Category: Uncategorized

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.

I suddenly realized this morning that I haven’t posted anything here in a while. That’s because there hasn’t been much going on. Now that the fall cleanup is all done, the gardening season is wrapped up and all that, the solar system is more or less working, etc. I haven’t had much to really talk about. And now I do. So here we are.

Let’s get this vexed business out of the way. (Vexed means mildly pissed off, by the way.)

Here’s the deal. I have my old gaming computer sitting on the workbench right now. After it went Pffft a couple of years ago I replaced it with an MSI gaming laptop, shoved the old one in a corner, telling myself I’d get around to looking at it “real soon now”, and it’s been there ever since until I started cleaning out my radio shack/mad scientist’s lab/workshop the other day. This thing wasn’t cheap. There’s a pretty hefty Core i7 processor in there, a decent Nvidia Geforce graphics card and 32G of high speed RAM. Even by today’s standards it would be a pretty decent computer so it would pay to spend some time trying to figure out what’s wrong with it. It would make an excellent auxiliary computer to run the laser engraver, 3D printer and amateur radio equipment and the like.

What happened was that we were in the middle of a late fall thunderstorm. A nasty one. In the space of about 5 minutes we had multiple momentary power failures and brownouts, and the computer just stopped working. So I have no idea of what’s all wrong with it and I can’t diagnose what’s wrong because the power supply doesn’t actually supply power any more. I suspect the power supply may indeed be the only thing wrong with it. So the first thing to do is get a working PS for it.

And, of course, I don’t have one on the shelf. Need a power supply for a TRS-80 Model II? I got one. Need a power supply for a Ti 99/4A? I got one. But not for this thing. And they want something like $150 for one, and I’m not willing to drop $150 on a PS for a computer that might not work anyway.

So I decided to take a stab at fixing the thing’s power supply.

Power supplies are not complicated beasties, all things considered. I used to repair power supplies for laser scanners, cash registers, and misc. equipment all the time back in the bad old days when I was a technician for a POS company. (No, not POS as piece of s**t, POS as in point of sale equipment)

So I yanked the sucker out. It was indeed dead as the proverbial doornail. So popped off the screws and took off the cover and…

What? Seriously? The damned thing is glued together?

Yeah, they glued everything. Great bloody gobs of rock hard glue or epoxy deliberately gluing the components together to make it damn near impossible to repair. Take a look at this:

That big coil is glued to the capacitors, which in turn are glued to each other. The other coil there is glued to two more capacitors. in the left center you can see another glob of glue where another component was glued to something else. I couldn’t even get the fan connector disconnected until I spent five minutes with an Exacto knife, a small screw driver and a pliers chipping away at the muck to free the connector.

Why would they do this? Someone suggested that they did it to prevent parts from coming loose in shipping. That’s nonsense. This thing is built like an efwording tank, for heaven’s sake. I could drop it off the roof of the house and the only damage would be a slight dent in the heavy steel case it’s in. Gluing down the connectors, maybe that would prevent the connectors from coming loose. But why in the world would you glue capacitors to coils? Or transistors to inductors? The only reason I can think of is to deliberately make the thing virtually impossible to repair so you have to buy a new one.

Now I could go off on a rant about planned obsolescence and manufacturers deliberately making equipment impossible to repair to force you to keep buying new instead of just fixing a broken item, but I will refrain from that. At least for now. Perhaps at some future date when I feel in the mood for a good rant I’ll delve into that.

So what did I do? Ordered a new power supply, of course. It’s the only way I can fully test the stupid thing, and if it does still work, which I suspect it does, I’ll need one anyway.

Growing Lettuce. In December.

So we have this sort of small, portable green house thingie that we use in the early spring for starting seeds before the weather is nice enough to plant stuff outside. Last spring we upgraded a bit, adding a heating pad and grow lights so we could keep it in the basement instead of having to move all the furniture around in the living room to make space for it in front of the windows. That worked out quite well, by the way.

So MrsGF and I got to thinking, we have this green house, we have grow lights, we have that heater, and we have lettuce seed left over, so why not try growing lettuce down in the basement?

