solar – grouchyfarmer

Yes I’m Still Alive!

I know it’s been ages since I wrote anything here but that’s because it’s been crazy busy here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters. The gardens were spectacularly prolific this year and dealing with all of that has been a struggle for me and MrsGF. It’s October 4 as I write this, it is 91(F) degrees out there, and we’re still harvesting peppers and tomatoes. Plus the brussel sprouts are now starting to come on strong and we have something like 15 big butternut squash ready to pick that we’re going to need to deal with.

We’ve given up trying to process the stuff ourselves. We ran out of freezer space and canning jars long ago. We’ve been giving it to two or three of the local food pantries and they’ve been very grateful to get the stuff. The food pantries have been struggling to keep up with demand over the last few months as it is, and because of recent funding cuts the demand has only been increasing. We took about 40 lbs of tomatoes to one pantry and about 15 pounds of jalapeno and bell peppers and our friend who volunteers there said it was all gone within a couple of hours.

Still the end is here for both the tomatoes and peppers. We’re going to do one last picking of both and then the plants are going to get yanked. The tomatoes stopped blossoming some time ago and the existing fruit is almost done developing. The peppers are still flowering somehow but have slowed down to where there’s no point to keeping it going. We’re going to wait until the weather cools down a bit before we tackle all of that though.

Speaking of weather, it has been seriously strange. It’s the first week of October. It should be in the low 50s at the most, with temperatures getting down close to freezing or even a bit below that this time of year. Instead we’ve been locked in this streak of hot weather for weeks now with daytime highs pushing well into the 80s or more. Normally we might get a few days of warmer weather this time of year, but not this warm and not for this long.

When I haven’t been puttering in the garden I’ve been busy cranking out a whole new line of hopefully amusing drinks coasters and re-drawing the artwork on the old ones to reprint some of those. Looking at the artwork on some of those first ones I made makes me wince today. So before re-printing any of those I’ve been cleaning up the artwork or even re-doing it entirely.

I also have other stuff in the works, like engraving coins, making specialty tokens and quite possibly custom glassware and other goodies. Thanks in part to a new acquisition, that weird looking thingie over there on the left.

That’s a Wecreat Lumos 3W infrared and 10W blue diode laser that comes with a flatbed conveyer thingie and a rotating thingie that I have yet to play with but will hopefully get set up yet this weekend.

Ooo, it’s got a rotating thingie! Cam’t wait to play with that.

It definitely is not going to be replacing the Falcon laser engraver/cutter. This one is entirely inappropriate for jobs I use the Falcon for. This one is going to be for specifically doing metal engraving and, hopefully glassware and jewelry.

Keep an eye out for a full blown review of the Lumos in the future. It is both enormously useful and great fun to use, and enormously frustrating at the same time. Which seems to be about par for the course for these things.

It’s main use here is for metal. Even as we speak it’s engraving “challenge coins” for a small scale production run. It’s not fast, true. I wouldn’t want to have to use this to try to crank out a significant number of items. But for a run of a dozen or so items it’s not too bad.

Anyway, more about that later as I said.

The new EG4 12000XP inverter is more or less installed and working just fine. It’s still in “testing mode” so to speak as you can see in the photo because we haven’t finalized the wiring. Those of you who are yelling at the screen about the wiring not meeting code and all of that, I probably know the NEC better than you do and I should point out that when that photo was taken we were still testing and hadn’t yet finalized the wiring. So before you launch into some kind of rant about it in the comments, just don’t.

There were some teething issues with the 12000XP, but they were minor. The first was it wasn’t “talking” to the batteries. That turned out to be a communications configuration error that was quickly corrected. The second was an odd glitch where the AC side would trip out with an overload error if there was power coming from the solar panels, and if the batteries were at 100% SOC an if there was an AC load of more than about 200W. And only if all three of those criteria were met. That turned out to require a software update and as soon as the firmware was updated it was working just fine indeed.

Now we just need to get the new solar panels up on the garage roof. They’ve been sitting in the garage since February waiting for eldest son to clear up some time on his calendar to work on it because MrsGF won’t let me do more than climb a step ladder after she caught up up that tree last spring stringing up an antenna.

And that’s about it for now. Thought I’d better post something to reassure the people who thought I was dead or something. Hopefully the Lumos review will be coming up in the near future.

Smoke, Flowers, Solar, Inlays and more Stuff

If you look down towards the feed mill at the end of my street you’ll see all of the haze we’re dealing with at the moment. That’s smoke from the Canadian wildfires and it’s so bad at the moment that they’ve issued warnings that its unhealthy to even be outside. When I go outside it frankly stinks like a trash fire. Someone on television said that being outdoors right for a day would be the equivalent of smoking a whole pack of cigarettes. Judging from the way it looks, smells and feels out there, I would think that is not an exaggeration.

There’s not much we can do about it. We have the house closed up tight, with three room sized HEPA filters running full out and the furnace fans circulating the air in the house through its filters. I’d love to be outside at the moment. Temperature is around 72 degrees, ideal for things like gardening, riding the bike, etc. But I had a severe case of bronchitis and/or pneumonia (they never did figure out which it was, exactly) some time ago and ever since my lungs were never the same so when things get like this I stay in the house as much as I can.

