Winter Finally Gets Here, Solar Stuff And More, well, Stuff!

After one of the warmest Decembers on record, the weather has finally taken a more winter like turn. We got about 5 – 8 inches of snow last week Tuesday into Wednesday. Followed by a full scale blizzard a couple of days later. And now this week we’ve had below zero temperatures. I’m not complaining. This is actually pretty normal for us. Which brings me to this little mini-rant…

What really frosts my cookies is how the local news outlets go almost into total panic mode whenever we have more than a couple of inches of snow or the temperatures get close to zero. This is Wisconsin, for heaven’s sake! We deal with this Every. Single. Year. This isn’t Georgia or North Carolina where an inch of snow shuts everything down because they don’t have the equipment or the expertise to deal with it. If you listened to some of the television weather reports here leading up to this relatively minor snowfall you’d think we had a category 5 hurricane bearing down on us. All things considered, this “storm” was pretty much a total bust. It caused some slight delays, we had to fire up the snowblowers and snowplows for the first time for a few hours, and that was about it. I have literally driven motorcycles in weather worse than what we had.

I sometimes wonder what the heck has happened to people. Maybe it’s because I grew up on a farm? The farm doesn’t shut down for bad weather. Never. The chores still have to be done, the cows still have to be milked and fed, the young stock still has to be cared for, the manure still has to get hauled out, no matter how cold it is, no matter how much snow is on the ground.

Solar Stuff

Speaking of weather, one of the problems with Wisconsin is that from about, oh, November through the end of February we rarely see the sun at all. So if you’re running a solar power system you’re SOL as they say. I don’t think we’ve seen the sun for more than a few hours since mid-November. And after the power flickered and even went out for a couple of minutes during the snow storm I figured I’d better check the state of my battery bank just in case I had to switch over to that. And found that the batteries were down to 48V instead of the 53 or 54 they should have been at. That meant they were down to about 60% capacity. Oops?

Well considering we haven’t had sun in two or three months that shouldn’t have been surprising. I had the batteries in standby mode all that time so they were using a bit of power to keep the BMS operating. I should have just shut them down completely but I’d neglected to do that. I don’t have provisions for charging them from the grid at the moment, so that meant I had to drag out the big old Generac and fire that beast up. It’s out there right now dumping about 30A at 240V into the charger that’s topping up the batteries. And yes, I know it’s too close to the house but I got CO detectors all over the place and it’s only for a few hours so stop clutching your pearls and wringing your hands.

That’s the problem with solar power. In ideal conditions, on paper, it’s fantastic. In the real world there are some serious issues. Like what do you do when there’s no sun?

Fly Me To The Moon

Or maybe not? NASA finally admitted that it’s goal of getting humans back on the moon anytime soon was not going to work. The date for an actual manned landing looks like it’s being pushed back to at least 2026. And I’ll be utterly astonished if they manage to do it even then. It’s proposed schedule was always completely ridiculous.

They’ve done exactly one test flight of their outrageously over priced rocket and it seems to work. But everything else they need? They don’t have any of the other bits and pieces they need to make it work. None. Zero.

They don’t have a lunar lander. They don’t have lunar rated spacesuits. They don’t have anything they need except the launch vehicle. Space X’s starship is an essential part of the planned mission, and Space X hasn’t even managed to get one into orbit yet much less prove the vehicle will do everything it’s supposed to do, including robotic in-orbit refueling of other spacecraft.

Plus no one has yet explained to me exactly why we need to land people on the moon in the first place. Don’t get me wrong. I’d dearly love to see us putting people on the moon again. But ultimately what are they going to do there? Science? The Mars rovers have proven over and over again that we don’t need to put people at risk just to get scientific data. Putting some kind of colony on the moon? That’s a complete pipe dream. For God’s sake, why?

Exploiting the moon’s resources? What resources? As far as I know there isn’t anything, not one single thing on the moon that we need badly enough to go to the expense and risk of putting people up there. Nothing. Zilch.

Other Stuff

I’ve got two or three things on the bench I want to talk about in the near future. There’s an SDR sitting there in the box waiting to be played with. There’s a cheap video microscope that I just got that needs to be put together and fiddled with. I just got a new set of electronics tools from IFixit that I want to talk about too.