So we did. And well, damn, it seems to be working. Within just a few days of setting it all up and planting some lettuce seed in a few pots with some potting mix, dozens and dozens of little lettuce plants popped up.

Hopefully in another week or two they’ll be big enough that we can have some fresh lettuce.

And A New Radio Receiver

On the electronics front I just got this little beastie in a couple of weeks ago, a Mlahit software defined radio receiver. SDRs have been around for years now but I’ve never had one before because I frankly wasn’t all that interested in them. I have enough old fashioned analog radios or hybrid radios to play with to want to dabble with these things as well. But I’ve been curious about these things for a long time so I saw this one and it looked reasonably good and the price was fairly cheap so I bought one on impulse. I haven’t had time to do more than play with it a bit. sometime in the next week I’ll have time to take a closer look at it and I’ll talk more about it then.

Solar Update

The solar power project has been … Interesting? Oh, nothing has gone wrong with the equipment. It’s still working exactly as it is supposed to. What’s interesting is that our electric bill has been literally cut in half ever since we put the system in, even though we haven’t used it that much. It’s been so cloudy here the last few weeks that we haven’t even been able to use it at all for several weeks now. So I haven’t even had the system switched on except for a few days in November.

But our electric bill was still half what it was last year. So what the hell is going on?

When we decided to put the system in we took a close look at how we use electricity here and made some very minor changes. We went through the house and replaced the few remaining incandescent and fluorescent lights with LED lights. We put all of the electronics in the house on power strips. You may not know it but almost all of your electronic equipment like your TV, radio, etc. never actually turn off. The displays may go dark, but they’re still drawing power. We bought a combination countertop convection oven/air fryer that works so well we almost never use the oven in the conventional stove any longer. We’ve become better at turning off equipment and lights when they aren’t really needed. All little things like that which haven’t altered our lifestyle but which, when you add them all up, have made a huge difference in the amount of electricity we use.

So oddly enough the solar power system has, in a way, been successful even when we aren’t using it because it caused us to reevaluate how we use energy in the house and make relatively insignificant changes that have cut our energy usage dramatically. Last year in November our electric bill was $310. This year it’s $157.

So even though we haven’t been able to switch the house over to solar on a regular basis, it is still, indirectly at least, responsible for cutting our utility bill in half. Weird out things work out sometimes.

Postscript

Just before I was going to publish this the new power supply for the computer arrived and… Yeah, it’s still dead as a doornail. I’m afraid the MB is cooked. I’m not even sure if I can salvage any of the parts out of the thing. I’m not sure if it’s worth the effort to dig into it further. Right now it looks like that right before the original power supply failed it dumped a huge power surge into the computer’s motherboard and other equipment connected to the PS. Oh, well…

Here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters the gardening season has pretty much been wrapped up. All the gardens have been cleaned up, we’ve done some minor maintenance work around the outside. The last crop of the season, the brussels sprouts, have been harvested. The chest freezer is full right up to the top with tomatoes, squash, green and wax beans, beats, carrots, a variety of peppers, etc. MrsGF blanched and froze the sprouts yesterday. The shelves down in the basement are full of jars of tomato sauces of various types along with pickled beans and pickled beets.

We probably have enough vegetables canned or frozen to last us through the whole winter without having to buy anything from the grocery store, which not only helps the budget but gives one an enormous feeling of satisfaction.

There were no real surprises out in the gardens this year. Some things did better than we thought, some did worse.

It was a rough year overall for gardening because of the drought. We had to resort to watering the vegetable gardens just about every single day. We have 2, 30 gallon barrels and a 50 gallon barrel connected to diverters on the rain gutter system on the house and garage so we normally have rain water to carry us through a short dry spell. But this year the barrels were empty for most of the summer. I’m actually surprised that we didn’t lose a lot of plants this year because of the heat and drought.

The biggest disappointment was the tomatoes. They were a yellow variety called something like Amish Yellow Slicers or something like that. They tasted very good indeed but production was woeful. Small fruits, extremely tough skins, and around the end of August the fruit stopped growing, and even stopped ripening entirely even though the plants themselves looked healthy.

