If memory serves me correctly, the Miranda ruling that resulted in the now famous "You have the right to remain silent" Miranda rights, was initiated by a convicted inmate (Mr. Miranda) hand writing an appeal to the Supreme Court from his jail cell. He had been convicted, never having had a defense lawyer, or knowing that he didn't have to answer any questions in court.
Having money for lawyers just makes it easier, and a day in court more likely.
Those old Ford/IH 6.9L's were dogs. But faithful ones. They had two chronic problems: 1. The glow plug controller was junk. The fix was to wire up a relay and a pushbutton, and control them manually. The other was the high pressure fuel pump, which seemd to die every 80,000 miles like clockwork. The fix there was the real International "severe duty" pump, which lasted much longer, and had the notable ability of being about to run on jet fuel and kerosine without getting chewed up.
The modern 7.3L PowerStroke that Ford puts in these trucks nowdays has a huge turbocharger, and uses a computer controlled injection setup. They still have some lag, but once the turbo spins up, there's a truely vast amount of power available. But let's face it, if you want a Camaro, you get a Camaro. If you want a locomotive to tow your trailerable oceanliner, you get a diesel pickup.
When I was a kid, my dad was a mainframe operator. They had something similar for power conditioning in a 4 foot high 6x8 foot box with an IBM label on it. I only found out about it because it was the only thing making noise after I hit the EPO switch (I was like 6 years old, and they didn't have a Molly guard on it... Gimme a break.). In retrospect, it was remarkable that he continued to answer my questions at that point.:-)
Temkin
Re:Give yourself enough time to switch to pedal po
on
Flywheel UPS
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately, the average person can only maintain about 75 watts output while pedaling. People who train, and bike regularly have been known to do 120 watts. Note, this is sustained for long periods of time, not burst output, which can be 300 or more watts for short periods. This flywheel unit does 500 watts for 4 hours.
Oh, an I almost forgot IPlanet.com which offers what used to be the Netscape mail and calendar products
iPlanet messaging server is not simply Netscape mail re-badged. It was merged with Sun Internet Mail (SIMS), and now sports a real MTA, domain hosting, with delegated administration, and a bunch of other features. That said, it seems to garner more support in ISP and telco environments, not typical enterprise applications. Why AOL doesn't use it is something of a mystery, although I'd imagine the migration issues alone are enough of an excuse.
Not sure who said it first, but having "smoking" and "non-smoking" section in a restaurant is kind of like having a "peeing" and "non-peeing" sections in a swimming pool. It just doesn't work.
Personally, I think smokers should have the right to smoke, but that right does not extend to imposing their filthy habit on me. What you do in your own home is your business, be it nicotine or heroin. But don't expect me to support your right to do either in the booth next to me at a restaurant.
there are others of us who CHOOSE to smoke
Heheh... Yea right. You smoke because you're an addict. There isn't a medical doctor in North America that would disagree with me.
Well it's a good thing I've got one of those lying around in my garage!
I think this article was originally published in the 1950's. Model-T parts were a bit more common (though not much) back then. Now days you'd just substitute some sort of solid state switch driven by an oscillator circuit of some sort. It actually has quite a bit in common with the modern switching power supply in your computer, with the exception that the voltage is headed the other way.
Funny thing... I looked at the drawing, and immediately recognized the model-T ignition parts in the pictures. There's one sitting in the basement of my grandmother's house. Just why my grandfather kept it is a secret he took to the grave. But if you really wanted to build one of these power supplies, and didn't want to engineer a solid state "vibrator", you might start by asking antique car enthusiasts.
For the benefit of my concience... As a trained scientist that has worked with x-ray equipment, I strongly advise against attempting to construct this device. As they say, a little knowlege is a dangerous thing. This stuff requires more than a little knowlege to work with safely. You should note, that many of the scientists that did the early groundbreaking work in this field died horrible deaths at relativly young ages. It would be interesting to find out how Mr. Simons met his end, assuming he has.
FYI (and hopefully without starting the usual free beer/speech debates) - Solaris is free for use on systems with less than 8 CPU's. Admittedly, driver support is lacking in the x86 version, but you really don't need the latest video card on your server.
You can even download ISO CD images here, and make your own installation CD's.
IIRC they use more electricity for AC than to run the computers.