The EG4 12000XP is working nicely. Mostly. After getting the battery communications situation straightened out I have had a couple of curious issues with it that we’re working to resolve. More about that in a moment. Otherwise it’s been doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. In the photo above it’s hooked to a 2KW solar array. You’ll note that it’s only bringing in a little over 1 KW and that’s because of guess what? Yeah, the smoke. It’s amazing how the haze from the wildfire smoke causes solar production to plummet. Almost all of that power is going into the batteries in the photo up there because the house isn’t switched over to the inverter yet. The 21 W it’s currently showing is what the inverter itself uses.

I really like the display on this unit. It is so much easier to read and understand than the displays on the 6500EX units were. The 12000 shows pretty much everything I need to see right here on the main screen. With the 6500EX I had to scroll through a half dozen different screens to get the same information.

But the issues… Twice now I’ve had the inverter trip out with an “Overload” error message and my son and I are both scratching our heads over that because there was no overload of anything. At the time it tripped out the total load on it from the house was only around 2.5 KW total on both legs and this thing is supposed to be able to handle up to a 12KW load, 6KW on each leg. So what caused it to trip out?

I haven’t been able to do much experimenting with it because we’ve had so much cloudy weather of late. Hopefully I’ll be able to “exercise” it, so to speak, more fully once the weather clears up and we can track down what the problem is.

As you can see we’ve been harvesting onions and picking some of the young carrots. The onions are brought into the garage where they will be laid out on a screen for about two weeks to cure them. The curing process basically allows the outer layers of the onion to dry and harden which protects them from rot and mildew. They’re left to dry in a fairly warm, dry place for a couple of weeks to cure, then we pack them loosely into net bags and hang them from the ceiling in the basement for long term storage. If properly cured and then stored they can last for months.

We also just peel them, dice them up and freeze them for use later in sauces, chili, tacos, etc. The texture does break down and they get soft but the flavor is still there. We do the same thing with cilantro, freezing it in blocks in ice cube trays in either water or olive oil. That works out really well. When we’re making chili or tacos or something we just pull out a cube of cilantro and throw it in the pot with the rest of the ingredients.

My wife and I both love cone flowers. They’re in all their glory right now. They put on a double show for us. First when the come into flower like they are right now, and then in the fall after the flowers have faded and the finches go after the seeds. We’ll get dozens of goldfinches coming to feast on the seeds in the fall. And best of all, it takes us zero work and expense to grow them. enough seed falls to the ground that they re-seed themselves and they don’t require any work at all in the gardens. They’re even quite drought tolerant.

I’m very, very lucky to have a very nicely maintained trail network just a few miles from my house!

Someone asked if I was still going out on the bike and the answer is definitely yes. I just don’t bring it up much here because I figured people were getting bored with it. I try to put on 10 – 15 miles a day, three or four days a week, and about 5 miles the other three or four days.

I have one of those Garmin fitness tracker thingies with built in GPS. I tried one of those fitness tracker aps on my phone but most of them are worthless and the ones that actually worked reasonably well deluged me with non-stop spam trying to sell me subscriptions and I don’t know what all else. All I want is something that records milage, shows my route, and that’s about it.

It’s a Garmin Edge 130. It’s a tiny little thing that clips to the handlebars of the bike. It has a fairly small, black and white LCD screen that displays things like elapsed time, speed, etc. It’s handy little gadget if ridiculously pricy. I think the dopey thing goes for about $200 these days. That’s like twice what I paid for mine a couple of years ago. I’m not sure why the price has damn near doubled since then.

I am not recommending you get one. I honestly don’t think it’s worth $200. It pairs with an app on my iPhone that gives me all sorts of data that I really don’t give a fig about, to be honest. I don’t know why people obsess so much about things like calories burned, cadence, respiratory rates, hydration and all that guff. If I were in training for the tour de France yeah, I might care. But I’m just an old duffer who likes to know how far he’s gone and can show the wife a map of where I went so she doesn’t think I’m cheating and only getting as far as the local pub.

When I’m out in the country on the bike I might bop along at 10 – 14 MPH but it’ll take me two hours to do 10 miles because I’m constantly stopping to take photos. Every time I come across a cluster of flowers or some interesting looking plants or hear an unfamiliar bird call I’m stopping and looking and listening and photographing. When you run into clusters of flowers like those up there in that photo how can you not stop and look?

And I’m still experimenting with the Falcon laser. I’ve been fiddling around experimenting with doing inlay and other things. I was wondering if I could get a sort of stained glass effect by inlaying translucent acrylic into wooden outlines and that seems to actually work in the simple experiments I’ve tried. I’m also going to try combining it with another hobby of mine, making epoxy resin castings to make decorative panels. If anything comes of that I’ll let you know.

Catching Up: GF Blows Up Inveters, Gardening, and Even More Stuff

Solar Stuff

Yes, you saw that right, I blew up the EG4-6500EX inverters on my solar power system. No, not on purpose.

