DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

It’s been a dismal year for our PV array; after a best-ever January, production has fallen off and stayed down, 20% lower than expected.

At first I thought the low generation was due to dirty panels, so I stepped up my cleaning routine. Then I thought it was due to shading, so we had some more branches trimmed. Neither of these remedies addressed the production shortfall, so finally I resolved to have our installer investigate. I began gathering numbers on our monthly production.

But this takes time, a commodity as rare around here as free electricity. I finally gathered the necessary documentation and submitted it for review in July.

In various dark periods in my past, I have done some customer support work and some system testing work, and I know that the vast majority of technical problems reported by users are their own damn fault. Here is a classic example, from my semester on the graveyard shift in the Mac lab in college about 100 years ago: a thick-necked football player who probably went on to make more money in his first two years out of school than I’ve made ever waved me over to complain that his mouse wasn’t working — when he pushed it forward, the cursor on the screen moved down, and when he pulled it back, the cursor moved up. He’d spent enough time pecking his way through the semester’s various essay assignments to have acquired some mastery of the pointing device, so its apparent misbehavior was discomfiting. Every mouse movement broke his concentration, as he had to consciously override well-established muscle memory to put the cursor where he wanted it. This required so much mental effort that it never occurred to him to pick up the mouse and rotate it 180°. (The cord is supposed to come out of the top, you know.)

So I fully expected to be put off by our installer with inquiries about cleaning, weather, and tree cover, and I was working up solid answers for each in hopes of minimizing the delay of any sane CS agent’s justifiable evasion techniques.

Then I realized that the best way to identify a generation shortfall is not by measuring multiple months’ worth of production data for comparison to previous years or to other systems in the neighborhood… the best way to identify a generation shortfall is to take a spot reading when the system should be maxed out.

My PV array was designed to produce maximum power during the peak hours of the peak season: noon-6pm, May through October. If at 2pm on a bright July afternoon the system wasn’t cranking out 95+% of its rated maximum of 2500 watts, then something must be wrong.

Giving the system every possible advantage, I washed the panels first, then waited for them to dry. The inverter showed a measly 1800 watts. We were missing 28% of our generation capacity.

I sent a brief email to the installer. Within a couple hours I got a reply: someone would be out to inspect the system the next day.

(Tune in next week for Part II)

Tags: solar, debugging
posted to channel: Solar Blog
updated: 2008-02-01 13:55:00

This made me chuckle — day-old, used copies of the new Harry Potter book on sale at Half.com, marked “Read just once!” Thousands of people burned their way through the book’s 759 pages yesterday… and a few dozen of them are trying to recover a bit of the $35 retail price.

I didn’t read the book this weekend, although as a test I timed how long it would take to locate an illegal copy online. The answer: about 15 seconds. It took another minute to pick out the text version; most of them seemed to consist of photographs of the book pages.

But then I bought a copy, the full tree-stump edition, at the local bookstore, which reports having sold 600 of them in the past day and a half. I’d have to guess that makes this their biggest weekend of the year, even at 20% off.

Read more about the rapid devaluation of new media.

Tags: potter, madness
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2007-07-23 12:47:49

Tags: nonsense
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2007-07-19 20:40:46

It’s a Loquat.

Apparently it’s out of season — the fruit is supposed to be ripe in the “late winter or early spring,” not July 1 as in our case.

Speaking of which, while we tried to figure out what sort of tree it is and whether the fruit was any good, most of the fruit has gone bad. The one nice one I could find to show the arborist survived about a half-second past identification, e.g. “Oh, that’s a loquat… <gulp>”

Thanks to the various folks who suggested quince and kumquat: close, but no pie.

Tags: loquat
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2008-02-01 13:58:51

PG&E launched its carbon-offsetting program last week. It’s called “ClimateSmart.” Ratepayers can sign up with a couple mouse clicks.

What would it cost you per month? Probably about $5. Here’s a cost estimator. You’ll need to have a recent PG&E bill handy, or ideally one from last winter and another from last summer so you can measure average consumption during peak energy-use months.

Thanks to the PV array on my roof, my monthly ClimateSmart fee should be about $0.66.

What do you get for your $5 (or $0.66) per month? According to the website,

100% of your ClimateSmart payment will go to directly funding new greenhouse gas emission reduction projects in California. PG&E will invest these funds in a range of innovative projects, such as conserving and restoring California ecosystems and capturing methane gas from dairy farms. Examples of the types of projects PG&E may invest in include the van Eck forest in Humboldt County and Garcia River forest in Mendocino County, if they are chosen through the competitive selection process.

It seems like a great deal.

Before you sign up, though, read Katherine Ellison’s analysis in Salon: Shopping for carbon credits. She investigates the “new greenhouse gas emission reduction projects in California” and learns that the project first in line for certification may well end up using ClimateSmart money to fund the construction of a new forestry building at Purdue University in Indiana.

To which any right-minded ratepayer can respond only, WTF??

Buying offsets is, at best, the lazy way out of environmental responsibility — as Ellison points out, the only true solution is to reduce emissions at their source — but this particular example is so far removed from actually reducing the carbon level in the atmosphere that instead of eco-mindfulness it inspires only jokes, e.g.: Why would anybody tack $5 onto their monthly utility bill to finance a new schoolroom at an institution whose most memorable contribution to culture is the biggest bass drum in the world?

Ellison decides not to join ClimateSmart, opting instead to save up for double-paned windows and to contribute ~$5/month to support federal election reform — which I agree ought to be at the top of the list of any realistic carbon-offsetting program. (Ellison’s article makes the case that volunteer efforts to reduce emissions are insufficient, that federal regulations are required, and further that “petro-dollar-powered Republican legislators” are never going to make the necessary regulations.)

I find no fault with her reasoning or conclusions, but I signed up for ClimateSmart anyway. I have more faith that the California Climate Action Registry will find some legitimate, non-joke-worthy ways to spend ClimateSmart donations. For example, the manure management idea. OK, maybe that’s going to inspire some jokes too, but at least the benefits are real. For example, read about the Straus Dairy’s methane digester, which not only directly reduces greenhouse gas emissions, but also generates electricity, preventing the need for other fuels to be burned, thereby indirectly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

And if they don’t — if after six months PG&E and the Climate Action Registry are still struggling to find legitimate and productive ways to spend Climate Smart money, I’ll take back my $0.66/month and save up for another acre of rainforest.

Tags: conservation, carbon, offsets, rainforest, methane
posted to channel: Conservation
updated: 2007-07-03 14:07:02