Uhhh... No. It's actually more like an 8:1 ratio in favor of the computers. I must admit though, it is interesting to see the look on an architects face when you tell them you need something like 1-ton of A/C (1 ton = 12,000 Btu) for every 14 square feet of space in a room. They tend to fidget a bit, and say they'll run some calculations for you, since you must be completely out of your mind. It's usually at that point I start talking about how many 225-amp 3-phase distribution panels I'm going to need. The smarter ones start to get it at that point.:-)
Don't get me wrong, it is an issue, and not just during the summer. I think the thing that bugs me most is that here in the middle of winter, it's like 60 deg./F or less outside, and we have to run A/C in our lab. Seems to me we should design these buildings to vent in cool filtered air from outside.
FWIW the reason nuclear power is unpopular is because of the environmental expense of
decommissioning a nuclear power plant. They're all very green until they're too old to
operate or redundant. Then they start to become a problem.
This shouldn't be the insurmountable problem that people make it out to be. It should be a manageable problem, but the industry's hands have been tied so that reprocessing the fuel rods is illegal (France does it), and there's no storage place for high level waste due to NIMBY/Green interference. The result is, nobody is researching ways to manage these problems, or create new reactor designs that are easier to decomission.
In California???? That's like a political "third rail" out here. Politicians and companies just don't want to touch it.
Granted, it's not a bad idea, just not very likely. Nuclear power out here has been villified beyond reason. It's almost like some strange form of religion... The greenies hate global warming, but they hate nuclear power even more. The result, we're on the verge of returning to the cave, but without fire, since that would cause pollution...
Remember, folks, that stupid little A/C compressor chews up much more energy than
your computers do.
Funny you should mention that... I type this while I wait for one of the local A/C shops to arrive to replace my ancient A/C unit and furnace with new energy-star rated units. The down side being, I'm going to be using an electric blanket, and space heater tonight (it's a 3 day job...), in the middle of what will likely be a Stage 3 power alert... (sigh)
Anyway, a typical desktop uses, say 350 watts, which is 252 kwh/month.
Just because the power supply is rated at 350 watts, doesn't mean the computer is pulling 350 watts all the time. The majority will be consumed by the hard disk, and the CPU. Figure 10 to 20 watts for the disk, and maybe as much as 40 watts for the CPU. Maybe add another 10 watts for the memory, and 20 more for that killer video board... You can quickly see, that an average PC draws more like 100 watts in normal operation, and with APM enabled this can be cut even further. The monitor will add another say 60 watts... It's hopefully turned off 2/3rds of the day....
I have 4 computers, which for the most part run 24/7. I turn two of them off when CAISO declares a Stage 2 power alert. By your numbers, The monthly bill for my computer equipment alone should be 1008 Kwh per month. My entire house drew only about 750 Kwh last month. That's with an electric stove, oven, clothes dryer, and a wife that doesn't turn lights off.
Costs about $5K per KW for the panels. California averages about 5 hours of "full sunlight" per day, so you'd need a 3KW array of panels to produce the average 15KWh of electricity used per residence per day. Add another $2500 for the utillity intertie inverter, and an equal amount for the installation, and red tape costs, and you're looking at $20,000. That's a lot of electricity, even at the rates being charged in San Diego.
Yup... Onan, a division of Cummins diesel. Their web page is at http://www.onan.com.
Isn't Onan the Biblical dude whom God put to death for committing the sin of self-gratification?
You got me there. I remember a passage about a guy that was supposed to impregnate his deceased brother's wife (or something like that), pulled it out and "spilled his seed on the ground", and was struck down by God. Not exactly what I'd call spanking the monkey, and he was struck down for the sin of defying God, the sexual act being irrelevant compared to that. I don't remember his name. You may be right.
This is the easiest of all. You just put a well isolated and rather big tank in the middle of the house which stores warm water.
There are already a lot of those houses in Germany, they are called zero emission houses, guess why.
This sounds really interesting. Can you send us a pointer to more information? My sister in an architect (in California), I will forward any information you post to her. Maybe it will start a trend.
The new Sun campus in Santa Clara has huge Onan diesel generators outside each building. We got to test them during an outage last summer. The grid dropped, and the gen sets kicked in about 30 seconds later. UPS protected systems were fine, everything else died and had to be rebooted. When the grid came back, there was no noticeable cutover brown-out. All in all, it worked well. All our critical systems are protected by UPS's. I was working on a docked laptop at the time, and just had to wait for my monitor to power back up. The laptop ran off it's battery while the gen set started.:-)
Let's try implementing things like solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal power on a large
scale before we conclude nuclear fission is environmentally friendly.
