It’s been a while since I wrote anything here so let’s get caught up.
Haze from the Canadian wildfire smoke seems to be an almost permanent thing these days.
Smoke from the Canadian wildfires is still an issue here. I wish I’d kept track of the number of days we’ve been under air quality warnings because of it, but I haven’t bothered. I have respiratory allergies and this stuff hits me hard. For about four weeks straight I was on Claritin which did help, but I was still sniffling and sneezing and hacking until the air cleared up a bit.
The bell peppers are doing very well indeed this year. We’ve already started harvesting and eating these guys and some of the banana peppers.
The vegetable gardens are doing quite well despite the drought, but we’ve had to water everything pretty much every evening until just recently when we started to get a bit of rain. We’ve been harvesting wax beans every other day or so for about two weeks now. Some we eat fresh, most are blanched and bagged and frozen. The tomatoes are looking pretty good too with lots of young fruit on the vines.
MrsGF put in some jalapenos this year as well. We have a couple in pots in front of the house to make it easy to snag one to mince up to throw into an omelet or soup or something, and there are a couple out in one of the raised bed. Last year they didn’t do well at all for some reason but this year it looks like we’re going to get way more than we’ll need. I’m the only one who eats these things but I’m never going to be able to eat all of these so I’ll end up freezing a lot of them for use later.
We have a few “volunteer” sunflowers that popped up all on their own which happens sometimes. The birds and chipmunks drop the seeds from the bird feeder into the gardens. We generally leave them alone because, well, sunflowers are just fun.
First the smoke and then the extraordinarily hot weather we’ve had have been curtailing my biking. It’s hard to enjoy getting out on the bike when either the air is so think with smoke you can chew it or the temperatures are pushing up into the 90s. We had storms roll through last night that have brought a bit cooler temperatures and seem to have helped clear the air so maybe I can get out today and do a 10 or 15 mile ride. We’ll see.
Utility Companies Are Not Your Friends Department
For those of you in Wisconsin who might be thinking of setting up a solar power system and selling power back to your electric utility, don’t bother. It isn’t worth the time, effort or equipment costs. One of the big utilities has dropped the rate they pay to home solar owners down to a whopping 4 cents per kWh. Two more of the big utilities just applied for permission to drop the rate they pay down to 4 cents as well. Sigh…
That’s the headline that greeted me when I opened the latest copy of Der Spiegel this week. And that headline was not only right, it pointed out what our future is going to be like. A future where you can’t believe anything you see, read or hear.
The article featured photos on the cover that have no basis in reality and more inside like King Charles in a very unflattering suit drinking a cocktail, Elton John as a child, and a picture of a dejected looking Trump in a prison jumpsuit cleaning toilets in a jail bathroom. Every photo was, of course, a fake created some some kind of AI software. And every photo was so realistic looking that the average person who was unaware of the existence of this software would have believed they were real.
It is so ridiculously easy these days to make fake photos, fake videos, fake sound tracks, etc. that you can’t really trust anything any longer. That bowl of fruit there on the right? That doesn’t exist. It took all of maybe a minute for an AI to create that image from my written description. Adobe even has a beta version of Photoshop that I’ve been playing with which incorporates the same technology.
The AI “revolution” as I heard someone call it should, frankly, scare the hell out of you. We already have media outlets firing their staffs and replacing their writers with AI generated content. One of the reasons the actors strike is going on right now is because the movie studios and television production companies wanted to right to scan in images of actors to be able to use their physical appearance to use those images to create new content without the consent of the actors and without compensating them for using their images.
I guess maybe I’m sounding paranoid. There are scientists and others out there who claim that AI is the best thing ever and it’s going to improve our lives.
But think about this for a moment: How are we going to survive in a world where we can’t tell lies from the truth? Where every photo, every video we’re shown has to be considered suspect? They used to say that “a photo is worth a thousand words”. That statement is no longer true. These days a photo can be worth a thousand lies.
I always assumed I wasn’t going to be able to run our central air conditioning system off the solar power system. I based that assumption on multiple reports from people on Youtube and other places that have systems similar to mine that showed their EG4 inverters going into overload and shutting down when they tried to start up their aircon systems.
I decided to try it myself. I was not optimistic. This is a big house, 2,400 sq feet, it’s about 90 degrees outside, and that’s a huge compressor sitting out there. Still, what’s the worst that could happen? (Don’t answer that.) I decided to try it.
I shut down the air conditioning system, switched the house over to the EG4 inverters. Once everything was switched over, I held my breath and switched on the air conditioning and…
It worked? Yeah, it just worked. No muss, no fuss, no alarms, nothing. The lights didn’t even flicker. The cooling fans in the EG4s didn’t even speed up.
