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January 28th 2020

420 Watts More?

I talk a lot about solar, and some of you just roll your eyes, so I just thought I would show the difference a couple of extra panels. The only difference is the panels, we have not moved, and both days are nothing but sunshine, the new panels were installed by about noon yesterday, but I had to pick up a couple of connectors to wire them in so they did not start adding to the cause until about 1:30, and I had to reset the controllers to work properly as you may notice by the pattern forming at the far right of this snapshot. Sorry the amperage and battery level are opposite to the ones below…

Here is a snapshot of solar life, this is from 8 am to 10 am on the 27th of January. The blue line shows the battery usage, while the brown line shows the amperage. The purple arrow shows where the solar first started to add to the batteries. The green points out when the beverage fridge kicked on, notice the big draw to start the compressor. The red indicates toasting bread for breakfast. The yellow arrow was the fresh water pump, also at the bottom of the toaster operation. And the orange is the solar recharging the battery bank.

This is a snapshot of the same time on the 28th of January. The blue and brown show the same information. Generally very similar with the big difference being the blue line and the sharper uptick in the battery recharging. The scaling on the brown amperage line is different because of a short usage of the microwave (which is a large draw) to soften the butter…lol. The same refrigerator cycling, water pump, and of course our toast at about 9 o’clock. About the same time the solar stops the discharging of the batteries.

The difference in the above two snap shots is the addition of 420 watts of solar just show the improvement. With sunrise at 7:35 am we did not start putting power into the batteries till 9:00 am, then the toaster pulled a full 6 amp/hours before the solar started adding power again, in fact if you look close on the top snapshot you can see that the first batch of toast was put back down (I like my toast a little darker), then the spike while Miss Laurie’s toast was started. The draw spike for the beverage fridge in the basement is quite severe but only cycles on about every 45 minutes, and runs for about six minutes as seen in the amperage draw brown line. Even with the two extra panels by 4:45 pm we are falling into a negative amperage, sunset is 6:02 and we are already -6 amp/hours. The reality is that we are getting less that eight hours of solar harvest strong enough to charge our batteries…the joys of winter. But the nights have been warm enough that I have shut the boiler off. The scaling between the days is different because we needed to nuke the butter for our toast which because of the draw changed the amperage scale, and at 10 o’clock on the second snapshot we were bringing in 16 amps as compared to the 7 amps, the difference because of the new panels…just saying

January 27th 2020

The Grammy Awards

Rant warning!

Well let’s just say I have seen and heard a lot of things in my life, I can remember Elvis Presley, the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. And I remember my father telling me how terrible that music was, you see my dad was a country music lover, and the old country Roy Rodgers, Gene Audrey, George Strait, you get the idea. We only had one radio station that the old radio in the barn would pick up CKOX out of Woodstock and they only played rock and roll for one hour a day and it was from five to six which was when we were milking the cows. I would turn it up every time I walked by the radio and my dad would turn it down ever time he was close. Oh there were many heated debates on the lack of talent required to make this rock music, and the hair cuts on these degenerates was a whole new debate…so I have always tried to keep an open mind of new music styles.

Ok, well I’m willing to admit I have lived through the New Kids on The Block, and the like, but I just couldn’t get past the whole rap craze thing, I have never heard such foul mouthed ungrateful people who sung of killings and whores, disrespecting pretty much any and every one of any authority. Pretty much just noise and in most cases not even good noise, not having a real beat, and in most cases can not be played over the air waves without huge bleeped out sections, the kind of noise that only gets a skip in my little world of streaming music. I really thought it couldn’t get any worse and then on the Grammys tonight there was some kind screaming grunting noise from something called Tyler the Creator, well that was about five minutes of my life that I will never get back and I still have no idea what he was doing other than possibly his diaper was on backwards…it was just bad and even scarier he won a Grammy for some style of noise.

And as the evening goes on there is just more and more bleeping, I am not even close to a prude, after spending forty years in the automotive world, oh if I pinched a finger I could swear a blue streak with the best of them. But to swear and curse for absolutely no reason in a song, that adds no value, and only degrades those doing it, I can’t imagine trying to explain such trash to young people listening to this garbage being produced by some very popular people…I would have said artists but I think of an artist as some one who creates timeless music and doesn’t need to add shock value, but even Steven Tyler of Aerosmith is getting bleeped tonight…has music fallen to this level…the answer is actually very obvious. I can remember when Elvis was on the Sullivan show and the cameras weren’t allowed to show his gyrations, oh how this music industry has decayed, most of the performers couldn’t carry a tune in a basket, let a lone sing in tune, and how degrading when they honour some gangster thug rapper on the same screen as Kobie Bryant. I don’t think overpaid athletes are hero worthy either but I do believe that they deserve not to be remembered with raping criminals that get shot…just saying.