DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

In April, 2001, I did an analysis of the installation costs and payback term for a solar energy system. My conclusions may not have been valid, because I made some assumptions that were definitely inaccurate (such as the cost of utility power). My numbers, then: for a 2 kilowatt system, installation cost would be roughly $20,000 and take over 25 years to pay for itself.

Yesterday I had an opportunity to get a real-world estimate. We went to a solar energy fair, met with installers, and listened to a panel of homeowners who had recently installed “PV” (for “photovoltaic”) arrays.

The homeowners made a convincing case. There was no sign of buyer’s remorse; every speaker was excited about using clean power. Most spoke of the addiction of watching their electric meters run backward. (These are “grid-tied” systems, meaning that surplus power flows from the PV array back into the electric utilities’ grid. PV users earn credits for grid-supplied power later, e.g. at night when the array’s output is zero.) Each speaker stressed the point that financially this investment is a “no-brainer.”

Well, I have a brain. Whenever someone tells me I don’t need to use it, I grow suspicious, like when Schwarzenegger brushes off a press inquiry with a no-answer answer like “I will fight for the environment… nothing to worry about.” We ran our own numbers.

The basic formula for California residents is this:

• Generation capacity x $8.50 per watt = Gross cost
• Generation capacity x $3.80 per watt = California Energy Commission rebate
• Gross cost minus CEC rebate = Out-of-pocket cost
• Out-of-pocket cost x 0.15 = California tax rebate (a one-time tax incentive)

For a 3.5 Kw system, which would typically supply a family of four, or a family of two if one of them keeps a stack of servers in his office closet… 3500 x $8.50 = $29750 gross; 3500 x $3.80 = $13,300 rebate; this leaves an out-of-pocket cost of $16,450, of which we’d get $2467 back the following year in a tax refund. Final net cost: just under $14,000. At our current usage level, that would take about 15 years to pay for itself. From years 15 through the life of the panels, we’d get essentially free power.

How long do PV panels last? They’re warrantied to produce at least 80% of their rated output for 25 years. After that, arrays can be supplemented with a few new panels to keep the output level consistent. I’m not sure anyone knows how long panels really last, but vendors claim they’ll function for 30-40 years. In other words, we’d have free or very cheap, clean, renewable energy for 10 to 15 years. At that point, I assume there would be incremental upgrades available to replace older, less-efficient parts; if so, the lifespan of the basic system could be extended indefinitely with occasional supplemental purchases.

Building the right size system is the key to a quick payback. PG&E, the local bankrupt energy utility, won’t write a check to anyone generating more than they use, so there’s no point building a bigger PV array than is needed on a yearly-average basis. Most users seem to aim to generate 50-80% of their total consumption.

The window of opportunity is closing, though. The CEC’s $3.80/watt buydown program could end as soon as November. The 15% tax refund drops to 7.5% next year. For a change, it pays to be an early adopter.

I learned something surprising, or more accurately dismaying. I was initially interested in PV systems because of our energy utility’s inability to keep the lights on. The combination of rural highways, aerial power lines, and hayfever-addled pickup-truck drivers means we lose power monthly due to downed poles. PG&E’s mismanagement of funds led to inadequate tree trimming, which allowed a 75-hour outage last December, due to “high winds.” I entertained, even nurtured the fantasy that my PV array would see me through these grid outages.

Grid-tied systems don’t work that way, though. During a utility blackout, a solar array is useless, unless the solar system is set up with a bank of expensive and toxic batteries. Installing several hundred pounds worth of lead and chemicals, which have to be replaced every 8 years, seems like a poor way to pursue a greener, less-toxic lifetsyle.

We’ll have a solar installer do a site review anyway. We’ve wanted green energy for years, and we’re now in a house that we plan to keep forever, so solar makes a low-risk investment — especially considering the subsidies and tax credits. When the power goes out, I’ll just stop typing for a few hours. That seems like a more-green lifestyle choice already.

(Read part 1, in which we shop for speakers and parts.)

I don’t think of myself as being particularly handy. I’ve done my share of furniture repair, painting, demolition, electrical work, plumbing, sheetrocking, and light carpentry, as have all homeowners with limited budgets. I think I’m competent at the basics, even though I’m always extremely (painfully) aware of the things I’ve done wrong, the things I could have done better, and, sometimes, the things I’m going to have to get someone else to re-do right away, i.e. before I reset the circuit breaker.

So why would I even attempt to hang speakers myself? In a nutshell, because our handyman is 6'5'' tall, 200+ lbs, and doesn’t strike me as particularly limber. I couldn’t picture him crawling around in my attic. Frankly I wasn’t even sure I would fit.