Apparently this air conditioning system is way, way more efficient than I thought. It’s only pulling about 1.8 KW maximum after the initial startup surge. How is that even possible? This is like a 4 ton air conditioner. Those generally average about 3 KW to 4KW, and this one is using half that? Wow… I just ran some rough numbers and it seems I could run the entire house, including the air con, off just the batteries and the EG4s for about 12 hours. Wow… Yeah, I know I said wow before, but still, wow…
Mr. Spiny the cactus is doing beautifully this year. Brilliant flowers for a week now.The poppies, like dill and a few other things in the garden, come up by themselves every year. I’m not a big fan of these. The flowers are beautifully colored but they only last a day or two. This little guy was one I found along the side of the road out in the country when I was on the bike the other day. Google tells me that it’s a type of rose.Columbine is another volunteer that keeps coming back year after year. Very pretty flowers but the darn things spread like weeds in the garden, usually turning up where we don’t want them.
Finally the drought…
This used to be a small river, a branch of the Manitowoc river just outside of the town where I live. Note the white box in the bottom center of the photo. That’s an old computer someone pitched over the bridge.
Dear lord it’s dry here! This is one of the worst droughts I’ve seen in years. I can’t remember seeing water levels in the local lakes and rivers this low. We haven’t had a decent rain since early May. What rain we did get has been very spotty. One day when we did get some rain moving through the area if I looked out one window it was raining, but it wasn’t raining on the other side of the house. The corn fields are looking terrible in a lot of places around here, the leaves curling up and in some places even turning brown.
We’ve been watering the gardens almost every day so they’ve been doing okay but the other stuff… We’ve actually had to start watering the hosta garden in front of the house. That’s the first time in about 15 years that we’ve had to water them.
There’s a 50% chance of rain today and tomorrow. We’re keeping our fingers crossed.
I’ve been thinking about the future of automobiles of late and I’m seeing a lot of things that don’t make a lot of sense to me.
Let’s start with EVs. Don’t get me wrong. I like electric vehicles. But I’m not sure if they are going to be the ultimate solution to the problem of weaning people off of internal combustion engines. I’ve talked before about how I don’t think that we have enough electrical generating capacity or a resilient enough electrical distribution system to deal with the tens of millions of EVs some people would like to see on the road. Then add into that mix electric long haul trucks, electric tractors and electric, well, electric everything, and the situation becomes even more strained.
But that is a problem that can (or could be if we’d be willing to actually pay for it) fixed relatively easily, however. There is another problem that is not so easily fixed.
There are something like 1.4 billion motor vehicles in the world. That is not a typo. 1.4 billion. There are close to 300 million in the United States alone. And people think that we can replace every single one of those internal combustion engine powered vehicles with their electric counterpart.
Guess what? We can’t.
Building those hundreds of millions of electric vehicles requires raw materials that aren’t easy to find, are difficult to mine, difficult to refine and distribute. And even the more common resources that are needed, like copper for wiring, are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. (And that doesn’t just affect the car makers, it’s rippling out through the whole economy. Have you seen what copper wire sells for these days?) And to make things even more interesting, a lot of those resources come from places that aren’t exactly friendly towards us, like China.
What it boils down to is that we simply don’t have enough raw materials to be able to make even a significant fraction of the number of EVs it would take to replace all of the ICE powered vehicles currently in use.
Production could be expanded, true. But it can take years, decades even, to find mineral deposits, obtain financing, build infrastructure necessary to develop a mine, build the infrastructure to do the processing, etc. Even worse, some of these materials are so scarce that there’s a very good chance that even if we went all out with trying to exploit our natural resources, we wouldn’t have enough.
And I have another question. Who suddenly decided that the best, the only solution to our transportation problems, was the electric vehicle? What happened to all of the other alternatives that were being experimented with like the various hydrogen powered alternatives for example? We’ve been experimenting with hydrogen powered cars for decades. They work pretty well, the only emission that comes out of them is water vapor. There are about 50,000 of them on the road and they’ve proven to be a viable alternative to gasoline powered vehicles.
What about other alternative types of transportation that would eliminate the need for a lot of driving in the first place like light rail or even bus service? You’d think that if the government wanted to wean people off ICE powered vehicles the first thing it would try to do would be to make it easier for people to not drive in the first place. Instead the state legislature here in Wisconsin is trying desperately to shut down every expansion of rail or bus service it can, and even eliminate existing facilities by starving them of funding of any sort.
But let’s forget about EVs for a moment and look at the trends in car manufacturing in general. I have questions about that as well.
Car Makers Making Cars Worse
Yeah, they are. From stupid noise generators that try to make EVs sound like overpowered gas or diesel engined monsters, to fake gear shift levers, to “info -tainment” systems that distract driver’s attention by making it impossible to even adjust the temperature of the heater without taking your eyes off the road, car makers seem determined to make cars worse.
