DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Continuing my theme of holiday unpleasantness… we woke on New Year’s Eve to learn that the power was out.

One of the ironies of grid-tied photovoltaic systems is that, sunshine or no, they don’t generate electricity if there’s no grid. Or in English, when the power goes out, the PV array goes out too.

It wouldn’t have been such a big deal if we didn’t have out-of-state guests en route for a fancy dinner… I had baguettes in the works, a pair of upscale pork tenderloins — yes, actual meat products! — soaking up my special garlic-and-peppercorn brine, and two nice bottles of Pinot Noir in the cellar.

PG&E’s automated telephone system informed me that the outage was known, but “repair crews are not able to access the equipment,” causing me to picture a group of burly linemen standing around a locked toolshed looking for the key. The outage reporting system suggested I should call back at 10:00 AM.

At 10:00 AM, the message suggested calling back at 2:00 PM, an ominous sign — nine hours with no power and no progress. The skies had cleared, but our lights were still out.

At 1:30 PM (call me impatient), the message said that I needn’t call back until 10:00 PM! Our inbound guests, who had been killing time elsewhere until we had power (or at least news of power), changed their plans and drove to visit family farther up the coast.

Meanwhile, my baguette dough sat in a bowl in the kitchen of my cold house. I couldn’t bake it, but didn’t have the heart to throw it away. It was growing like the Blob, although a lot slower, and without actually eating me, my family, my house, and the rest of Sonoma County.

Newly without dinner plans, or a suitable mood for New Year’s Eve, we headed downtown to drown our sorrows in a cup of tea and a selection of vegan cookies. Free holiday celebration tip: if you’re looking to cheer yourself up, stay the hell away from vegan cookies. But I digress. Before drowning our sorrows, we nearly drowned our car; Highway 12 just east of Sebastopol was under three feet of water. This was probably the reason PG&E couldn’t access its equipment. They probably couldn’t access the town.

But PG&E came through, somehow, restoring power about 4:30, which gave me just enough time to flip the baguette dough into rough batards and shortly thereafter (a paltry 20-minute rise) onto a not-exactly-hot-yet baking stone before rushing to join friends for an impromptu, post-power-failure dinner.

We brought the pork. It was great, or so I’m told.

The baguettes turned out surprisingly well considering that the dough had been rising more than twice as long than necessary. I expected the yeast to have expired, but I got a decent oven spring. Having no heat in the house contributed to this success; every 18 degrees of temperature change doubles or halves a dough’s rise time — above 40° or so, anyway.

So, all things considered, we ended up having a nice time on New Year’s anyway, despite those vegan cookies.

I wish I’d taken a photo of the image that inspired the title of this story: the UPS guy walking down the driveway with a stack of boxes from Amazon.com in his arms. Brown truck, brown shirt, brown pants, brown boxes.

He was carrying our Christmas gifts: some fancy crystal wine glasses and a new digital camera.

The wine glasses don’t really go with our recycled-glass tumblers, but you have to like the thin rims and the pure, high-pitched sound that resonates for 5 seconds when you clink them together. Also, they were half-price (and still are).

The more exciting gift was packed in the smaller two boxes. After three evenings’ worth of poring over reviews and sample images, we decided on the Canon SD450, an “ultracompact” model that is about a quarter the size of my Nikon Coolpix 995. I debated at length whether to get a more feature-rich model like the Powershot S80, which has a wider-angle lens (28mm), semi-manual controls (apeture or shutter priority), and an interface that seemed more intuitive. But it’s bigger all around and weighs twice as much as the SD450, and in the end we decided to get something really small (assuming the image quality would be good, which in this case appears to be true).

After that, we did another iteration of research to see if we could get a tiny camera with a fold-out LCD. I made an inventory of all the available cameras with that feature, and slowly eliminated every one of them: they’re all too big, or flawed in some other way. The SD450 is about the size of a deck of cards, small enough to carry around in a pocket.

(The third box from Amazon contained a spare battery. Why did they ship it separately? That makes as little sense as, well, not having a second battery for a digital camera. But then, I’m all about backups.)

Our 2005 “trueup” bill arrived from PG&E. My total electricity cost for 2005: $56.68, or about $1000 less than it would be if I didn’t have a PV array on the roof.

In 2004 we paid only $6.53 for the year’s power. The difference is small, but growing. (His name is Raphael.) We’re keeping the house warmer, and doing an extra 4 loads of laundry a week. And our houseguests come more often and stay longer, and use a whole bunch of power when they’re here.

I’ve baked 33% fewer times this year than last, but the savings in oven power have been eclipsed by higher uses elsewhere. I thought my new low-power firewall would have made some small contribution to our conservation efforts, but I can’t see it on the graphs. Computers just don’t draw that much power, unless you have about a million of them.

PG&E keeps a running tally of our outstanding charges, billing only at the end of the annual cycle. The idea for grid-tied systems is that consumption is bigger than generation in the winter, but smaller in the summer, and that after 12 months the balance should be near zero — assuming the system was sized correctly. In 2004, we were only off by $6.53.

The graph for the past two years’ running charges shows the cycle clearly. The 2005 line is offset by about $40, which I guess is the cost of adding a body (even a small one) to the household.

As a sanity check, I graphed our generation for both years. Total generation for 2005 was about 9 kWh higher, so I didn’t expect large differences month-to-month. The array reconfiguration in October, 2004 appears not to have had much impact.

Our installer should soon be running a comprehensive year-end analysis to determine our actual energy savings. I’m interested in this because, in essence, I paid for 10-12 years’ worth of electricity in 2003, and I’m eager to break even — every dollar I don’t pay PG&E now is another dollar’s reimbursement on my initial investment, bringing me closer to those 20 years of free electricity I have coming.

Dec 25 04:02:08 raid1: Disk failure on sda1, disabling device.  
Dec 25 04:02:09 md0: no spare disk to reconstruct array! -- continuing in degraded mode 
Dec 25 04:02:09 md2: no spare disk to reconstruct array! -- continuing in degraded mode 
Dec 25 04:02:09 md4: no spare disk to reconstruct array! -- continuing in degraded mode 
Dec 25 04:02:09 md3: no spare disk to reconstruct array! -- continuing in degraded mode 
Dec 25 04:02:09 md1: no spare disk to reconstruct array! -- continuing in degraded mode 
Dec 25 04:02:09 md5: no spare disk to reconstruct array! -- continuing in degraded mode 
Dec 25 04:02:09 md: (skipping faulty sda1 )