Keep in mind power requirements and local/state laws. Machine shops usually require three-phase power. Transformers that support that will cost extra. Additionally, net metering and similar issues are subject to legislation. In some states solar currently makes sense for an environment like this, but not in others... and there are definitely no long-term guarantees.
Sure. So, if I was going to fill a roof with solar panels, assuming a reasonable sized roof, at some point, I could split it to thirds, and feed each phase back to the power company from that inverter. In reality, most factories will consume more power than a roof full of panels can provide, so it's just a cost offset mechanism. Unless your goal is to run the factory after the power grid collapses, it's just a cost avoidance strategy. Buy what you need from the utility, and sell what you generate back to them in a form that is convenient to YOU rather than them. In Wisconsin, the state laws are favorable to that approach. Other places will certainly vary.
The "whole house UPS and off-grid if needed" is great for house-sized loads. With 20 panels, I could go off grid. The beauty in this is that I can sell excess power at retail rates back to the utility (again, varies by state), and still be able to go off-grid if something goes horribly wrong with society.
I especially like how the payback is 6-ish years if energy prices don't increase at all. Once those panels and inverters are bought, the energy prices can do whatever they want, I still get those watts for free.
Ephemeral, my ass. Your way costs me $100 a month. My way costs me $25 a month. All you are doing is playing word games and bullshit in claiming my way isn't 400% as efficient as your way.
Seriously. The whole point of the law is to make sure people are only voting where they live. In Wisconsin at least, IDs for voting are free. Yet, people cry "disenfranchisement", as if somehow anyone, even someone who has no job, can somehow survive without a state issued ID.
Can someone please, without frothing at the mouth and namecalling, help me understand what the actual objections of "Wow, you should be able to prove you're voting where you live", is a problem? Especially when, see previous re: State issued ID cards being free?
Well, maybe. Active tracking adds 30-35% to the power output (think: area under a square wave vs. area under a sine wave of same period and peak). But, it adds a LOT of moving parts, and when you're working with a finite area (like a roof), shading becomes a concern - you have to space them far enough in both directions to have them not shade each other at any time during the day. If you've got wide open spaces, and dedicated staff, the extra output MAY be worth the cost. But, if you want to get the most energy per acre of roof, fixed angle racked panels give you the most bang for the buck.
If your trackers, room to put them, and upkeep cost more than 30% of the cost of the panels they're hosting, just put that money in more panels, with zero moving parts, and one-time-calculations for tilt and shadow prevention. As panels continue to drop in price, the more or less fixed cost of the trackers is going to continue to be less attractive, because it'll be an even higher percentage of an overall installation. This is based on Wisconsin, USA going rates as of this summer; by next summer, it'll probably be even more skewed away from trackers. Unless someone comes up with a better, cheaper tracker.
As far as the sun-facing walls, well, maybe. Those will have to be on a separate MPPT feed, because otherwise those panels will current-limit the entire string of more properly aimed panels. And, they cost the same as that same panel at the right angle - awning mounted on the sun-facing walls if anything, but flat vertical mounting would be a waste. It's all about the surface area of the panel as presented to the sun, cosine of the angle and all that.
Depending on where you're located, the payback for a roof full of solar panels will likely be somewhere between 5-8 years, if energy prices don't go up. Panels are typically coming in with 20 or 25 year warranties, and the switchgear is like any other power switching equipment (keep the filters clean and the mice out). Plus then you can advertise that you're green, if you want. Isolating yourself from rising energy costs, even in part, may be attractive.
The country is big, with lots of low density areas. Thousands of miles of cable don't just pay for and install themselves, and the incentive to cover a lightly inhabited area just isn't there.
We can agree that heat pumps are vastly more efficient per watt used. But the efficiency numbers aren't comparable. This is my argument.
Heat pumps give additive overall system efficiency, but not in the same way light bulbs do.
You're either playing pointless word games, or you're making a subtle point that I'm missing. If I can spend 100 bucks a month in the winter to heat my house with one method, instead of 500 bucks with the other, then the first method is 500% as efficient as the second method. It doesn't matter what the methods are - could be parabolic solar, could be a woodburning stove, could be heat pump, could be "Shut the damn door, what were you, born in a barn?!?!", could be just turning the thermostat down. Doesn't change the end result which is a warm house for (cost).
Right. And for purposes of comparing it to lightbulbs, it's an invalid equation. These are NOT the same things.
Right, but from a "How much money do I have to spend to heat my house" perspective, it's completely valid. If I get 5 dollars worth of heat for one dollar of electricity, then it's 5 times more efficient than just warming up a space heater with that same electricity.
