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.