The fake engine and exhaust noises and the fake gear shifters are, at least, not dangerous. But some of the other things they’re doing are, like what’s going on with a vehicle’s control systems, are dangerous.
Why do they have to make cars so damned complicated? Let’s look at my Buick Envision. This thing is supposedly a “luxury” car, with the top of the line trim level with all of the goodies you can get. And some of them are admittedly pretty neat and even improve the safety of the car. But some of the things they do…
Like where the hell is the headlight switch? Seriously. I couldn’t find the switch to manually turn the headlights on and off when I got the car. It was set in auto mode when I got it, so the headlights turned themselves on and off as necessary depending on light levels and weather conditions, but I still wanted to be able to turn the damned things on manually if I needed to. I finally found it. It turned out to be a tiny dial located way down out of my light of sight on the dash near my left knee. Oh, and it wasn’t labeled as a headlight control. All it said was “on off auto”. On off auto what, though? No idea until I actually played with it.
Same with the auto dimming headlights. That’s a nice feature. It automatically dims the headlights a night when there is an oncoming car. But it also dims the lights when it comes upon a lighted billboard, a reflective road sign, and it does it even in town, the lights constantly going from bright to dim when I go past a street light. I finally found that. It’s a little button labeled “Auto” embedded in the turn signal stalk.
Now I could have found that out by reading the owner’s manual, but who actually ever reads that thing? And in any case, systems as essential to operate as the headlights should be so clearly labeled that anyone can find and operate them properly.
One day I went out to the garage and I noticed that all of the windows in the car were down. All of them. Uh? I had to go back in the house to get the key fob so i could get in the car and start it, roll all the windows back up again, and didn’t think anything else much about it. Until the next day I went out there and all of the windows were down again. That happened maybe another three times. So I complained to the dealer about it.
The dealer didn’t know what the hell was going on either so the service manager started to do some research while the car was in for an oil change. Turns out this is a “feature”. Apparently under the right conditions, if you hit the right combination of buttons on the key fob, all of the windows in the car open up to cool off the interior of the car before the air conditioning starts up to put less strain on the aircon system. Why was my car doing it? I didn’t remember hitting random buttons on the key fob or anything like that. But we unanimously agreed that a car that rolls down all of its windows while no one is even near the car is not a good idea and they figured out how to disable that, thankfully, and it hasn’t happened since.
Then there is the massage system built into the seat. Yeah, it has one. And it is utterly horrible in every single way. It is distracting, irritating and even painful if you already have a bad back the way I do. And if you fumble around down on the left side of the seat to try to adjust the seating position, you absolutely will hit the damned massage button and then you can’t turn the effing thing off again without stopping, getting out of the car so you can see the controls down there and figure out which one does what so you can shut the thing off.
What I really want is something like, well, this…
alas I don’t have photos of the one I had, but mine looked exactly like this one, right down to the hideous orange color. It was an absolute hoot of a car.
That is an old Honda Z600 from the early 1970s and I used to have one of these little beasties back in the day. It’s what is known as a kei car, and they are the most popular vehicle in Japan and have been for some time. I had it back in the mid 1970s. It had a 2 cylinder air cooled, 600CC engine, a 4 speed transmission, front wheel drive, these cute little 10 inch tires and it was utterly nasty in every way. Even so the thing was an absolute hoot to drive. Despite the tiny engine it could cruize at 65 mph all day long, it got about 50 MPG, and you could fix it with a screwdriver and a few bits of tin foil. Thanks to its light weight and front wheel drive it even worked good in the snow.
The only problem I had was that it often wasn’t where I left it when I came out of work or school because people thought it was great fun to pick it up and run off with it. Four guys could pick the thing up and carry it off.
It had a AM radio, a heater that didn’t work, and, well, nothing else. No power anything. No frills, no luxury nonsense. It was basically a box with a small, zipping little engine, four wheels, and that was it.
And, thanks to the infinite wisdom of the US government, they banned their import shortly after I got mine for “reasons”.
When I got the 600 it was about a year old and had only about 10,000 miles on it. I paid about $500 for it and it was the best $500 I’d ever spent. And if I could get another one I’d buy it in a heartbeat because ultimately that’s all I want or need, a basic, simple, cheap, reliable car.
So the question that everyone has is now that the system is installed and up and running, is it really doing any good? The answer to that seems to be yes. It’s early days yet but what we’re seeing is encouraging, even a bit surprising.
MrsGF is the one who keeps track of these things and according to the data she’s been accumulating one year ago, June, 2022, we used 1,600 kWh of electricity according to the utility company. This year, in June, 2023, we used 1,100 kWh, 500 kWh less than last year.
grouchyfarmer 