use is offset. During the summer I expect to generate quite a bit more power than I use, even with the hot tub, and I intend to make the hot tub significantly more energy efficient before next winter.

So all in all, I would guess that I'll have this entire installation paid off in about 7 years, so then I should have about 13 years of profit from it before I have to replace it.

Power usage/generation Jan 2010

Ugh...I used 926 kwhs last month in addition to the 590 kwhs I generated. I've got to do something about the amount of power that hot tub is taking. It was a cold month, average temperature of 26, but still...that's a crazy amount of power.

Total so far: 2.03mwhs. Woohoo! December is definitely the low month, and that's likely to be true every year.

Data collection

I've really screwed up the data collection for my power. I was going to put together a nice set of data and comparisons and whatnot for the end of the first year with solar, but it turns out I don't have a baseline. I've just been changing things too fast.

Moved into the house in 2006 and didn't have time or money to do anything for winterizing the house. Nice baseline but that's it.

2007 I had two roommates and did some winterizing. Now way to tell which effects apply to what.

2008 I had one roommate and installed a tankless electric water heater and did some more winterization.

2009 I added a crapload of insulation, had no roommates, installed a hot tub and solar panels.

So...no clue about any of the changes. It appears since I got the insulation done and winterized more this year I'm saving an entire 1 therm at the same average temperature.

Clearly I used more gas and electricity when I had roommates by a tremendous amount and I'm using far fewer therms now that I've got an electric tankless but it's almost impossible to tell if I'm really saving money.

I generated 390kw in December 2009 for a total of 1.52mw since the installation in October. I really wish I could figure out what is required for a monitoring system since REC won't respond to my questions about getting a datalogger installed. Sigh.