I am still kicking myself. Look, in addition to farming and everything else I’ve worked at over my lifetime, I’ve in the building trades as well for years, especially building maintenance. My first job after MrsGF and I got married was building maintenance where I did carpentry, drywalling,. plumbing, electrical, concrete work… Especially electrical. The first year I worked for that company I spent the entire summer on the roof, rewiring all of the Reznor rooftop air handling units and putting in new panels down in the basement to feed them, and the rest of the summer rewiring the lift station, irrigation pump and boilers. If it was anything to do with building or maintaining a building and its systems, I’ve done it. Over the years I’ve gone through literally hundreds of hours of training on electrical systems, plumbing, fire suppression systems, alarm systems, building codes, the NEC, etc. So I know how to do this stuff.

All of which makes me even more upset with myself because I did something really stupid because of a momentary lapse of concentration. I thought something was shut off that wasn’t, plugged something in that I shouldn’t have plugged in and BANG… I blew up about$3,oo0 worth of inverters.

There was no property damage, except to the inverters,. no one got injured or anything like that. But it never should have happened.

To make a long story short. I had to spend close to $3.000 to buy a replacement inverter. There is a sort of silver lining to this, though, because I replaced the two 6500’s with that beast over there on the left. That’s an EG4 12000XP off grid inverter and to say it is very, very nice and light years better than the 6500s is an understatement.

It was easy to install. It took longer to drill the holes in our poured concrete basement wall to put up the mounting brackets than it did to wire it in. I should add that it is very, very heavy, weighing in at over 100 lbs.

It’s up and running, powering the entire house at the moment, and just purring along with no muss or fuss or headaches.

Not all was “plug ‘n play”, though. At first it wouldn’t communicate with my EGR-LL batteries. It didn’t even “see” that they were there even though it was getting power from them and would turn on.

Here I have to give a shout out to the folks at Signature Solar where I bought the inverter. I submitted a report to their customer service department via their website and within 12 hours I got back a very detailed response that explained what the problem was and how to fix it, including screen shots of the menu options on both the batteries and the inverter, pictures of the actual DIP switch settings, everything I needed to correct the communications problem. Within half an hour of getting the email from them I had the problems fixed and it was running exactly as it should.

Also I got in the mounting hardware for the new solar panels that are going to be going up on the garage roof. Close to 5 KW of new. bifacial solar panels are going to be going up there yet this summer. I should have a grand total of something like 7.5 KW of solar panels up before the end of the summer. Not sure when that will happen, though. MrsGF caught me about 25 feet up a spruce tree in the backyard hanging up a new antenna that one day early this year and now she won’t let me climb anything higher than a step stool so I’m going to have to depend on my sons finding time to get out here on a weekend and put the new panels up.

Anyway, more on that as things progress.

Gardening Stuff

This has been one of the best growing seasons so far that I can remember. Temperatures haven’t been too extreme, we’ve had regular rainfall and enough of it so that we’ve only had to water things once so far this year. And the plants out in the garden have responded by growing spectacularly. Here are a few photos to show you.

This photo is outdated. That little head is now over a foot across!

The cilantro has been going absolutely crazy. We’ve been harvesting the stuff since late May and it’s still going strong. None of this will go to waste. About half of it will be harvested and frozen for use in sauces, etc. during the year. The rest will bve allowed to go to seed for planting next year and for coriander.

Tomatoes with onions planted around the border. The onions are already being harvested pulled, allowed to harden off and will go into storage.

And the flowers this year are absolutely spectacular

Not a flower. A frog. Trying very hard to pretend he’s not being seen. I think he’s an Eastern Gray tree frog. Normally on a tree these little guys are darn near invisible but somehow he ended up on the railing on our porch and he doesn’t exactly blend in.

Other stuff

Yes, I’m still playing with the Falcon laser engraver and I am still enormously pleased with how well it works. I still think it is hands down the best 10W diode laser for the money on the market.

Solar Prices

If you’re in the market for solar panels right now you have my sympathy. All of the deals I was talking about earlier are now long gone and prices have gone up anywhere from 50% to as much as 100% or more. Panels in the 300 – 400W range which I was seeing for around $70 – $100 range are now up to around $150. The 400 – 450W bifacial panels I got back in February for $107 are long gone. Panels in the 400 – 500W range are now up to at least $175 – $200.

To give you an idea of just how badly we are being ripped off by our own government, solar panels we’re paying $200 for are selling for around $70 or less in the EU.

This is perhaps a good place to end this with the reminder that tariffs are not paid by the country of origin. Tariffs are a tax, on us. We pay it, you and I and anyone who imports or buys products from overseas. Not the country of origin. We do. This isn’t punishing China or Canada or whoever over unfair trade practices, this is punishing us, people already stretched to the breaking point by ever rising prices, stagnant incomes and a government that’s more interested in making up snarky memes to insult members of the opposition than it is in actually fixing our problems. Read some of the history of this country. We’ve gone down this path before and it nearly bankrupted the country.

