Solar project: general ideas

Before I mentioned my solar panel project, in general. The general requirements were simple:

• Supply additional heating to reduce electricity cost
• No grid-tie

If I were to go to simple solution, I'd go for grid-tie system, as electric grid already reaches the cottage. That doesn't really make any sense, however, since energy cost of electricity is around 4c/kWh now, and transfer cost (which essentially pays maintenance the electric grid) is around 6c/kWh (for total of ~10c/kWh).  As the grid-tie systems typically go, you get the energy cost you deliver reimbursed, but either way, the transfer cost is billed from you. In essence I'd be paying 2c/kWh for any excess energy I generate! Talk about insane proposition! Granted, there might be some lowered transfer pricing involved somewhere too, but I'm not fan of the idea either way.

• No batteries

No batteries clause is of course quite simple. Batteries large enough to contain sensible amounts of energy are huge and expensive and require additional investment later on, in form of replacements and maintenance. That would be pointless, so no.

• Monitor the temperature and grid supply in cottage

This is pretty handy for one's peace of mind when you consider that winters can be damn cold around here (-30 centigrade and below), and water and pipes tend to make really ugly mess when they freeze (or, really, when they thaw again). So knowing that temperature inside keeps above zero even during coldest nights is very nice. This would be in form of daily reports, with possibility of emergency reports thrown in if there is a problem - temperature inside dropping quickly, grid power going out for extended periods or something like that. So internet - or more to the point, cell network connectivity - is needed.

• Control connected (solar powered) heaters
• Monitor voltage and current of solar panels.

Now we're getting to interesting parts. First item here kinda requires the latter. If system turns on 800w heater and voltage drops, it's pretty clear the panels don't supply enough energy for that, so it's better to turn that one off and try some of the lower-powered ones instead. Current measurement isn't required here, but it allows system to calculate rudimentary power production figures. Just because I am engineer and such information, in form of tangible numbers is nice, no other reason.

• Supply mains-compatible AC power if requested

This is kinda extra alternative output for heater system. DC-AC inverters exists, so why not wire one up to supply extra power when heaters aren't needed but other power is, like for lights, laptop, fridge and so on during summers.

• Control grid-powered heaters

This is kinda an extra. The cabin will be empty for extended periods, and one can never know how cold it will be in the mean time - -10 or -40. So ability to turn off heaters when they are not needed due to warm temperature outside will be nice energy-saving bonus feature.

And, of course

• Do everything above safely

Whatever happens, this systems must not electrocute anyone, burn the cottage, cause electrical faults or anything else nasty like that. Everything else above is fairly simple stuff (but then again, I've been thinking about this quite a lot already so I have pretty good idea what the system will look like already), really, this is the line where design requirements get somewhat tricky.

So that is, in nutshell, my ideas of this project. More about the actual design later on when I start moving the ideas from my head onto the paper. Or CAD, actually.

Project: Auxiliary solar heating

I've mentioned this before, but here up north solar isn't exactly greatest energy source, no matter how much environmental nuts try to push it. Summers do offer lots of sun, but winters, when the power need is at its peak, the production is pretty much zero. Days are short and sun is very low at the horizon, at northernmost part of the country sun doesn't rise at all! Good luck with solar panels under these conditions.

I've also mentioned that I have this summer cottage with running water and grid power, and keeping it warn (due to water supply) is somewhat expensive. I'd love to reduce that expense a bit.

So I came up with auxiliary heating /power supply idea with some solar panels, say 6 or 7 250-watt panels, bringing DC voltage up to 220v or so (with variations up and down, depending on load and supply).

So the basic idea was controller box where can can measure incoming voltage and control loads - that is, resistive heaters and auxiliary DC/AC inverter that is not connected to main grid (used for other power needs, like fridge, in summers).

Say, four to six channels, each with varying sized heaters (for example 800w, 200w, 100w, 50w), that are toggled separately on depending on voltage and current supplied by panels, and with a user input power can be supplied to DC/AC inverter.

During the darkest part of the winter the production will be next to nothing, but by the time the days start to get longer (or shorter, during the fall) there still will be plenty of sun to supplement normal heating and hopefully cut down the cost of grid power.

Whether this will really ever be economical is separate issue. Panels aren't too expensive, less than 1000€ total (taxes included), and the controller box isn't too expensive either - PCB and parts will be make around 100€ total. Heaters will be another few hundred euros. Most expensive part is the DC/AC inverter to run equipment that expects normal 220v AC grid power, but that won't be used for heating anyway so it's kind of a extra. And since there will be no batteries and no grid-tie, there really aren't any other major costs.

This of course completely excludes all the labor needed to actually design and build the system, but then again, this is a hobby project (at least right now) so that doesn't really count. Being hobby project doesn't mean that I don't take this seriously though - there are large current at high voltages involved, so I am taking the safety of the design very seriously indeed.