Oh man, where do I start....
Ok... Wind... I live within sight of one of the largest windmill farms in California, Altamont Pass east of Livermore. I haven't seen the windmills spin in ernest since last fall. Sure, you see a few of the more advanced ones chugging along every now and then, when a storm provides a breeze, but nothing like what they do at say 2pm on any August afternoon. It's seasonal power, and you're lucky to get it more than 5 hours a day at that. We tried it, it's a nice topping source to run air conditioners, but not much more.
Solar... See my rant elsewhere in this thread. It's not economical at prices that will sustain the economy. You want solar?? Inflation baby... yea...
Geothermal... Nice big project up in Sonoma county, north of my house. Huge even... Sprawls over acres and acres of land... Put's out about 500MW I believe, which is nothing to sneeze at. They have trouble keeping the turbine blades on the shafts. The steam is corrosive, and maintenance costs are high. They drilled so much that the pressure started falling off, and now they have inject water, which costs $$. Now if California just had 30 more projects like it, we'd be set.... And maybe even under $0.20KWh... Maybe... I got to tour them once when I was a kid. The sulfur fumes made me sicker than hell.
Tidal... Yea.. Go ask the fish first. Then solve that little problem of building a viable plant, and covering the two 3 hour periods per day where your prime movers are idle due to lack of water current. Oh, and did I mention that you're not allowed to flood any wetlands, or disturb any marine habitats in the process? Get back to us when you've got it figured out!
Which brings us to nukes and conventional plants... Tried and true.. They work. Conventional plants spew huge volumes of carbon into the atmosphere, and might be causing problems. Nukes produce some pretty nasty waste, that can be stored in a reasonably small space, in a confined environment. When a nuke breaks down, some pretty spectacular and disasterous things can happen, but usually don't. People die. Yes they do. Two workers died just last year I believe, operating a nuke plant in Japan. Prime earthquake country I might add, just like California. Several dozen workers died at a rather notorious plant near Kiev a few years back, and several hundered thousand were injured due to an extremely poor reactor design that hasn't been built in the west in more than 35 years. But did you know that an average of ~55 people die EVERY DAY mining coal for conventional power plants? Nobody seems to care about that so much. Where's the outrage there? Add the coal ash waste, the mining accidents, and the atmospheric pollution together, and coal fired power plants probably kill more people per year than all the world's nuclear accidents total! So yea... I can reasonable conclude that nuclear power, as implemented in the US, Japan, and Europe is safe, and actually environmentally friendly, and the greenies have been duping us on this for years.
But there is one thing they are right about, and it's the only thing that will get California our of the mess it's currently in. That's conservation. It takes time to build powerplants, no matter what the fuel source. California needs power today... right now. To that end, I've spent about $120 replacing just about every single incandecant lightbulb in my house with a compact fluorecent bulb. I'm putting R30 isulation in my attic this weekend, and next week I'm having my (circa 1968) 55% AFUE furnace and 4 SEER A/C replaced with a 80% AFUE furnace and a 14 SEER A/C unit. For those Californians reading this... What are you doing to conserve power in your house?
Forget photo-voltaic? So the people I know with a solar house, that are selling power
back to PG&E, I just hallucinated them?
So they bought $20,000 plus worth of solar panels.... They'll have their investment paid for about the time the terminal lugs on the panels corrode through. I'm not saying this isn't a somewhat viable solution, but it doesn't scale well, and you need some nasty chemical batteries to get you through the night. It's close to a zero sum gain unfortunately.... At least for now. I am researching adding a 2KW array to the roof of my house. If electricity really does hit $0.30 per KWh, like some think may happen, the economics of it changes somewhat. Some may say that's good, because it will make PV solar economical... But it would wreck the California economy, and plunge the world, not just the USA, the whole freaking world into a recession.
Temkin
Staring out the window at the idle Altamont windmill farm...
Slashdot Mirror
If memory serves me correctly, the Miranda ruling that resulted in the now famous "You have the right to remain silent" Miranda rights, was initiated by a convicted inmate (Mr. Miranda) hand writing an appeal to the Supreme Court from his jail cell. He had been convicted, never having had a defense lawyer, or knowing that he didn't have to answer any questions in court.
Having money for lawyers just makes it easier, and a day in court more likely.