Catching Up: Spring, solar, lasers, Oh My

Well it’s spring, or so they tell me. And judging from the lack of posts here it seems I’ve been hibernating most of the winter, doesn’t it?

After a ridiculously warm winter we’ve had a ridiculously cold spring. It isn’t until now, early May, that we’ve gotten reasonably warm temperatures during the day, although it’s still plunging down to near freezing at night. Anyway, the daffodils are in full bloom, even some of the irises are popping open which is always delightful to see.

MrsGF has had her seedling operation going in the basement for some time already. We have tomatoes, brussel sprouts, peppers and I don’t know what all else popping up in the little greenhouse down there. We have onion sets ready to go out as soon as the weather improves. The garlic she planted seems to be thriving. She only put in about a dozen garlic cloves and somehow all of them seem to have survived the winter and are now about 8 inches tall out behind the garage near the solar panels.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know I love bicycling, and by this time of year I should have been going out almost every day. But thanks to the cold weather that hasn’t been happening. I’ve managed to get out exactly twice since mid-April. It is very frustrating.

Solar Stuff

I think I mentioned that I picked up a bunch of solar panels with the intention of getting them up on the roof of the garage to supplement my rather pathetic 2KW of panels leaning up against the back of the house. Alas, that hasn’t happened either because of the poor weather. Hopefully soon. MrsGF has a fit when she sees me up on a ladder or on a roof, so getting those mounted is going to have to depend on when my sons can get over here to work on it. And I suppose I better actually order the mounting hardware, shouldn’t I?

I just got done completely rewiring the entire AC side of the solar power system to bring it up to snuff so it will pass an inspection. It’s configured a bit differently this time. The inverters struggled to keep the central air conditioning running, to the point where we couldn’t run on solar if we had to use the AC. That meant that whenever the weather got hot, we were entirely on the grid, which was not a good thing. The system has been rewired now so that both the AC and the electric clothes dryer are always connected to the grid while the rest of the house can be switched over to the solar system. So we’ll be able to keep cool and do laundry while running the rest of the house off solar.

Also this brings the system into compliance with electrical codes and it’s passed inspection.

Laser Stuff

This is one of the reasons why I’ve been so busy that blog posts have been neglected. If you’ve been following grouchyfarmer for a while, you know that I’m sort of an artist/electronics geek/computer geek/maker/… Well, you get the idea I suppose. Years ago I got a deal on a cheap, flat bed laser engraver. While it was fun to play with, it was also woefully slow, cranky, fiddly, annoying, had zero safety equipment, zero smoke control, inaccurate, but fun.

And it sparked some ideas as well. Commercial ideas that eventually developed into actual products. I eventually got a much better, much faster, much more accurate and much more useful laser, and I started cranking out things like company logos, art projects, things like that. I didn’t do a lot of it because despite what you may see on YouTube, there really isn’t any actual money in doing this kind of thing unless you’re willing to invest the time, money, and especially the equipment, into going into it almost at an industrial scale. What mattered to me was that I was enjoying it, it gave me an outlet for this need I had for artistic expression and all that high minded guff, and it gave me an excuse to play with a lot of high tech equipment.

I thought that part of my life was pretty much done with, though. I was getting a bit tired of it. Technology was moving on, if I was going to continue doing it I was going to have to get serious about learning Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator at a level that was deeper than I really wanted to get involved with. And to top it off my laser engravers were starting to show their age.

And then stuff started happening. People I’d made things for before started asking about doing more, the brewing company told me that all of the joke coasters I’d done for them had been stolen and they wanted more and oh, could I look into doing a few promotional items for them like maybe branded keyfobs or bottle openers. And then I was getting the urge to make “art” again…

Okay, to make a long story short, i got a new laser engraver/cutter and I’m back in the business again. And yes I’m going to bore you with all of the details, but not in this post. I’ll reserve that for a different time because to cover everything I want to talk about is going to take some space.

That’s about it for now. It’s actually nice out today, so I’m heading out to put a few miles on the bike.

Random Thoughts & Stuff

Ah, the joys of insomnia! Well I’m not sure if I should call it insomnia or not. I have no trouble falling asleep at all. The problem is I wake up after about 4 hours. And I mean wake up. About 3 AM rolls around and I wake up, fully, totally awake, not tired at all, fully alert, with sleep the last thing I want to do. I feel as if I’ve had a full, complete night’s rest. By about 10 or 11 AM I’m starting to feel a bit tired, take an hour nap or so, and I’m good for the rest of the day. I’m not sure what the heck is going on, but that’s the way things have been going here for the last month or so. Occasionally I’ll sleep to 5 or 6 AM, but that’s rare.

So what does one do at 4 AM when the rest of the world is asleep? Well, stuff like this….

I draw stuff, sometimes. When I’m in the mood. I fire up Photoshop on the big computer and drawing tablet and start fiddling around with a combination of sketching and filling and mix in some AI stuff and I end up with things like that up there. I start sketching things out, fill in bits and pieces with the AI thingie, fiddle around with smoothing and blending, adding more detail and eventually I end up with something that I, at least, like.