Oh, you were replying to the other guy, not me. Didn't realize that replies stopped indenting after a certain number. Whoops.
Yeah, same here, I was looking at it and wondering WTF I was doing responding to the wrong guy. Or, I did, and we're all confused. But yeah.
It only costs a few cents to light a pilot light, but it turns on a flame that heats my house. So my pilot light is 5000% efficient at turning that electricity into heat, or whatever. A heat pump is like that except you don't have to buy the energy it brings in, you just have to pay to move it to where you want it.
All analogies suck.
Sorry, but, you're wrong. Any resistive or inductive load is, by definition, 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat. It might turn into photons for a while, but, as long as that photon doesn't exit your space, it turns into heat once it hits something opaque.
A heat pump moves heat energy from one place to another. It can move more heat than it takes to run the pump, which is the whole point of it. The heat moved to where you want it, that exceeds the amount of energy it takes to move it, is where the numbers higher than 100% come from.
Third party batteries can be found in a few seconds of googling, as can the procedures for a user to swap them out themselves with basic tools. It's only "non user serviceable" in the same way that an oil change for your car isn't.
Right, but, you don't have to have it replaced by Apple. http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Installing-MacBook-Air-Models-A1237-and-A1304-Battery/848/1 and a bunch of other sites have the procedure for swapping out the battery. No, it's not a "slide a clip and you're done" job, there's a screwdriver involved, but it's hardly difficult for anyone with any skill whatsoever. Not sure why subby thinks this makes it impossible, maybe they don't have a screwdriver and the skills to google.
The failure to build more nuclear reactors is the biggest social disaster since the sacking of the library of Alexandria. Just as that act set world civilization back by 1000 years, the failure of humankind to use carbon-neutral and safe modern designs of fission reactors will be seen by centuries of people in the future as a major failing.
It disgusts me that people who don't understand reality and science pretend that a 40 year old reactor design in Fukishima, or a completely unsafe design as in Chernobyl, have ANYTHING to do with modern nuclear energy generation technology. The ironic thing is that so often it's the people who pretend to care about the environment who are ignorantly opposing modern nuclear energy plants.
Off-topic shout out, sorry. I got my first job as a "real" Unix sysadmin in 1992 or so, when Curt left GE Medical Systems to go work on FGFS and other projects. Really cool to see it's going well and he's getting some top recognition. Good on ya, Curt! (I worked for Paul O. at your old desk after you left, we've talked a few times).
100 watt incandescent light bulbs are a buck each. How much was your Philips LED bulb, and, does it put out as much light as a 100W incandescent? If so, please provide the part number, because I can't find one that even comes close, for any price.
Not so much, the makerbot "kits" at least, 6 months ago, are infested with guess gaps. If you're not pretty hardcore geeky, and persistent, expect to be frustrated. Makerbot has gone from kits to pre-assembled systems now, with the spoken goal being less support call overhead (paraphrased) so they can focus on development rather than support. If you're not a pretty hardcore geek, it might overwhelm you.
In 1981, I got my first printer. It was a 7-pin, dot matrix printer that printed on 2.5" wide aluminized paper, and made the characters by arcing from the printhead to the "paper". Ozone fumes and shitty print quality, big time. 10 years later, you could buy a decent 9 pin printer for $400. I'm pretty sure that my Makerbot in the first 3,000 or so units, is the equivalent of that aluminized paper printer of decades ago. Just like then, I'm having fun being on the bleeding edge and I'm perfectly content with 1 out of 10 prints failing in a dramatic but informative manner. In 10 years, these things will be somewhat common, and in 20 years, they'll be everywhere.
ReplicatorG (from replicat.org) integrates the current Skeinforge, and does a great job of combining the visualiser, slicer, and gcode generator. Worth a look, works great with my Makerbot.
Right, the water soluble plastics that the Makerbot heated extruder uses would be great for lost-wax type casting, I'd think. I just mentioned the frostruder as an example of working in clay type stuff directly.
Gears are pretty easy, actually, to a point. How small are the teeth? http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3575 is a year or more old, but a good overview of what's possible, http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:10955 is a current design, you can see from the photo how the print quality is. The spiral gear is about 1.5" in diameter, for scale. Are the Sega gears near this size?
Check out makerbot.com's 3D scanner and printers, based on the RepRap projects mostly. For $2K you could build the printer and scanner - and the frostruder can extrude frosting-consistency stuff. Some guys are using clay, some are doing lost-wax type casting. thingiverse.com has many thousands of designs for download (free).
As one of the guys on the makerbot discussion group says, "The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed."
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Keep in mind power requirements and local/state laws. Machine shops usually require three-phase power. Transformers that support that will cost extra. Additionally, net metering and similar issues are subject to legislation. In some states solar currently makes sense for an environment like this, but not in others... and there are definitely no long-term guarantees.