There’s a particular unpleasantness to squatting or, worse, laying on joists and breathing fiberglass dust. The light is bad. Maneuvering is tough. It’s hot. All in all it’s not the way I planned to spend my weekend. But the prospect of finishing this installation outweighed other considerations.

The left speaker would have to hang between studs. I planned to attach a piece of 2x4 between the studs (on the back side of the drywall, of course) so the speaker-mount screws would have something to bite into. I’m not an expert on load-bearing hardware, but I didn’t feel good about hanging a 20 lb. speaker at the end of a 4'' arm using plastic drywall anchors.

To install the 2x4, I had to get behind the wall where the speakers would hang. This seemed as if it would be easy, because there’s an access door into the attic close to where the speakers would go. But once I climbed up there I saw that the space was filled with ventilation pipes. I could just about squeeze my hand through the gap to touch the back of the drywall where the speaker would attach, but there was little hope of fitting tools in there.

The other side was worse… I couldn’t get there from the left side, so I went up through the kitchen and crawled across the living room ceiling. Due to the cathedral ceiling, the crawlspace is about a foot wide and ten feet long, and is interrupted by a ventilation fan which I’d somehow have to crawl over without putting my weight on it, lest I drop through the ceiling atop the fan housing and surf the assembly down the basement stairs.

I sensed that special flavor of futility that comes when you’re wedged into a place that took you 15 minutes to get to, only to realize that you can’t go any further and it will take ten minutes to back out. I became aware that what I’d planned to do was beyond my abilities, and even further, beyond my desire. I painstakingly backed out of the crawlspace. I consider it one of the few successes of the morning that I didn’t kick the wires off the HVAC unit’s valve controls in the process. Be grateful for the small things, I told myself, especially when that’s all you’ve got to be grateful for.

It was time for plan B: mount the speakers to the top of the wall cabinet instead.

Fishing the speaker wires behind the cabinet took some time. There are now three large fender washers and assorted scraps of fishing line stuck somewhere behind the cabinet — I was trying to drop a line from above, and it got caught the first three times. After much jiggling I managed to drop my line directly behind the hole I’d cut into the back wall of the cabinet. We tied the speaker cable to the top end of the fishing line and pulled it through: viola! as I like to say. We’d actually made progress.

After that, the rest of the task was simply driving screws. I drove a lot. My only criteria was to not punch through the top of the cabinet — I didn’t need to see screw points and splinters on display among the fancy vases and whatnot. I succeeded on this measure as well. I’ll refrain from publishing the number of screws whose heads I stripped with the Phillips bit in my drill… really, I mean it when I say I’m a software guy.

Here are images of the finished product: front view, side view.

Adjusting speaker position is tougher than I expected. After three corrections, the left speaker is still tipped clockwise. I guess it wants to stay that way. I’m trying to oblige (but there may be a 4th adjustment in the near future). Overall we’re really happy with the result, because, you know, now I get to resume shopping for an amplifier.

For about a year we’ve been wanting to move the living room stereo into a wall cabinet. It was a big project, because I also wanted to replace every component. The speakers were huge, old, and always sounded too mid-rangey for my tastes. The integrated amp has lost two input channels, and lacks a remote control. And the cables were junk.

But even the decision to proceed took me a while. Rooms that have stereos ought to look like proper listening environments: speakers at one end, facing the length of the room; couch halfway down the room facing the speakers; remote control conveniently placed; beverage-table nearby. (The best image of this configuration is suggested by the famous old Maxell advertisement, created in the 1980s and still adorning the company’s audio tape products.)

In this case, though, the listening-room approach made little sense. We use the living-room stereo daily, but usually we’re cooking or cleaning or exercising, not sitting still with our hair blown back by high-SPL progressive rock music. With no regrets I compromised my audiophile tendencies to better utilize the space.

Shopping for home-theater equipment generally takes me a long time. First, I pursued auditions of exotic speakers. Months passed. The audition was definitive: the exotic round speakers sounded terrible. The promise was so great, and the reality was so disappointing… I was lost. I thought I was waiting to arrange a second audition, but in fact I was doing a whole lot of nothing.

A few months passed. My wife, ever logical, and more importantly eager to put a loveseat where the old stereo still sat, proposed a means of dislodging me from my, err, lodging? She suggested that I put the speakers from my office stereo up on top of the living-room cabinet just as an experiment: would box speakers look ridiculous up there? How would they sound?

We spent a Sunday evening hefting my desktop speakers (Polk Audio RT25i) onto stands on top of the cabinet, and ran cables to the amp. I spun up my audition discs, the remastered Moving Pictures and Simon Phillips’ Protocol, and … grimaced. The speakers, which work so well in my office, sounded awful: boxy, thin, un-real.

Placement is everything, though. I climbed back up the ladder and turned the speaker cabinets slightly so they’d not be parallel to the rear walls. The sonic improvement was drastic and immediate. The speakers sounded great. In fact, these little 2-way Polks, mounted nine feet in the air and haphazardly aimed, sounded better than the big 50-lb, 3-way Yamahas in perfect “listening room” position.

Decision in hand, I ordered a pair of Polk Audio RTi38, the newer and larger sibling to the RT25i. Next I ordered speaker cables: Clearview Golden Helix from Mapleshade. (As I wrote once before, I could hear the improvement when I installed these cables on my office stereo.)

Finding appropriate speaker stands was more complicated. I had decided to mount the speakers from the wall, and although there are only a few wall-mount bracket manufacturers, identifying a specific model took three calls to the manufacturer and one returned shipment. I ended up with a pair of OmniMount’s 20.5 ST-MP brackets.

OmniMount makes a quality product, but their website is frustratingly out of date. For example, the 20.5 series is not listed on the site, but only in the Specifications document (a 900k PDF file made of over-compressed JPEGged scans of the original documents?!)

Worse, the documentation shipped with the product is outdated and incorrect: I received instructions for the older “50” model, which is rated for 15 lbs., not 20. Even more confusing, step 10 of the instructions notes that when mounted to the rear of the speaker cabinet, rather than the top or bottom, the capacity of the bracket falls to 7.5 lbs. Remember, this part is supposed to carry 20 lbs. A support guy at OmniMount told me that the documentation is incorrect, but honestly I didn’t know what to believe. Could they really have tripled the capacity of this bracket, from 7.5 lbs to 20, when they renamed it?

Anyway, I’d finally received all the parts. The next step should be easy: installation.

I don’t know where they got my name, but the Seybold Seminars people have been sending me junk mail for about five years. The mail pieces are big, colorful, high-production-quality designs.. which means they took a lot of toxic chemicals to produce and lots of gas to deliver, and they take up too much space in my mailbox. It’s all a waste — I never asked for the stuff and don’t plan to attend the seminars.

The mailers never show opt-out information. This is the only reason Seybold has been able to send me stuff for five years. That is, if they’d made it easy for me to “unsubscribe,”, I would have done so a long time ago. (I quote “unsubscribe” because it implies that I requested this junk. In fact, Seybold most likely bought my name from a DTP software vendor or maybe the MacWorld Expo people.)

Finally I ferreted out the opt-out procedure. It is this: send an email detailing your request to remove@medialiveintl.com. If that fails, look for the Contact Us page at Seybold365.com to see if they’ve come up with a new method for sending these requests.

If your Windows machine crashed today, you have lots of company. As reported by Macintouch, John Dvorak writes, we can estimate that there are a minimum of 30 billion Windows system crashes a year.

Dvorak did the math based on estimates from Bill Gates. It’s an astounding level of non-productivity, all that rebooting and recovery. I guess people don’t know that it’s just not necessary. to put up with that ridiculously poor level of stability.

Most geeks cite the stability of Linux as a server platform. And it’s true — I’ve personally had Linux servers run for over a year, and even then they didn’t crash, but got powered down safely for one reason or another. But servers aren’t an equal comparison because they run a limited number of very stable apps.

Workstations crash more because users run lots of whacked-out, unstable, untested applications. Like web browsers. Like Java “crapplets”. Like rushed-to-market file-sharing apps with piggybacking spyware, or home-brewed Photoshop plugins. The list goes on.

But still, to crash three times a month? That’s the average figure Dvorak calculated from Gates’ numbers. It’s sad that computer users have come to accept this, as if they had no choice.

Here’s the choice: OS X.

My (Apple) Powerbook endures daily use, running all manner of applications, including the typical complement of beta-ware. It has crashed twice since I’ve owned it — say, about once every seven months. That is, my laptop has crashed one-twentieth as often as the average Windows machine.

Dvorak writes something else that ought to inspire about twenty million Windows users to switch: “the jury is still out on whether XP dies more often or less often than Windows 2000. From my experience, the number of crashes for each operating system is about equal.” If that’s really true, what the heck is the point of upgrading? To have a bunch of new features that don’t work well? If Microsoft isn’t trying to improve system stability, then who is?

Besides Apple, I mean.