Let's see what I can cook up here...

Politics: This may turn ugly

News of the date. Truck drove in the crowd in Stockholm. This, being our neighbor country, is the main headlines now here (some six hours after the fact). Nevermind that there is almost nothing but guesses and speculation going around, no real facts. So I'm not really interested, not yet. Tell me some facts, news men!

What is more real is that USofA just earlier spent several millions of dollars by bombing Syrian air base (news just speaks of cruise missiles without specifying the type, and I'm taking (probably way too low) estimation of some $500'000 each, times 50 or so). The company that provided these missiles must be lovin' it.

What happened just before this is that there was chemical weapons involved, with many civilians exposed, many seriously wounded or dead. Now, I have no idea whose chemical weapons those were but I find it to be unlikely that rebels of Syria suddenly managed to manufacture large amount of chemical weapons. Not impossible, mind you, just very unlikely.

Was it government then? In that case Bashar al-Assad either got very, very cocky, or just stupid. Attacking population center with chemical weapons? Even if it were just rebels they hurt ir would be really, really stupid move, as he was bound to know that such move would draw some really unwanted attention.

Be it either way, it happened, and the president (with very, very small p there) of US deemed it fit to retaliate by bombing Syrian army base. Where there very likely were Russian troops. They did warn Russians first (AFAIK), which was kinda nice, but nevertheless, this was bound to raise some serious issues between these two major powers.

What did happen was that Russians chose to drop out of their agreement with US to inform each other of what they were doing. At the moment I heard of this, I went 'uh oh, this won't be good'.

I would not be surprised if Russians were to attack some US troops now. Purely by mistake of course, they just happened to be where rebels were as well. Maybe few times over, before they re-neg their previous tell-then-kill agreement.

Or possibly it will turn out worse. Both of these major powers will benefit if Europe suffers, so what if they turn this conflict into a proxy war? Russian supporting government (ie. al-Assad), US supporting rebels. No direct contact between nations (I'd guess they'd try to avoid that as much as possible, otherwise they'd run a risk of turning this into real WWIII), but that would mean even more refugees and unrest within Europe, potentially being of benefit to both of them. And then there is the possibility of situation turning turning into "whoever controls the region controls the oil".

I just hope I am being paranoid. Because these scenarios sure aren't fun.

I killed the drill

Wife asked for seemingly simple thing; a board where she could place small mason jars so they wouldn't move during the use when training the dog (course is called 'nose work' I think.)  I didn't really have much to do right now, so I got to it immediately. First checking what would be needed - as it turns out that I'd need pretty much everything, as we were fresh out of suitable pieces of wood, not to mention hole cutting drill bits and everything. Except the drill.

After a brief visit to local hardware store (and grimacing of the cost of seemingly simple hole-cutting drill bit) I got back home and got to work. I noticed pretty much immediately that my cheap 550w Skil drill isn't happy about this job - guess hole drilling is a bit too much for it. Not to mention six holes that were needed.

I never got the sixth hole made - the drill died. I was hoping to get the sixth done with it, despite it's smoking calls for rest (or help), but alas, it wasn't to be. Dang.

This drill was not my first, going against my self-imposed tool-buying guidelines, but then again, I bought this drill before these rules (or guidelines) were really set in my mind. Although I kinda think the first drill doesn't count - it was extremely shoddy 20€ thing that promised a lot in its specifications - and actually broke the very first time I pressed the trigger. I got it almost as an afterthough from some store. Too bad I lost the receipt, I would've returned the damn thing otherwise for refund...

So now I got a half-finished dog training ... thingamajic and no drill. Guess I need to get a new one pretty soon - this time a quality brand one.

Are we in a simulation?

One of the old philosophical problems, also tackled by movies like Matrix, along with many others, is, simply: Are we living inside a simulation?

Without going into philosophical aspects of that, I've got to say that if we are, it is damn impressive simulation indeed.

Take issue of observable universe, for example. Let's for starters assume that the rules of the universe must be fixed and running from the beginning and whoever is running can't just improvise general rules at some point. I make this assumption since as far as we've perceived so far, the rules have not changed - system (in our solar system level) has been the same from the start, introducing us such weird things as epicycles when we got it wrong.

But this is just small potatoes so far. Let's expand this a bit. Our galaxy, Milkyway, has estimated of 100-400 billion stars (so, 100*10^9 - 400*10^9, in a bit more easily readable notation when talking about huge scales), and by now we can assume that quite many, if not most of these stars have at least one, if not more, planets. So we're talking at least trillion (1*10^12) major objects, and we're completely ignoring things as asteroid belts and such.