Carrots were another disappointment. We tried something different, carrot seeds that had been “pelletized” so to speak. Carrot seeds are extremely tiny. It’s impossible to just plant a single seed without resorting to using a tweezers and a magnifying glass. So usually there’s an enormous amount of waste because clumps of carrots have to be thinned out. With this pelletized stuff each seed in encapsulated in some kind of biodegradable stuff, about the size of a small pea. And it would have been a nice idea. If it had worked. It didn’t. Almost none of the pelletized seeds came up.

Onions were good flavor but smaller than normal. We expected that though because of the harsh conditions over the summer.

Every year we like to try growing something new that we’ve never tried before. This year it was the brussel sprouts in the lead photo. They are one very strange looking plant. They developed a massive stalk as big around almost as my arm, and about 4 feet tall. And the sprouts themselves just sort of pop out of nowhere wherever a leaf stem attaches to the stalk.

The research MrsGF did on them before we planted them was that it was best to wait until after the first frost to harvest them, so that’s what we did.

Certainly they tasted good, much, much better than the commercial ones we’ve been buying frozen. The commercial ones sometimes have a rather bitter, even nasty flavor, to be honest. These though were amazing. No bitterness at all, very mild flavor.

Still I’m not sure they’re worth growing. We like them but we don’t like them that much, if you know what I mean. And since they’re basically a mutant cabbage of some sort, they are subject to the same problems cabbage has, including some nasty insects you have to watch out for.

Electric/Solar Stuff

On the solar power front… Ah, well, this is Wisconsin, isn’t it? That means we get days, even weeks where we may never actually see the sun. We’ve been going through one of those periods of cloudy weather and it is very irritating. I think we’ve had clear skies perhaps one day out of the last fourteen. Grrr…

I really, really need more solar panels. But with the roof scheduled to be replaced in the next year or two it doesn’t make sense to put 20 solar panels on the roof only to have to take the down just one year later to replace the roof and then have to mount them all again. So the lack of PV means I can’t switch the house off grid as often as I’d like as well. Oh, well. I knew that before I went into this and we decided to do it anyway so all we can do is live with it until we get the roof done and can then permanently mount enough solar up on the roof to adequately feed the system. Until then we’re limited.

Otherwise the solar system has been working just fine when we’ve been able to use it. Haven’t had any issues with it at all. Plus it’s reassuring that we don’t have to panic about keeping the sump pumps, furnace, freezer and fridge running during a power failure. Even without solar, as long as the batteries are full we have enough stored power we have enough power to keep the house running for a long time without having to resort to trying to start the Generac backup generator. Trying to start that thing in cold weather is royal pain in the neck.

And let’s throw in a Christmas cactus just for the heck of it.

MrsGF’s Christmas cactus always blooms right around Thanksgiving, and it’s right on schedule this year. I noticed the other day that it was just starting to form flower buds. In a week or so it’s going to be covered with flowers.

Antenna

The HGR-QRO PreciseRF antenna continues to work amazingly well. I’ve always liked magloop antennas. They have serious drawbacks, are fiddly to get tuned, etc but damn they work well when everything is set up right. Especially for their size. I already had a MLA that I used for portable operations that I liked very much, it couldn’t handle more than a few watts of transmitter power.

The most impressive thing about this antenna is the low background noise level. I’m still amazed at the huge difference in the background noise levels when comparing it to my OCFD antenna. Ever since I got my license ten years ago I’ve had background noise levels running S5 – S8 or even higher on the average day. It might dip as low as S3, rarely, but generally it’s been a pain in the neck. But with this antenna the noise level is essentially zero, while actual radio signals being received are as strong or stronger than they are with the dipole. And it works at least as well on transmit as my OCFD antenna.

Rant Time.