Book Pricing

So they got me working on pricing books again, this time children’s books. It’s fascinating. The price ranges on some of this stuff is fascinating. I was looking up that book over there on the left just a short time ago. The Berenstain books are considered “classics”, I suppose, like Seuss’s books. But they printed these things in the millions. It isn’t like they’re collector’s items or something.

But damn, some people try. If you look that one up over there on places like eBay you’ll find people asking mind bogglingly huge amounts of money for it. The highest price I found someone asking for this book was $240.

Seriously. Someone was asking $240 for that book up there. Another was a more “reasonable” $190.

If you dig around further you’ll find that the real selling price for that book, in reasonably good condition, is about $3.

The sellers of these high priced versions must think that there is someone, somewhere out there, who is stupid enough to pay $200 or more for a $3 book?j

Once in a while I run into a gem. I found one rather obscure Little Golden Book, a first edition with a very rare cover color, that was legitimately selling for big $$$. In pristine condition it was going for well over $100 for some reason. Alas, the one we had was not in pristine condition. In that kind of condition it was going for $40 or so. So by our standard policy we charge about 1/3 of what the retail price is, so I should probably put about $10 – $12 on it. But who’s going to pay that kind of money for a kid’s book around here? Oh, well. Not my problem. I slapped a not on it explaining it to the manager and I’ll let her decide what to do with it.

Solar Repairs and Theft???

The weather is fantastic out there right now, in the mid-50s, almost 30 degrees warmer than it was this time yesterday, so I took advantage of that to make some repairs to the solar panels. A couple of weeks ago I got up and looked out the window in the dim light of dawn and saw what looked like one of my solar panels laying face down in the middle of the yard?? WTF?

I bundled up and went out. Sure enough, one of the panels was laying out there, with the MP4 connectors ripped right off of the cables. At first MrsGF and I figured a gust of wind had caught it. They’re just leaning up against the side of the garage after all. But if that was the case why only one? Those panels are all wired together. If the wind caught one, the wires and connectors would be more than strong enough to pull several of the others along with it.

So I checked the historical data from the weather station in the backyard and we had almost no wind at all that night. The biggest gust we had was only 5 MPH for the previous 24 hours. So obviously it hadn’t been the wind.

So I went out and looked around again and… There wasn’t much snow out there, only in parts of the yard, and there were what looked suspiciously like the footprints of someone cutting through the backyards of my place and the neighbors’ yards. I figure some nimrod was stumbling home half drunk or something, went “Ooo, free solar panels!” and it wasn’t until after he’d ripped one free he realized that trying to lug around a 5 foot tall, 3 foot wide, 40 lb solar panel at two in the morning wasn’t a good idea and just dropped it.

Anyway, I hate trying to do wiring in cold weather. My fingers are clumsy enough as it is. Besides, the weather was so cloudy we hadn’t gotten enough sun to bother switching over to solar anyway. But today being bright and sunny and even warm, I spent a half hour trying to find where I’d put my MP4 connectors, crimping tools, etc. and then went out and got everything hooked up again.

Then held my breath, kept the fire extinguisher handy just in case I screwed up, switched everything on and… and it worked? Yeah, it worked.

So we got the solar going again, just in time for the spring sun. Even with some high haze I’m pulling in enough sun power to run the whole house off the panels. We’re pulling in 1.8KW at the moment.

Then, of course, I have the new panels sitting in the garage waiting. Getting those up is outside of my control. MrsGF won’t let me go on the roof any more for some reason. Not that I pay any attention to that when she’s not around, of course. She caught up up the spruce tree in the backyard one day stringing up antenna wires. Ooo, was she mad…

Anyway, we’re back on solar again, finally!

Catching Up. Bored… So bored… Records. And Solar Update

Wow, has it been that long since I posted anything? Sheesh… Well the fact of the matter is that there really hasn’t been much to talk about until now. Here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters we’ve been… bored… so bored…

That started to change though beginning with this nonsense just below.

Yeah, snow. I know, I know, this is Wisconsin and snow is something we just live with. Or, rather we did. Snow has been a scarce commodity around here until just this past week. Winter resorts are literally going bankrupt because we pretty much haven’t had a real winter until this past week.

But then in the middle of February, now first we get hit. We got close to a foot and a half of snow in just about a week, and then the cold hit, with wind chill temperatures down around -35F and still air temperatures of around -10.

The local St. Vincent dePaul society where MrsGF and I both volunteer has been keeping me busy, though. Our primary fund raising method is a thrift store that the organization operates. We get donations of gently used clothing, furniture, appliances, cookware, etc. which we, in turn, sort, clean, and turn around and sell to the general public in the store. So they put me to work sorting, grading, cleaning and pricing a variety of stuff, including books, video games and vinyl records.

We don’t get a huge amount of vinyl records in. I suspect that most of them come from someone cleaning out Grandmother’s house after she moved into an assisted living center or has passed away, and they don’t know what to do with the stuff. We don’t mind.