Temkin
Those old Ford/IH 6.9L's were dogs. But faithful ones. They had two chronic problems: 1. The glow plug controller was junk. The fix was to wire up a relay and a pushbutton, and control them manually. The other was the high pressure fuel pump, which seemd to die every 80,000 miles like clockwork. The fix there was the real International "severe duty" pump, which lasted much longer, and had the notable ability of being about to run on jet fuel and kerosine without getting chewed up.
The modern 7.3L PowerStroke that Ford puts in these trucks nowdays has a huge turbocharger, and uses a computer controlled injection setup. They still have some lag, but once the turbo spins up, there's a truely vast amount of power available. But let's face it, if you want a Camaro, you get a Camaro. If you want a locomotive to tow your trailerable oceanliner, you get a diesel pickup.
Temkin
When I was a kid, my dad was a mainframe operator. They had something similar for power conditioning in a 4 foot high 6x8 foot box with an IBM label on it. I only found out about it because it was the only thing making noise after I hit the EPO switch (I was like 6 years old, and they didn't have a Molly guard on it... Gimme a break.). In retrospect, it was remarkable that he continued to answer my questions at that point. :-)
Temkin
Unfortunately, the average person can only maintain about 75 watts output while pedaling. People who train, and bike regularly have been known to do 120 watts. Note, this is sustained for long periods of time, not burst output, which can be 300 or more watts for short periods. This flywheel unit does 500 watts for 4 hours.
Temkin
Yes... But this time there's more details. Think of it as "followup", which is sorely lacking in virtually all other "news" media.
Temkin
Oh, an I almost forgot IPlanet.com which offers what used to be the Netscape mail and calendar products
iPlanet messaging server is not simply Netscape mail re-badged. It was merged with Sun Internet Mail (SIMS), and now sports a real MTA, domain hosting, with delegated administration, and a bunch of other features. That said, it seems to garner more support in ISP and telco environments, not typical enterprise applications. Why AOL doesn't use it is something of a mystery, although I'd imagine the migration issues alone are enough of an excuse.
Temkin
Not sure who said it first, but having "smoking" and "non-smoking" section in a restaurant is kind of like having a "peeing" and "non-peeing" sections in a swimming pool. It just doesn't work.
Personally, I think smokers should have the right to smoke, but that right does not extend to imposing their filthy habit on me. What you do in your own home is your business, be it nicotine or heroin. But don't expect me to support your right to do either in the booth next to me at a restaurant.
there are others of us who CHOOSE to smoke
Heheh... Yea right. You smoke because you're an addict. There isn't a medical doctor in North America that would disagree with me.
Temkin
Well it's a good thing I've got one of those lying around in my garage!
I think this article was originally published in the 1950's. Model-T parts were a bit more common (though not much) back then. Now days you'd just substitute some sort of solid state switch driven by an oscillator circuit of some sort. It actually has quite a bit in common with the modern switching power supply in your computer, with the exception that the voltage is headed the other way.
Funny thing... I looked at the drawing, and immediately recognized the model-T ignition parts in the pictures. There's one sitting in the basement of my grandmother's house. Just why my grandfather kept it is a secret he took to the grave. But if you really wanted to build one of these power supplies, and didn't want to engineer a solid state "vibrator", you might start by asking antique car enthusiasts.
For the benefit of my concience... As a trained scientist that has worked with x-ray equipment, I strongly advise against attempting to construct this device. As they say, a little knowlege is a dangerous thing. This stuff requires more than a little knowlege to work with safely. You should note, that many of the scientists that did the early groundbreaking work in this field died horrible deaths at relativly young ages. It would be interesting to find out how Mr. Simons met his end, assuming he has.
Temkin
Solaris being ruled out on cost
FYI (and hopefully without starting the usual free beer/speech debates) - Solaris is free for use on systems with less than 8 CPU's. Admittedly, driver support is lacking in the x86 version, but you really don't need the latest video card on your server.
You can even download ISO CD images here, and make your own installation CD's.
Temkin
Hmmm... so that means if I strap a subwoofer to my ass my bones will get stronger?
And it explains why rap fans are so hard headed....
Temkin
Doesn't appear to have made it to the "portable" version yet.
I just installed 2.3.0p1, and it isn't there.
Temkin
2. Most servers are redundant ones, hot spares, etc.
What are you smoking? Can I have some of your server budget?
Temkin
IIRC they use more electricity for AC than to run the computers.