The staff here at grouchyfarmer.com love a good rant more than anything else… Well, okay, so that’s not really true, I guess. They like pizza. Put out free pizza in the employee lounge and it’ll be gone in like five seconds. It’s like as swarm of locusts from some biblical plague on pizza day. And Joann has chickens. She has like twelve of the damned things running around here now and we’re thinking of staging an “intervention”. And maybe a fried chicken day. And our IT guy, Jeff, is the president of the local Black Pink fan club. We try not to talk about that. But generally speaking they do enjoy venting their spleens about whatever it is that’s sticking in their craw, so to keep ’em happy let’s get on with this.

EV Push Back

Certain persons (you know who you are) seem hell bent on to strangle this trend towards electrification any way they can. The problem they’ve been having is that by and large electrification makes a hell of a lot of sense even if you don’t take into consideration the whole climate change thing. There are some legitimate issues with EVs, but those are being dealt with. So they’re starting to just make crap up now.

I think it’s too late to stop it, though. While the doom and gloom crowd is doing its best to shut things down, everyone else is just quietly getting on with things because EVs just make sense. The claim that you can’t electrify heavy trucks? Guess what, it’s already been done. Volvo has been quietly producing electric trucks since 2019 and is currently ramping up production. Makers of farm equipment and earth moving machinery are moving in that direction. JCB, New Holland, CIH, Bobcat, and dozens of others that make equipment ranging from small to gigantic are moving towards electrifying just about everything.

And there are very good reasons why. Maintenance is much easier, for one thing. And a hell of a lot cheaper. No more engine oil changing, no more engine oil filter changing. Ever. No expensive exhaust systems and catalytic converters to mess with. If you’re a major freight carrier with thousands of trucks on the road like Schneider, the potential savings on oil changes alone would be astronomical.

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I have to close this off with a sad note. We lost our beloved cat Meg yesterday after a short illness.

Thank you Meg for being a loving companion for almost 17 years. We miss you.

So people have been wondering what’s going on with the solar power system. We’ve been keeping track of our energy usage, of course, so we just got the bill for August and here’s the results.

Last year it was pretty hot and we used the AC a lot so our electric usage in August last year was 1,971 kWh.

This August, which was even hotter, our electric usage was 1,074 kWh.

So we cut our electric usage almost in half, during a month that was even hotter than 2022 was. And that’s only running the system part time. I’m pretty darn pleased with that.

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…

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…

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.

Wow…

That’s smoke, not haze or fog. We’ve been under air quality warnings for weeks now, on almost a daily basis, because of the forest fires in Canada. I think this is the worst it’s been, though. As soon as I walk outside I can smell it. They’re warning people with asthma, breathing issues, heart problems, and the elderly to stay indoors and limit physical activity. I was outside for about an hour mowing the lawn and my eyes were watering and I could feel it in the back of my throat. We have all the windows closed, the HEPA filters running on full blast and the HVAC system fans running to pull air through those filters so hopefully that’s keeping it from getting into the house.

This morning at 8 AM I flipped off the mains in the breaker panel, shutting the house completely off of grid power and switched to running completely from the EG4 6500EX inverters, batteries and solar panels. We’ve been running the entire house completely off the grid for the last few hours and so far the system has had no problems at all.

We got virtually no solar power at all for the first two hours because the panels were in shade until 10AM so that gave me a chance to see how long the batteries would carry the house by themselves. We were living normally, not doing anything to conserve power. We used the convection oven, lights, coffee maker, etc. as we normally would. There were no extraordinary loads on the system, the sump pumps were running, furnace wasn’t on because it’s warm out. Under those conditions we use about 10% of our battery capacity per hour, which is actually a lot better than I thought it would be.

Once the sun was in position to fully hit the solar panels we were making enough solar power to run the house entirely off the panels, and even occasionally enough left over to put some power back into the batteries.

So far so good. Keep your fingers crossed.

Only issue is that we’ve run into the dreaded light flicker problem, but only with the bathroom lights for some reason. This is a fairly common problem with a lot of inverters. LED lights can flicker annoyingly. It doesn’t affect everyone, and doesn’t affect every light. The only lights that flicker here are the decorative bulbs in the bathroom. All of the others, almost all LEDs of one type or another, work fine.