You’d think it would be dull work but it’s actually quite interesting, especially the records. I’m not a collector or music fanatic or anything like that, but I do appreciate good music and I have a small collection of vinyl records and an excellent turntable. So I do like my music. My tastes wander all over the place from stuff ragtime, jazz and dance music from the 1920s and 30s, up to more modern stuff. I’m a creature of my generation, though, so my preferences run towards pop/rock music from the 60s and 70s.

My job is to sort through all of this stuff, check the condition of each record to make sure it’s playable. A lot of them aren’t. I’d say about 20% of them or more are so badly scratched or otherwise damaged that they go straight into the bin.

If they do look playable, they get run through that yellow thing over there on the right. If you dabble in used vinyl records at all you need one of these, or at least something like it. That’s a record washer. It’s filled with filtered water to which a record cleaning solution has been added. The record slides down into the tank just keeping the label out of the solution. It’s then clamped between two microfiber pads soaked with the solution and rotated around a few times. Dry it with a microfiber cloth or let it stand on a rack to air dry. It removes not just the dust and all that, it removes finger prints, dirt embedded in the grooves, etc. I’ve taken records that were unplayable and after running them through that thing they’ve come out sounding almost as if they were brand new.

Then I play them. Well, not all of them. I mean some of those records are the stuff of nightmares, depending on your musical tastes. But enough to determine if the record is in good enough condition to sell.

Then there’s pricing. We’re a thrift store, not an antique shop. We have a limited amount of storage and retail space, so we need to move product through the store as fast as possible. Plus we aren’t out to try to make a killing on some “rare” collectable. The rule of thumb we follow is that we take the average price an item sells for on the used market, and we charge 1/3 of that price. So if a record’s average selling price is, oh, $10 on eBay or one of the other pricing sources we use, we mark it at $3.

Not that I really need to worry about anything like that. The most expensive vinyl record I ran into so far was a rare special edition jazz recording from the early 1960s put out by, of all things, a high end paper manufacturer. The B side was pleasant, generic, 1960s style smooth jazz. The A side was something entirely different. Each track started out with a recording of a different printing press in operation, and then the musicians would come in, matching the tempo and tone of the printing press’s mechanical noises, blending into a smooth melody and eventually the mechanical noises would fade into the background leaving only the music. It was unique and actually worked surprisingly well. The album jacket was designed for a 2 disc set, but the second pocket wasn’t for another disc, it was for paper samples from the paper company. Alas, those were not in with the recording itself. I had a devil of a time finding any information at all about it. For a moment there I thought we might have something that might justify going to the trouble of putting it up for auction, but eventually I tracked it down and found that the last recorded sale of it was for only about $35.

The other day the manager of the store presented me with a whole stack of video game manuals. No games, just the manuals. I didn’t think they were worth anything. I was wrong, she told me. There apparently is a thriving market for just the game manuals. Oddly enough, sometimes the manuals alone sell for more than the actual game disc sells for.

And books… So many books… Modern mass market paperbacks and even hard covers just get shoved on the shelf for a set price. But we get a lot of very old, antique books as well. You’d think that a 120 year old book would be worth something, but most likely it isn’t. So many authors and titles that I’d never heard of before, and for good reason. Either our ancestors were very easily pleased, or publishers were putting out just as much pure crap as they are today.

Occasionally I’ll run across a gem, like a first edition of a popular author like Agatha Christie or something like that. But even those aren’t worth that much no matter what you might see on Antiques Road Show.

Solar stuff… You’re going to be hearing more about this later once the weather gets better. A big ass truck showed up at my front door yesterday and dropped this off:

Solar panels. Lots and lots of solar panels. Damn, those suckers were heavy. That pallet there weighs around 700 lbs. Fortunately the driver very graciously helped me wrestle it up the driveway and into the garage. Even better, all of the were intact with no shipping damage!

This spring or early summer the entire solar system is going to be completely rebuilt from the ground up. Those are 430W bifacial panels that I got for a ridiculously cheap price, $109 each from Signature Solar. I don’t really care about the bifacial part, it was that price that got my attention. Even MrsGF told me I was nuts if I didn’t grab a bunch of them for that.

The south facing roof of the garage is going to get covered with those, the existing 2.2 KW of existing panels are going to continue living on the backside of the garage, and when all is said and done I should have about 6 or more KW of solar panels out there, which ought to really piss off the utility company because I should have enough power coming in now to be able to shut off the main breaker and run the house entirely on solar.

Since all of the existing PV wiring is going to have to be pulled out anyway, we’re going to scrap all of the existing wiring and re-do all of it. it’s going to be a pain in the neck but if we’re to meet building codes it has to be done. We’re going to need larger PV wiring, larger circuit breakers and fuses, run new conduit, etc. anyway so we might as well re-work everything, re-route the conduit into more convenient locations, etc.

Okay, wait a minute, we got 2 now??? And flowers!

Apparently Cat 1 cloned herself and we got two tabbies now? Sort of a matched set? Yeah, we got two of them now. That’s Cat 1 on the right and Cat 2 on the left. Or is it Cat 1 on the left and Cat 2 on the right? Both tabby, both large economy sized kitties and I’ve already resigned myself to constantly confusing which one is which.