Uhhh... No. It's actually more like an 8:1 ratio in favor of the computers. I must admit though, it is interesting to see the look on an architects face when you tell them you need something like 1-ton of A/C (1 ton = 12,000 Btu) for every 14 square feet of space in a room. They tend to fidget a bit, and say they'll run some calculations for you, since you must be completely out of your mind. It's usually at that point I start talking about how many 225-amp 3-phase distribution panels I'm going to need. The smarter ones start to get it at that point. :-)
Don't get me wrong, it is an issue, and not just during the summer. I think the thing that bugs me most is that here in the middle of winter, it's like 60 deg./F or less outside, and we have to run A/C in our lab. Seems to me we should design these buildings to vent in cool filtered air from outside.
Temkin
Now if we could just get some of those California web hosting companies to adopt these en-mass.... I could turn on the lights in my office again... :-)
Temkin
FWIW the reason nuclear power is unpopular is because of the environmental expense of decommissioning a nuclear power plant. They're all very green until they're too old to operate or redundant. Then they start to become a problem.
This shouldn't be the insurmountable problem that people make it out to be. It should be a manageable problem, but the industry's hands have been tied so that reprocessing the fuel rods is illegal (France does it), and there's no storage place for high level waste due to NIMBY/Green interference. The result is, nobody is researching ways to manage these problems, or create new reactor designs that are easier to decomission.
Temkin
then build more nuclear plants
In California???? That's like a political "third rail" out here. Politicians and companies just don't want to touch it.
Granted, it's not a bad idea, just not very likely. Nuclear power out here has been villified beyond reason. It's almost like some strange form of religion... The greenies hate global warming, but they hate nuclear power even more. The result, we're on the verge of returning to the cave, but without fire, since that would cause pollution...
Remember, folks, that stupid little A/C compressor chews up much more energy than your computers do.
Funny you should mention that... I type this while I wait for one of the local A/C shops to arrive to replace my ancient A/C unit and furnace with new energy-star rated units. The down side being, I'm going to be using an electric blanket, and space heater tonight (it's a 3 day job...), in the middle of what will likely be a Stage 3 power alert... (sigh)
Temkin
Anyway, a typical desktop uses, say 350 watts, which is 252 kwh/month.
Just because the power supply is rated at 350 watts, doesn't mean the computer is pulling 350 watts all the time. The majority will be consumed by the hard disk, and the CPU. Figure 10 to 20 watts for the disk, and maybe as much as 40 watts for the CPU. Maybe add another 10 watts for the memory, and 20 more for that killer video board... You can quickly see, that an average PC draws more like 100 watts in normal operation, and with APM enabled this can be cut even further. The monitor will add another say 60 watts... It's hopefully turned off 2/3rds of the day....
I have 4 computers, which for the most part run 24/7. I turn two of them off when CAISO declares a Stage 2 power alert. By your numbers, The monthly bill for my computer equipment alone should be 1008 Kwh per month. My entire house drew only about 750 Kwh last month. That's with an electric stove, oven, clothes dryer, and a wife that doesn't turn lights off.
Temkin
The use of a solor cells on their roof
Costs about $5K per KW for the panels. California averages about 5 hours of "full sunlight" per day, so you'd need a 3KW array of panels to produce the average 15KWh of electricity used per residence per day. Add another $2500 for the utillity intertie inverter, and an equal amount for the installation, and red tape costs, and you're looking at $20,000. That's a lot of electricity, even at the rates being charged in San Diego.
It's almost worth it.... But not quite yet.
Temkin
The funny thing is, I've thought about doing something like this to run my monitor... :-)
Temkin
Yup... Onan, a division of Cummins diesel. Their web page is at http://www.onan.com.
Isn't Onan the Biblical dude whom God put to death for committing the sin of self-gratification?
You got me there. I remember a passage about a guy that was supposed to impregnate his deceased brother's wife (or something like that), pulled it out and "spilled his seed on the ground", and was struck down by God. Not exactly what I'd call spanking the monkey, and he was struck down for the sin of defying God, the sexual act being irrelevant compared to that. I don't remember his name. You may be right.
Temkin
This is the easiest of all. You just put a well isolated and rather big tank in the middle of the house which stores warm water. There are already a lot of those houses in Germany, they are called zero emission houses, guess why.
This sounds really interesting. Can you send us a pointer to more information? My sister in an architect (in California), I will forward any information you post to her. Maybe it will start a trend.