Sure. So, if I was going to fill a roof with solar panels, assuming a reasonable sized roof, at some point, I could split it to thirds, and feed each phase back to the power company from that inverter. In reality, most factories will consume more power than a roof full of panels can provide, so it's just a cost offset mechanism. Unless your goal is to run the factory after the power grid collapses, it's just a cost avoidance strategy. Buy what you need from the utility, and sell what you generate back to them in a form that is convenient to YOU rather than them. In Wisconsin, the state laws are favorable to that approach. Other places will certainly vary. The "whole house UPS and off-grid if needed" is great for house-sized loads. With 20 panels, I could go off grid. The beauty in this is that I can sell excess power at retail rates back to the utility (again, varies by state), and still be able to go off-grid if something goes horribly wrong with society. I especially like how the payback is 6-ish years if energy prices don't increase at all. Once those panels and inverters are bought, the energy prices can do whatever they want, I still get those watts for free.
Ephemeral, my ass. Your way costs me $100 a month. My way costs me $25 a month. All you are doing is playing word games and bullshit in claiming my way isn't 400% as efficient as your way.
Seriously. The whole point of the law is to make sure people are only voting where they live. In Wisconsin at least, IDs for voting are free. Yet, people cry "disenfranchisement", as if somehow anyone, even someone who has no job, can somehow survive without a state issued ID. Can someone please, without frothing at the mouth and namecalling, help me understand what the actual objections of "Wow, you should be able to prove you're voting where you live", is a problem? Especially when, see previous re: State issued ID cards being free?
Well, maybe. Active tracking adds 30-35% to the power output (think: area under a square wave vs. area under a sine wave of same period and peak). But, it adds a LOT of moving parts, and when you're working with a finite area (like a roof), shading becomes a concern - you have to space them far enough in both directions to have them not shade each other at any time during the day. If you've got wide open spaces, and dedicated staff, the extra output MAY be worth the cost. But, if you want to get the most energy per acre of roof, fixed angle racked panels give you the most bang for the buck. If your trackers, room to put them, and upkeep cost more than 30% of the cost of the panels they're hosting, just put that money in more panels, with zero moving parts, and one-time-calculations for tilt and shadow prevention. As panels continue to drop in price, the more or less fixed cost of the trackers is going to continue to be less attractive, because it'll be an even higher percentage of an overall installation. This is based on Wisconsin, USA going rates as of this summer; by next summer, it'll probably be even more skewed away from trackers. Unless someone comes up with a better, cheaper tracker. As far as the sun-facing walls, well, maybe. Those will have to be on a separate MPPT feed, because otherwise those panels will current-limit the entire string of more properly aimed panels. And, they cost the same as that same panel at the right angle - awning mounted on the sun-facing walls if anything, but flat vertical mounting would be a waste. It's all about the surface area of the panel as presented to the sun, cosine of the angle and all that.
Depending on where you're located, the payback for a roof full of solar panels will likely be somewhere between 5-8 years, if energy prices don't go up. Panels are typically coming in with 20 or 25 year warranties, and the switchgear is like any other power switching equipment (keep the filters clean and the mice out). Plus then you can advertise that you're green, if you want. Isolating yourself from rising energy costs, even in part, may be attractive.
The country is big, with lots of low density areas. Thousands of miles of cable don't just pay for and install themselves, and the incentive to cover a lightly inhabited area just isn't there.
We can agree that heat pumps are vastly more efficient per watt used. But the efficiency numbers aren't comparable. This is my argument.
Heat pumps give additive overall system efficiency, but not in the same way light bulbs do.
You're either playing pointless word games, or you're making a subtle point that I'm missing. If I can spend 100 bucks a month in the winter to heat my house with one method, instead of 500 bucks with the other, then the first method is 500% as efficient as the second method. It doesn't matter what the methods are - could be parabolic solar, could be a woodburning stove, could be heat pump, could be "Shut the damn door, what were you, born in a barn?!?!", could be just turning the thermostat down. Doesn't change the end result which is a warm house for (cost).
Right. And for purposes of comparing it to lightbulbs, it's an invalid equation. These are NOT the same things.
Right, but from a "How much money do I have to spend to heat my house" perspective, it's completely valid. If I get 5 dollars worth of heat for one dollar of electricity, then it's 5 times more efficient than just warming up a space heater with that same electricity.
Oh, you were replying to the other guy, not me. Didn't realize that replies stopped indenting after a certain number. Whoops.