Cat 2 is a sort of refugee. She was a shelter kitty who was adopted into a home where a pre-existing cat decided she hated her and beat the crap out of her every chance she had. Not a good situation. So we agreed to try taking her in and see how Cat 1 would handle having another kitty in the house. As you can see, Cat 1 has no problem with having a new roommate at all. The two of them have been together about 4 days now and are getting along just fine. They aren’t exactly cuddle buddies but there’s been no hissing or spitting or growling or fighting. In fact no drama at all.

And considering this is Cat 2’s fourth home in about 3 months she’s adjusting remarkably well. She spent about the first hour here under the sofa, then decided that was boring and went and sat under the bed for a while, and the next morning she was acting like she’s lived here all her life. She’s not a lap cat like Cat 1 is, but she’s become downright affectionate towards me.

We were nervous about how Cat 1 would handle an intruder but aside from eyeing her with suspicion for the first day or two there hasn’t been any problem at all. In fact I think the two of them colluded in a 4 AM raid on the butter dish this morning. I woke with a start upon hearing a loud crashing noise and rushed out to find the two of them sitting under the dining room table and pretending they had no idea how MrsGF’s favorite ceramic covered butter dish ended up in many pieces on the floor. They would have had to get a rather heavy, covered, ceramic dish, with a quarter pound of butter in it, lifted up over the top of a one inch thick cutting board, shoved about three feet along a counter and then onto the floor, and I don’t think either one of then could have done it by themselves so I think both of then were in on it.

So, it’s spring! Yeah, sure it is. Temperature was down around 28 degrees last night. Sigh… Good thing we haven’t got anything planted out in the gardens yet. We do have flowers, though. A few of the more daring plants have been putting on a show.

It’s wonderful to be seeing color out in the gardens again.

Let’s see, what else?

Oh, I mentioned before that we were going to be getting the roof on the house and garage replaced sometime this year. We had the contractor out here Monday morning to measure everything up, give us a quote, and now we have that scheduled for sometime in late May or early June. Estimated cost for that is going to be around $13,000. That’s actually a bit less than I had anticipated so I’m pleased with that.

Once the roof is replaced I can start thinking about putting up a permanent solar array on the south facing garage roof. Hopefully I’ll be able to finally get enough solar panels up there to adequately feed the solar power system so we can fully utilize it at last. Going to have to see what the budget can handle. Might have to wait a while for our household budget to be able to deal with about 5 KW of solar panels.

Catching Up: Solar Numbers and V2H

It’s been ages since I posted anything here except for the brief announcement about Cat moving in with us. But there is a good reason for that. Pretty much nothing has been going on here. At least nothing worth writing about. But now I do.

Solar, Taxes and ROI

So we just got our taxes back from the accountant so I wanted to talk about money and solar power. Especially about the 30% federal tax credit for the purchase of solar equipment. I’ve been wading through a lot of solar power related forums for some time now and there is a lot of misinformation floating around about this, so let’s see if I can straighten some of this out.

First of all, the best way to determine what is or is not a qualified purchase for the purposes of the tax credit is to go straight to the horse’s mouth, the IRS, and the agency’s information about Form 5695, which is how you apply for the tax credit. All of the information you need is right there if you click on that link up there. Stop paying attention to the self appointed “experts” on the internet and go directly to the IRS if you want information.

Note first of all that this is a federal tax credit. That means it is applicable only if you owe the federal government. It goes towards reducing the amount of tax you pay.

In our case here pretty much everything that we bought for the solar power system was allowable: batteries, solar panels, inverters, circuit breakers, wiring, switches, etc. could be applied to the tax credit. Once our accountant got done with all of it, our residential energy tax credit amounted to about $5,000. Needless to say, MrsGF and I were more than pleased with this.

So what does this mean when applied to our out of pocket costs? When everything we had receipts for (you did save your receipts and invoices, right?) was added up our total cost, including solar panels, was $16,000. The tax credit brought that down to $11,000.

So let’s now talk about ROI, or return on investment. How long will it take for our solar system to more or less pay for itself?

Since we put in the system about a year ago we saw a dramatic decrease in our electric utility bill, far more than I’d anticipated. I had estimated that if we were able to use the system as intended, it would cut our utility bill by about 1/3 when it was in operation. This should have been significantly more but at the moment we are restricted because we can’t get enough solar panels out there to really feed enough power into the system. We’re going to need to mount panels permanently on the garage roof. We can fit about 5KW – 6KW of panels up there. But the garage roof (and the house, for that matter) are scheduled to have the roofs replaced in another year. That’s how we have things budgeted, and we aren’t going to change the schedule at this point in time. It doesn’t make sense to put all those panels on the roof, only to have to take them all down again and then immediately have to reinstall them in a year or so when the roof is replaced. So for the time being we only have 2KW of solar out there on the backside of the garage. Once we get enough solar panels out there, we can take full advantage of the system and batteries and there should be a lot of days when all of our electrical needs are met by solar.