Temkin
Well done! I need to go install some more power strips to catch those phantom loads. A virtual beer for you sir. May your budget loosen soon. (clink)
Temkin
The new Sun campus in Santa Clara has huge Onan diesel generators outside each building. We got to test them during an outage last summer. The grid dropped, and the gen sets kicked in about 30 seconds later. UPS protected systems were fine, everything else died and had to be rebooted. When the grid came back, there was no noticeable cutover brown-out. All in all, it worked well. All our critical systems are protected by UPS's. I was working on a docked laptop at the time, and just had to wait for my monitor to power back up. The laptop ran off it's battery while the gen set started. :-)
Temkin
Let's try implementing things like solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal power on a large scale before we conclude nuclear fission is environmentally friendly.
Oh man, where do I start....
Ok... Wind... I live within sight of one of the largest windmill farms in California, Altamont Pass east of Livermore. I haven't seen the windmills spin in ernest since last fall. Sure, you see a few of the more advanced ones chugging along every now and then, when a storm provides a breeze, but nothing like what they do at say 2pm on any August afternoon. It's seasonal power, and you're lucky to get it more than 5 hours a day at that. We tried it, it's a nice topping source to run air conditioners, but not much more.
Solar... See my rant elsewhere in this thread. It's not economical at prices that will sustain the economy. You want solar?? Inflation baby... yea...
Geothermal... Nice big project up in Sonoma county, north of my house. Huge even... Sprawls over acres and acres of land... Put's out about 500MW I believe, which is nothing to sneeze at. They have trouble keeping the turbine blades on the shafts. The steam is corrosive, and maintenance costs are high. They drilled so much that the pressure started falling off, and now they have inject water, which costs $$. Now if California just had 30 more projects like it, we'd be set.... And maybe even under $0.20KWh... Maybe... I got to tour them once when I was a kid. The sulfur fumes made me sicker than hell.
Tidal... Yea.. Go ask the fish first. Then solve that little problem of building a viable plant, and covering the two 3 hour periods per day where your prime movers are idle due to lack of water current. Oh, and did I mention that you're not allowed to flood any wetlands, or disturb any marine habitats in the process? Get back to us when you've got it figured out!
Which brings us to nukes and conventional plants... Tried and true.. They work. Conventional plants spew huge volumes of carbon into the atmosphere, and might be causing problems. Nukes produce some pretty nasty waste, that can be stored in a reasonably small space, in a confined environment. When a nuke breaks down, some pretty spectacular and disasterous things can happen, but usually don't. People die. Yes they do. Two workers died just last year I believe, operating a nuke plant in Japan. Prime earthquake country I might add, just like California. Several dozen workers died at a rather notorious plant near Kiev a few years back, and several hundered thousand were injured due to an extremely poor reactor design that hasn't been built in the west in more than 35 years. But did you know that an average of ~55 people die EVERY DAY mining coal for conventional power plants? Nobody seems to care about that so much. Where's the outrage there? Add the coal ash waste, the mining accidents, and the atmospheric pollution together, and coal fired power plants probably kill more people per year than all the world's nuclear accidents total! So yea... I can reasonable conclude that nuclear power, as implemented in the US, Japan, and Europe is safe, and actually environmentally friendly, and the greenies have been duping us on this for years.
But there is one thing they are right about, and it's the only thing that will get California our of the mess it's currently in. That's conservation. It takes time to build powerplants, no matter what the fuel source. California needs power today... right now. To that end, I've spent about $120 replacing just about every single incandecant lightbulb in my house with a compact fluorecent bulb. I'm putting R30 isulation in my attic this weekend, and next week I'm having my (circa 1968) 55% AFUE furnace and 4 SEER A/C replaced with a 80% AFUE furnace and a 14 SEER A/C unit. For those Californians reading this... What are you doing to conserve power in your house?
Temkin
Forget photo-voltaic? So the people I know with a solar house, that are selling power back to PG&E, I just hallucinated them?
So they bought $20,000 plus worth of solar panels.... They'll have their investment paid for about the time the terminal lugs on the panels corrode through. I'm not saying this isn't a somewhat viable solution, but it doesn't scale well, and you need some nasty chemical batteries to get you through the night. It's close to a zero sum gain unfortunately.... At least for now. I am researching adding a 2KW array to the roof of my house. If electricity really does hit $0.30 per KWh, like some think may happen, the economics of it changes somewhat. Some may say that's good, because it will make PV solar economical... But it would wreck the California economy, and plunge the world, not just the USA, the whole freaking world into a recession.
Temkin
Staring out the window at the idle Altamont windmill farm...