Well, it’s been just over a year since I had the solar panels turned on, and I’ve learned one important lesson:

1. Either Bella Energy did a perfect job of estimating my energy usage for the entire year, and sold me the exact right number of solar panels needed to generate that exact amount of energy I’d use, or
2. Wholesale energy is very, very cheap 

Xcel Rebate

The reason I know this? Here’s the rebate check for the entire year of 2009, in which I sold energy back to XcelEnergy. A whopping $6.15. Now granted, when I started last year, my “net meter” started at “zero” and was running at below zero for the whole year, and I’m at about -100 now, but I was stunned at how close to “zero” usage I ended up.

I’m not complaining… Having monthly electric bills of $7.00 (just for the connection to the grid), and this rebate means my “out of pocket” for the entire year was roughly $75 bucks was absolutely worth it. At the current rate, the whole system should pay for itself in about 7 or 8 years. And that’s if Xcel doesn’t raise the rates for electricity.

All in all, I’m very happy I did this…

Tags: bella energy,rebate,solar,solar panels,wholesale electricity,xcelenergy
Categories: Green
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The website for the Front Range Photographic Society (FRPS) has moved to a Facebook group located here.

We were not really “active” and the only thing that was really getting used was the mailing list, so I decided to stop paying for it, and move it to Facebook.

I still have access to all photos, files and stories that were posted there, so if you want something from the old site, let me know and I’ll either move it to Facebook or send it to you directly.

Steve

Tags: Facebook,Front Range Photographic Society,FRPS
Categories: Announcements
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The latest update in the “Greening” effort was to replace my old X10 Thermostat (TXB-16) with a new Venstar T1800 7 day programmable thermostat, and then hook up an INSTEON adapter to it that will let a product called Indigo on my home control computer run it.

By itself, the new thermostat is considerably more powerful than the TXB-16 was, and with Indigo I can do much more. And in a rare example of me actually planning “forward”, it will support the dual-zone, multi-stage furnace/AC I want to put it next year to replace the again, cheap, and highly inefficient York furnace they put in the house when it was built.

The installation wasn’t too hard but I found out that the house builder had not really connected all the control wires in the furnace/AC control ( but at least they didn’t clip the wires they didn’t use). They just left ‘em hanging inside the furnace. A little crawling around in the dust and all that razor sharp sheet metal connecting all the wiring, and voila!  All told, the whole upgrade took about an hour, including programming.

And, my favorite part ? The Solar System doesn’t interfere with the new INSTEON communication method (on both electrical wires and RF boosted)… Finally, I have control of my house temperature back under computer control. It only took me 11 months to do it…

Tags: Green,green home,Indigo,INSTEON,Perceptive Automation,thermostat,X10
Categories: Green
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SB Sunset #22

I happened to be working in Santa Barbara during the last week, and caught a couple nights of stunning sunsets. I didn’t go out the first night with the camera, we just sat on Patty and Jeff’s deck and watched it. But tonight, I couldn’t “not go”. I drove down to Shoreline Park (on the Mesa) along with a few thousand other appreciative souls, and took the pictures below.

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Categories: Photo Albums, Travel
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Steamboat Barn, painted with light

Gregg and I tried an experiment “painting” the Steamboat Barn with light tonight. It was 15 degrees out there, about a half hour after sundown. Gregg brought a halogen spotlight and “painted” the barn while we shot exposures about 30 seconds in length. Gregg’s shots on his D90 turned out WAY better than mine, for reasons we haven’t determined yet.

I did get a couple that are acceptable (the third one showing stars and constellations is pretty nice), but not quite what I wanted…. See below.

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Categories: Photo Albums, Steamboat
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Live View

My green home upgrade continues with the addition of a product from a company name The Energy Detective called TED 5000. Basically this is a meter that let’s me keep an eye on energy usage with both the feed from Xcelenergy (the power company here) and my solar panels. It’s something only a guy could love (the geeky graphs and huge amounts of data), but on the side, also lets me know, down to the watt, what each device in the house is using.  I’ve attached a couple more “sample pictures” after the break below.

It has a “live mode” (the picture on the left) where I can watch real time as I turn on things like:

• TV (100-600 watts, depending on if it’s displaying a predominantly black or white screen)
• Clothes Dryer (a scary 6,300+ watts)
• Oven (2,500 watts) and burners (2,800 watts each) [which explains why I don't cook!]
• The furnace (1,100 watts for the blower motor) [which explains why I keep the house at 64 degrees day, and 55 night]

I haven’t gone around measuring everything yet, but may do something like that over the long weekend. I’m really curious how much energy all the little power bricks I have for all the little devices take. I’m betting it’s going to be a surprising number.

The company still has some work to do on the software that comes with the product (quite a few minor bugs, and a couple major ones (like mis-labeling outputs on graphs). The appear totally overwhelmed by the popularity of their products, and are trying to ramp up support, but they’re not there yet. Be prepared to be “on your own” for a while. But, for the most part, it works OK, and provides information I simply didn’t have before.

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Categories: Geek Toys, Green, Hardware
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They warned us on the news over the weekend. People ignored it as usual. They warned us again on Monday. So I took the Harley out for a ride on a nice fall day. They warned us again on Tuesday, but it was cloudy and windy, with lots of fall leaves in the air, so I left the bike in the garage and went out in the truck instead.

Wednesday AM - Out the front door

It hit Tuesday night. This picture on the left was from from 9am on Wednesday AM, when it really started snowing hard.

It snowed all day Wednesday, and we all shoveled driveways a couple times to try to keep ahead of it. The pictures below are from Thursday morning as the whole neighborhood was out shoveling again. Except for the kids of course who persisted in playing and throwing snowballs at the adults… So I eventually buried one up to his shoulders and told him to dig himself out.

The pictures are below the break.

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Categories: Photo Albums
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Thanks to Susan Ricks, I added a bunch of names to the Grade School Pictures that I posted a while back.

They’re all here.

Categories: Photo Albums
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We held our 2nd annual Fourth of July block party this year, and it was another successful, if not slightly more sane party. We wrapped it up at 1:30am this year instead of 3am, and it only took an hour to clean up the streets the next morning. And, just to be clear, I have no recollection of any any fireworks at our party… I have no idea where all that stuff we had to sweep up came from…

For the official fireworks from the city, which they launch about 1/4 mile north of the house, I set up the camera to capture the fireworks, and caught a few good shots.

I’m uploading the rest of what I rated 3+ (out of 5) below the break, since most people really don’t care about the other couple hundred shots it takes to capture fireworks effectively.

There was no fire jumping this year, and more importantly, I had officially resigned as the “after dark” photographer, so all the goings on are relegated to memory only… You’ll have to ask the neighbors about things you may want to know. I’m not talking….

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Categories: Photo Albums
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The Wedding Party

I was asked to help out a friend and shoot pictures for her wedding (a few pics appear after the break). Little did I know it would be 102 in San Jose that weekend, but I did it anyway. Luckily it was not a suit-type wedding, or we would have had to turn on the sprinklers to prevent heat stroke.

Congratulations to Shawn and Michele Mouser!!!

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Categories: Travel
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