Yeah, same here, I was looking at it and wondering WTF I was doing responding to the wrong guy. Or, I did, and we're all confused. But yeah. It only costs a few cents to light a pilot light, but it turns on a flame that heats my house. So my pilot light is 5000% efficient at turning that electricity into heat, or whatever. A heat pump is like that except you don't have to buy the energy it brings in, you just have to pay to move it to where you want it. All analogies suck.
Sorry, but, you're wrong. Any resistive or inductive load is, by definition, 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat. It might turn into photons for a while, but, as long as that photon doesn't exit your space, it turns into heat once it hits something opaque. A heat pump moves heat energy from one place to another. It can move more heat than it takes to run the pump, which is the whole point of it. The heat moved to where you want it, that exceeds the amount of energy it takes to move it, is where the numbers higher than 100% come from.
Third party batteries can be found in a few seconds of googling, as can the procedures for a user to swap them out themselves with basic tools. It's only "non user serviceable" in the same way that an oil change for your car isn't.
Right, but, you don't have to have it replaced by Apple. http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Installing-MacBook-Air-Models-A1237-and-A1304-Battery/848/1 and a bunch of other sites have the procedure for swapping out the battery. No, it's not a "slide a clip and you're done" job, there's a screwdriver involved, but it's hardly difficult for anyone with any skill whatsoever. Not sure why subby thinks this makes it impossible, maybe they don't have a screwdriver and the skills to google.
The connector has more than just charging and USB data on it. Why should my phone be limited only to what can be done over USB?
The failure to build more nuclear reactors is the biggest social disaster since the sacking of the library of Alexandria. Just as that act set world civilization back by 1000 years, the failure of humankind to use carbon-neutral and safe modern designs of fission reactors will be seen by centuries of people in the future as a major failing. It disgusts me that people who don't understand reality and science pretend that a 40 year old reactor design in Fukishima, or a completely unsafe design as in Chernobyl, have ANYTHING to do with modern nuclear energy generation technology. The ironic thing is that so often it's the people who pretend to care about the environment who are ignorantly opposing modern nuclear energy plants.
Off-topic shout out, sorry. I got my first job as a "real" Unix sysadmin in 1992 or so, when Curt left GE Medical Systems to go work on FGFS and other projects. Really cool to see it's going well and he's getting some top recognition. Good on ya, Curt! (I worked for Paul O. at your old desk after you left, we've talked a few times).
100 watt incandescent light bulbs are a buck each. How much was your Philips LED bulb, and, does it put out as much light as a 100W incandescent? If so, please provide the part number, because I can't find one that even comes close, for any price.
Foxcomm employees, haven't you been watching the news?
Are you Muslim? If not, do you enjoy servitude?
You seem to have misspelled "decapitation".
Not so much, the makerbot "kits" at least, 6 months ago, are infested with guess gaps. If you're not pretty hardcore geeky, and persistent, expect to be frustrated. Makerbot has gone from kits to pre-assembled systems now, with the spoken goal being less support call overhead (paraphrased) so they can focus on development rather than support. If you're not a pretty hardcore geek, it might overwhelm you. In 1981, I got my first printer. It was a 7-pin, dot matrix printer that printed on 2.5" wide aluminized paper, and made the characters by arcing from the printhead to the "paper". Ozone fumes and shitty print quality, big time. 10 years later, you could buy a decent 9 pin printer for $400. I'm pretty sure that my Makerbot in the first 3,000 or so units, is the equivalent of that aluminized paper printer of decades ago. Just like then, I'm having fun being on the bleeding edge and I'm perfectly content with 1 out of 10 prints failing in a dramatic but informative manner. In 10 years, these things will be somewhat common, and in 20 years, they'll be everywhere.
ReplicatorG (from replicat.org) integrates the current Skeinforge, and does a great job of combining the visualiser, slicer, and gcode generator. Worth a look, works great with my Makerbot.
google "ronthomp mendel", it's at about 80% now.
I've read the MSDSs, have you?
Right, the water soluble plastics that the Makerbot heated extruder uses would be great for lost-wax type casting, I'd think. I just mentioned the frostruder as an example of working in clay type stuff directly.
Gears are pretty easy, actually, to a point. How small are the teeth? http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3575 is a year or more old, but a good overview of what's possible, http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:10955 is a current design, you can see from the photo how the print quality is. The spiral gear is about 1.5" in diameter, for scale. Are the Sega gears near this size?
Check out makerbot.com's 3D scanner and printers, based on the RepRap projects mostly. For $2K you could build the printer and scanner - and the frostruder can extrude frosting-consistency stuff. Some guys are using clay, some are doing lost-wax type casting. thingiverse.com has many thousands of designs for download (free). As one of the guys on the makerbot discussion group says, "The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed."