DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Our time-of-use electrical meter tracks peak-period consumption separately, because for peak hours we’re billed at about 3x the offpeak rate. Watching this number gives us a good idea of our total energy production, because we need to not only zero out our peak usage, but generate enough extra (at a 3x payback rate) to zero out offpeak usage too.

We’re not there yet.

To be fair, we shouldn’t be there yet; if we were, it would mean we bought an unnecessarily big PV system. We only need to zero our balance over a 1-year period. We’ll build up a deficit through the winter, then make up for it in the summer. In fact, by late August we should have a large outstanding credit, to see us through the Fall’s shorter days.

Prior to the solar install, we burned about 4.5 kWh on a typical weekday afternoon (noon-6pm). (Measuring this was part of our sizing effort.) Therefore, in a 13-weekday period, our pre-solar peak-period usage would have been about 58 kWh. But thanks to the PV array, we’ve burned only 16 kWh. Considering the snotty weather we’ve been having, that’s pretty impressive. I think we’ve only had about three really sunny days since the TOU meter went in, yet the solar array has covered 72% of our peak-period needs. And actually it gets dark by 5:00 PM still, clipping an hour of generation time off the peak period even when it’s sunny.

During one of the many rains we’ve had, I discovered water dripping from the bottom of the DC disconnect switch. Further inspection indicated that, against all reason, the water was coming from inside the weather-tight switchbox. I don’t know what a short-circuit in that box could do to my PV array but I was not interested in waiting to find out.

The installer came out right away to open the switchbox. It was disgusting. I should have taken a picture — the inside of the casing was covered with funk and rust-colored grit and slimy mildew-looking stuff. Apparently two grommets had been left out when this box was wired up. The first grommet would have kept water from following the power cable on the roof through its hole in the eave. The second would have kept water from following the power cable into this switchbox. It was an installation error.

The technician replaced the entire DC switchbox. I was impressed with that.

“What’s that slimy black stuff?” I asked him as he was working.

He surprised me by running a finger through it to feel its consistency. Then he looked a bit alarmed, with an index finger full of goo, and hurriedly wiped it on his pants leg. “It’s … I don’t know. It’s grossness.” he declared. “Um, that’s a technical term.”

My motorbike has succumbed to the cold, wet weather. I needed to ride it downtown last week, but the motor wouldn’t turn over. Typical thing: the battery had run low. Combine that with stale gas, from not driving for a couple weeks, and the result is a 500 lb sculpture that looks remarkably like a motorcycle. “Look, the tires are real rubber!”

My recovery plan called for bump-starting the bike. This involves rolling the bike down a hill to gain momentum, and then shifting into gear and releasing the clutch. The plan brought a logistical problem — my garage is at the bottom of what a software engineer, such as myself, might call a “nontrivial” hill. In fact it’s a huge hill, from the top of which I can see, I think, Boston.

With a running start I managed to push my bike about ten feet up the hill. I realize how pitiful that sounds. It cast doubt on any ideas I might have had about my strength or fitness. The only reassuring aspect to the whole black comedy is that I had the foresight to sweep away the pine needles before trying to manhandle the bike up the hill… otherwise I could have easily slipped, pulled the bike down on top of me, and slid beneath it to a halt by the garage. I had visions of punctured lungs and road-rash.

Perched on the side of this virtual cliff, astride the bike, I executed a 17-point turn to aim the machine back down the hill. This gave me about 30 feet of rolling space before I’d run out of driveway… just enough time, I hoped, to push off, run full-tilt for two seconds (while sitting on the bike, Flintstone style), shift into gear, pop the clutch, and brake to a halt before slamming into a chain-link fence.

A half dozen skid-marks later, amid heavy, ragged breathing, I determined that all was perhaps not well with the engine. I called the local service facility and was reminded that motorcycle folks are invariably friendly, helpful and supportive. I would love to spend more time with those sorts of people, if spending time with them didn’t mean dragging one’s knees around right-angle turns at 80mph. The technician suggested a remedy and offered to teach me the procedure if I stopped by the shop.

I had no way to get to the shop, though, given the condition of the moto-sculpture in the garage. So I embarked on the draining of the carburetor float-bowls alone, working without a proverbial net, or more to the point, without a drain hose.

The task involves opening two valves to drain whatever gas is in the carburetors. This gas goes bad quickly, making the engine difficult to start after sitting for even just a few weeks. Draining the bowls is a typical first step in prepping a bike for storage, and (I’ve learned) an essential first remedy when the bike wasn’t prepped for storage.

Getting to the screws is a problem. With experience, the right tools, and small hands, this is probably not a difficult task. But I have no experience, the wrong tools, and big hands — big enough that squeezing them between frame rails to manipulate micro-miniature Allen wrenches is an exercise in pain, frustration, and blood.

And then there’s the issue of where to put the gas. Given three feet of plastic tubing, I could have easily drained the carbs into a suitable container on the ground. But I had no tubing, so I was relegated to fitting a small cup into the engine compartment, beneath the drain valves, to catch the gas as it dripped out. Impatience with the process overcame any effective scavenging strategy, so I returned to the garage with two options: a plastic drinking cup and a styrofoam drinking cup.