And expanding this again. Ultra Deep Field shows just tiny, tiny fraction of sky we see (way smaller area than the moon!) and it alone shows something like 10000 galaxies. Expand this to entire sky and we're talking about hundreds of billions of galaxies (100*10^9) again. Each with trillion (1*10^12) major objects. Which would place total number of major objects to somewhere around 1*10^23 range. That's 1, with 23 zeros following.

It's late when I'm writing this so there might be some stupid math errors, but nevertheless, I don't think I'm too far off. And again, we're still discussing only planet- or moon-sized objects and larger; smaller objects are so far ignored.

So again, returning to assumption that the simulation must be mathematically perfect from the start, it would have to consider gravity interaction of all these objects, all the time.

And here we are, where we can't even analyze such problems with mere 3 objects (three-body problem) but only in some very limited scenarios!

So I say again, if this a simulation, it must be backed by some pretty impressive mathematics to be able to simulate all these objects, since we certainly don't have capabilities for even infinitely tiny fraction of something like it. Without cheating, of course, but such cheat would be kinda obvious later with sudden changes in system behavior when exposed to detailed observation...

Of course system might be limited to things we can observe, but this was kinda my point with this - at the moment we can observe stupidly huge amount of objects - not necessarily directly, nor all the time, but still the behavior of objects previously observed must remain consistent during the simulation, in case we are to observe them again later. So even with cheats, things get pretty heavy.

I know, there are arguments to counter things I've said here, but nevertheless the energy cost for running such simulation would be simply enormous. Even if the rules if this universe don't apply in universe that is running the simulation.

It's so ...

Again, this post has nothing to do with electronics, but some anecdotes about tourism in Finland.

One thing many foreigners don't get when talking about Finland is how sparsely populated this country actually is. Huge land area, combined with just 5 million or so inhabitants mostly centered in larger population centers at southern part of country means that there are literally thousands and thousands square kilometres of ... well, you could say nothing, but there's forests, lakes, rivers and such mostly natural things. Entire northern part of Finland, Lappi, has over 100000 square kilometres of area, with some 120000 people on it (excluding Rovaniemi - largest city there - that has about 58000 people living there).

When I decide to take a car for a work trip, the first three to four hours from Oulu - at highway speeds; 80-100km/h - is usually spent for just getting to main population hubs of this country, first being typically Jyväskylä (about 300km away from Oulu). For the first 200-300 kilometres or so the scenery is mostly forest among main roads (and when traveling southwards, there is only four major routes - I know them all my the heart by now). Later it turns to fields and forests along roads.

I was told this story some time ago now, but I think it's worth repeating here.

Some persons I know had a friend of theirs from (I think) Germany visiting them here at Finland one summer, years ago. Like many Finns, they had a summer home/cottage by a lake, with all the usual accessories; pier with small boat, sauna, and nothing but forests and lake nearby as their nearest neighbor was kilometers away (or possibly there was another cottage nearby, just with no one in there at the moment).

They had good time, going to sauna, having some beers, talking and so on. It was getting a bit late (but it was still light; due to northern location, there is plenty of light in summer nights here) and suddenly someone noticed that it had been ages now since they had seen their German friend.

They got worried and went looking for him. Quite soon they found him, too. He was there, just sitting at the end of the small pier, by the lake, just staring at the opposite end of the lake.

They asked him what he was doing. He didn't respond for a while, and when he did, all he said, in quiet and almost trance-like voice was:

"It's so quiet here..."

Having just the sounds of nature around you, with no man-made noise, can be a real experience alone, one that being native here don't necessarily appreciate as much as one could.


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Just one misclick ...

Well, that was some fun hour or so.

See, here I was, trying to figure out how to make it possible to connect from office WLAN (which is kinda limited, for a reason) to my desktop for testing purposes.

So I am browsing through the firewall settings, trying some things, and ...

...Shit. Everything just stops working. That last setting (some bridge rule) apparently was Very Bad Idea.

As pretty much nothing works (and remaining live interface happens to be DMZ, from which I can't do anything anyway.)  So only option I have is to hit factory reset in the router. And start desperately rebuilding everything from scratch. All the settings, all the firewall and forwarding rules, everything.

And I realize I have absolutely no recollection on how to do it. The setup has been there for some two years now, virtually untouched aside some minor tweaks here and there. At this point I'm getting a bit nervous, especially since I have no internet access - until I manage to reconfigure it correctly.

This isn't a very pleasant feeling.

But then a small memory hits me. Last time I did this, didn't I make notes?

Yes I did. Not very clear ones - I'm quite certain that no one but me could rebuild the setup from those - but they were just sufficient enough to allow me to set up everything quickly. First outbound access (damn Cisco boxes provided by ISP make that annoyingly difficult), then inbound services one by one.

And now we're back. At least some of the obsolete port forward tweaks that were needed at some point for testing got thrown out too.

I think there is a lesson here somewhere, but guess I'm not seeing it, not right now...