Anyway, let’s look at some numbers. Our electric bill in the year before we put in the system was pushing close to $300/month and some months even more. After we put in the system that dropped to around $150 – $170 per month. We estimate that we’re saving about $1,800 per year.

Our cost after the tax credit was $11,000. 11,000 divided by 1,800 is 6.11. So the system will basically pay for itself in 6 years. That’s assuming the rate we pay the utility for electricity stays the same as it is now, $0.16/kWh. And the chances of that rate going up significantly in the next few years are pretty much 100% considering the way things are going.

Of course our expense is going to go up when we add more solar panels, but once we do that we’ll be able to utilize the system more fully and further cut our utility bill as well.

I still need to do some work on the system. It is still in “experimental mode” so to speak. I need to make some changes to the wiring, run conduit, add a few safety features dictated by building codes, etc. But now that I know the system pretty much works well I can go forward with that.

V2H

In case you don’t know what that means up there in the heading, it stands for Vehicle to Home, and it’s related to EVs and their potential use to power a house during a blackout. The idea is, of course, that you have this massive battery pack sitting in your EV so why not use that power, or at least some of it, to keep essential equipment running in your home during a blackout.

There is also something called V2G, vehicle to grid, which is where the utility company wants to suck the power out of your EV to keep the grid going under heavy load conditions, but that’s an entirely different subject.

Ford made a big deal out of the V2H capabilities of the Lightning when it was first introduced, promising to actually sell you all of the equipment you’d need to do it. At the time I did a bit of research and the marketing people were saying the kit to do this would cost about $5,000, which I thought was a bit expensive, but not too horrible, all things considered.

Well last week I was talking to an actual real person who puts these things in out in California and I found out that the $5K price that was initially bandied about was ridiculously optimistic. He just put one in last week and the total cost was actually $14,000. He’s done about a dozen of these now and the cost of the installation, including labor parts, etc, has been running between $12,000 to $15,000 depending on what the electrical service in the customer’s home is like.

But $14K??? Seriously? That is a hell of a lot of money just to be able to suck power back out of your truck. Especially when you consider that my entire solar system, including batteries, inverters and solar panels, was only $16K.

That’s about it for now. Hopefully I’ll be getting back to updating this on a more timely basis!

Quick Solar Update: It Just Works. Solar Panel Issues. And a Frog.

Someone asked what it’s like actually living with this system. And since it’s been more than two months since it’s been running this is a good time to update what’s been going on.

As for what it’s like living with a system like this, it’s just like being on the grid. If you were in our house you wouldn’t be able to tell if we were running on grid power or on power provided by the EG4s and solar/battery power. Everything just works. We do avoid using 240V equipment like the clothes dryer and central air when we’re running off the EG4s because they are such huge energy hogs. But for everything else? We just use everything else as we normally would.

We’ve had no problems at all with any of the components of the system with the exception of the solar panels. More about that in a moment. The inverter/chargers and batteries have worked exactly up to their specifications. The only annoyance is that the fans on the EG4s can get pretty loud when we have a lot of solar power coming in from the panels. But since they’re down in the basement and not in our living space we don’t notice it.

The only real drawback to the system is that we don’t have enough solar power coming in to adequately keep the system fed, so to speak. We can’t, for example, run the house off batteries at night and then make enough solar during the day to both run the house and recharge the batteries by a significant percentage. If we’d draw down the batteries to, oh, about 70% or less, we wouldn’t be able to fully recharge them and run the house at the same time.

But that’s something we knew when we started this. We knew we weren’t going to have enough space to put in as many solar panels as we really needed without resorting to using the garage roof, and we can’t do that at this time because the roofs are scheduled to be replaced in the next year or two. So we decided to make do with as much solar as we could put in now and then put in the roof top solar after the work was done.

But the solar panel situation has changed this week so let’s take a look at that.

Those are the HQST 100W panels that originally fed the Bluetti and those, along with several 220W panels from Newpowa have been feeding the EG4s. And unfortunately I’ve been having some problems with them. Considering how cheap they are, about $75 each, they’ve been doing pretty good. In good weather conditions they’ll produce about 650W. Now I know that 650 out of 800 doesn’t sound very good but when you consider the conditions here in Wisconsin plus all of the smoke we’ve been getting from the Canadian forest fires, that’s actually pretty good.

Unfortunately that abruptly dropped to 450W or even less so something obviously is wrong. I checked all the wiring, connectors, etc and couldn’t find anything so one of the panels must have a problem. And now I have 10 of the Newpowa 220W panels up against the back of the garage for the time being. I’ll need to put in some kind of semi-permanent mounting system for them before winter comes but for the time being just leaning them up against the garage is working fine. I’m pleased with them so far. At midday under good conditions they put out a full 2 KW. Yesterday we had pretty dense cloud cover and just for the heck of it I hooked them into the system and even with the clouds they were putting out 345W.

First chance I get I’ll have to test all of the HQST panels individually to see what’s going on with them. The ones that test good are going to a business outside of Milwaukee that’s going to use them to run security lights.

And I promised you a frog so here he is:

Catching Up

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…