Experienced mechanics and anyone who has read the Anarchist’s Cookbook can probably see where this is going…

The plastic cup didn’t fit, so I broke off the top third of the styrofoam cup and wedged the rest inside the engine compartment.

A few more minutes’ worth of cursing and knuckle-scraping opened the first valve. It drained beautifully, dumping about a quarter-cup of gasoline into my styrofoam cuplet. Then it took me a few minutes to close the valve, after which I picked up the foam cup to dump it out.

“Hmm, it doesn’t weigh as much as it should,” I thought, and then, “Aieee! The cup dissolved!” I should have remembered this: styrofoam dissolves in gasoline. My foam cup of gas was now a foam ring with no gas, and no bottom. The gas in question had run out underneath the bike, leaving a trail of foam/gas sludge on top of the transmission, which fortunately wasn’t hot, because styrofoam plus gasoline equals napalm. I’m not looking forward to my next long ride, I can tell you. If any traces of jellied gasoline remain, I could be in for a Darwin Award nomination. (Think “fireball.”)

Finally I had to jump-start the bike from my car battery, which with its inherent risk of a hydrogen-gas explosion brought an anxiety-provoking conclusion to a dismal afternoon’s work.

This has been around for a while, but merits a repeat.

Driving a 13mpg SUV for a year rather than a 22mpg car will waste more energy than if you:

• left your refrigerator door open for 6 years
• left your color television turned on for 28 years
• left your bathroom light burning for 30 years

That’s not multiple-choice, friends.

The source: Sierra Club’s report on Global Warming & SUVs.

I think these numbers are great, because lots of SUV owners probably take care to turn off lights and close the refrigerator door. These people aren’t dumb… they maybe don’t have all the pertinent facts about the consequences of their choices, though. Or maybe they really need an SUV. I mean, SUVs are really great in snow, right?

One way SUV owners might learn these sad facts, if they’re not smart or attractive enough to read debris.com regularly, is finding a ticket from EarthOnEmpty.com on their windshield.

I can’t imagine anybody would be too happy about getting one of these tickets — as that amounts to being condemned and ridiculed in a semi-public fashion. Actually I think it would tend to bring out the worst in most people, which is too bad, because the campaign itself is harmless. Check out the negative feedback the campaign has received from SUV owners — name-calling, stereotypes, threats of violence, the typical adolescent gamut. A few of the messages are reasonable, which I find refreshing — not only that EarthOnEmpty would print them, but that someone who’d received a ticket could respond civilly.

On the other hand, there’s this: “BTW, this is America, if I want to keep my color TV on for 20 years, I damn well will.” Oh, yeah, that’ll show ‘em.

The most famous image from the island of Naxos, in the Greek Islands, depicts an empty marble gate backlit by the setting sun. Every postcard rack in town — there are a lot of them — contains multiple versions of the image.

Naturally this inspires every tourist on the island to line up at the gate at sunset to try to capture the image themselves. OK, I admit it, I went there too. Call me a lemming.

The funny thing is, it’s just not that great a picture. The gate is invariably lost to shadow, and the sun is reduced to an orange dot in the distance. But seeing the crowd made the trip worthwhile — jockeying for position, snapping away madly. I didn’t see any pictures like this in the postcard rack.

Any idea how much energy it takes to pump water from the bottom of a 150-foot deep hole in the ground? Yeah, me neither, but it’s probably a lot. We could see the impact on our electric bill when we began irrigating last Spring.

Now that we’re on the time-of-use plan, it’s important to conserve power between noon and 6pm on weekdays. I’m not going to be sitting around those afternoons working an abacus by candlelight, I can assure you — I’ll be bathed in the radiation of two LCDs, a G4, a powerbook, my office stereo, etc. But there’s no point running the well pump then, given that there’s a 1200-gallon storage tank, full, just uphill of the house. The day we use 1200 gallons of water between noon and 6pm is the day the UPS driver accidentally crashes his truck into the storage tank.

So I called our water-treatment-system maintenance guy to inquire about putting a timer on the well pump. I explained the situation briefly: the pump can run 18 hours a day if it needs to, but we want to cut the power between noon and 6pm on weekdays.

“Oh, you need a PumpMan,” suggested the treatment guy.

“OK,” I replied. “There’s already a PumpSaver on there, actually two of them. Would the PumpMan replace them?”

“I don’t know, you’d have to call him. Try Charlie over at Jaeger.”

“Err, what?”

“You’ll have to call a PumpMan.”

“OH,” I exclaimed, “I need to call a pump man.” At which point the water-treatment guy was probably thinking, what is this idiot smoking? I thought he had been suggesting a specific model of pump timing device, e.g. the “PumpMan 2000, single-phase brushless rotary submersible motor timer with digital readout!” But in fact he was referring my call to somebody else. He doesn’t do pumps.