Mo’Betterer

Ya can just see the scrolling arrows of power flow there. Looks really good. Not at all happy about that 12.7 thing.

Wha? 12/7 RAWKS!

Um, Not for LiFePo batteries. Tha’s about the bottom of the barrel for that breed. You can see the battery image is only half full up there,

And I have 800Ah to get to full. Time, Sunlight (lacking today) or Fuel usage is the only way. (Note: its heavy cloud cover today and I am seeing some electron movement in the pic. Were the clouds to go’way, that amperage would be closer to 10, not point9.)

Little Genny always rocks my world. Little Honday 2K: won’t run BIG power tools, but runs purt much everything else (will even run a window AC unit.) and does it sucking fumes. One gallon of fuel ran that gurl all night long. She finally sputtered around 7:30 this AM. I started her up yesterday around 7ish. 12 hours from mostly full to dead empty. That is a goodness thing! And, I needed to run that old gas out of her. She did bring those batteries back up to 12.5 from 11.0 overnight: wasn’t as good as it could be, but she only outputs 2A on her 12v side. Still fingering options there as I would like to see closer to 6 amps from Boosted charger. A standard battery charger is a no go with LiFe batts, even running through my MPPT controller: call it communications issues, its a bit more complicated than that but the concept works as analogy.

Something that the GreenWeenies never seem to Understand. ENERGY IS NOT FREE. I may not have a utility bill every month, but when I do ‘get that bill’, it’s stacked tall. Like replacing the battery bank. THAT hits hard and deep. Doesn’t happen but once a decade or so, but when that time comes, your wallet is gonna squeal!!! Getting the energy costs upfront. (all those green energy deals that evaporated into offshore accounts? Yeah,,,)

And NO, I don’t believe it’s scalable to large infrastructure. I haven’t thought that since I started diving into this shit. Closest you get to that is Hydro power, and if you have ever seen the internals of one of those generation plants, you start percieving just how difficult this shit is to scale up. Seriously, keeping it small scale to individual needs, removing one load at a time from the mainGrid, is much more in line with “Green” than trying to adapt from top down.

And it all comes down to the storage. Hydro is near enough to standard type generation that storage is a moot point(the storage is the lake behind the dam). But when you are relying on mama-nature to push electrons with weather or sun, you MUST be able to store surplus for later when those electrons aren’t being pushed.

And Solar Fields look just downright ugly to me. Wind Turbines are eye-sores from a distance, and the upkeep of both is “hidden” from view as tax write offs by the companies doing such. Musk did the right thing in GigaFactory by making the roof a solar feild: keeps the place a touch cooler and powers itself. THAT is the right way to go about things. (I’d love to see his storage setup. That bank must be as big a couple of tractor trailers.)

Yah, I’ve been over this subject a time or three, even published a small phamplet about it (Outside looking in, find it below the fold and send your blogger a coin in buying a copy.)

Quick point: we will never hit 100% efficiency in solar capture. To hit that would remove all the energy from the light hitting a designated area and there would be no residual heat. We start capturing like that and things cool down. I beleive that Sol hits the earth with the equivalant of 1000W/m-sq. I have 24v panel that are 1msq and only getting 200w per 20%! And thats top of the line. (currently) I’ve seen dual faced panels that taut 25-30% but they capture reflected light on the back side to account for that gain. The structures needed to maximize that are ungainly and probably not in league with a homeowners desires. (or what wifey would be willing to look at everyday.)

Time to turn a strange corner here, sortof inline with that last sentence. Back in the Land Rush days of this country, people were scrambling for land out in the Great Plains and building materials were a problem. Adapt improvise and overcome: use sod (the Plains are loaded with it). Houses literally ‘grew’ out of the ground. And what was found was a Sod house stayed cool in summer, was easier to heat when the weather dropped into the basement of minus zeros, and retained the interior temps longer. Not ‘pretty’ though. And as soon as the railways made getting building materials cheap again, the sod house went buh-bye! Because the ladies wanted PRETTY, not efficient.

Theres a lesson in there somewhere.

Love y’all, Stay curious, I’ll be back up with more laters.

LLLLL!!! (, ‘)