Today is the one year anniversary of the Solar Panels Turnup, so I thought I'd gather a few stats to see how they did (unfortunately the full house monitoring system only became active more than 2 months later, so I don't have full stats).
Cobalt Power Estimated the panels yearly production at 8114Kwh for a year. I was a bit apprehensive during the quotes because of our weirdly shaped roof and shading issues from nearby trees, but in the end we got exactly 8700Kwh a year later, or almost a 600Kwh production beyond the estimate. Great!
Cobalt Power estimated our federal tax credit to $11,235 (the CA tax rebate is directly taken off the initial bill). I just got my taxes done and our tax credit was $11,746. this made the panels around $500 cheaper than quoted. Great again! :)
According to PG&E, we used around 1600Kwh since last year (i.e. we used about 1.5 months' worth of electricity), but due to the time of use credits (summer daytime electricity that we mostly produce is worth more than night and winter electricity), we actually got a $40 credit for the year, so we won't owe them anything outside of the monthly connection charge ($10, which is much cheaper than batteries and being off-grid). This year the $40 is lost but next year, they'll actually owe us whatever credit we get (i.e. we get a check back).
At this rate, we should break even in 5 years.
So in a nutshell, the system performed great so far. Cobalt Power definitely underpromised and over delivered and we're apparently done paying electricity bills from now on.
Here are the not quite yearly graphs (as a reminder you can zoom in by selecting a rectangle with the first mouse button and zoom out with the second button).
As a slight repost, below is a graph with production start and end (hour the sun starts hitting the panels and when it sets past the roof). Note the one hour jump on Nov 1st because of the daily savings change.
Production hours:
Production Kwh (nice to see that March is getting a lot more sun):
Last, but not least this page lets you get all the daily starts (note, you need to change the top preset to 3, 6, or 12 months to get useful data, last day doesn't show anything).
Day 1 was disappointing. There were 12 to 18 inches of fresh snow and because of poor organization and a stupid bus driver that needlessly stopped us in Auburn for almost 30mn, by the time we got to Squaw there was actually a traffic jam and it took 45mn to drive from hwy 80 to the Squaw entrance (a mere few miles).
It was already 10:30 by the time I made it to the first lift and by the time I got to the top, most powder had been well tracked out by hordes of local who had come that morning. Fairly disappointing :(
The snow was till good, but I sure wasn't swimming in powder like I was hoping. Later that day, the sun got overcast and the melted powder started icing up. Very sad... (and due to the fact that Squaw is way too low altitude-wise).
nice and sunny in the morning, melted the powder
even the back was pretty skied out
Track for Day 1
The next day, I just used to explore the edges of Squaw had had not gone to, espespecially as the main front sucks anyway since you're funneled back to a bunch of flat sections.
Riding Silverado was interesting: the terrain was very challenging since it was easy to get cliffed out and ski patrol didn't go out of their way to mark that side of the mountain. There lots of spots with slopes beyond 60 degrees but leading down to a mixture of ice and rocks :-/ A couple of times I ended up in a not so good spot and had to carefully get out of it.
Thankfully the snow did not ice up on the second day and I got to see most of the edges of Squaw. The one lowpoint was that the bolt holding the back plate of my NXT flow binding came out again, and I wasted close to 45mn doing a field repair. Thankfully I actually had the right tools and a set of the very special screws and bolts required (so I'm not carrying that heavy backpack for nothing :) ).
I took the line down between the gondola and cable car. A bit low on snow, but more scenic and different
Kevin nicely hosted us at his shop, Competizione Motors at Sears Point. He is a super knowledgeable Ferrari guy, and mostly works on race cars.
He gave us a very useful list of tips, like:
remember to go easy during your first laps to bring the brakes up to temperature, or you can glaze and ruin them
he actually recommends bringing temperatures to 3psi above stock and make sure that you equalize left and right temperature after the first session.
it's a good idea to slightly engage the brakes to set tha pads before you do the heavy braking
which fluids are recommended
you don't want slick tires on a street car
carbon brakes vs older regular pads
F355 mini pad vs current F430 carbon pad: huge difference
Kevin nicely agreed to work on my car to work out the bugs that have been bothering me, like misbalance shaking, checking the alignment, fixing the front/read brake bias, and a general inspection of the car.
Right after receiving my new motor and mounting it on my plane, I went for a quick test flight at the local park which I've flown at before since it's closer than Rancho San Antonio. I thought I'd save a few minutes by going to the park since I just wanted to have a feel for the new motor.
Ok, I'll save you the details, there was wind (no big deal), I was too close to the street at end of the park and when I made my turn to land back close to where I was, the plane flew right into the sun. I got blinded and by the time I could have seen it, I tried to dodge a power/phone line and lost. The plane hit the line motor first, and the plane fell right onto the street outside the park.
I have to say I actually had a string of good luck there:
cars avoided running over my plane (thank you).
plane actually got fairly little damage, glue to the nose will fix it.
the motor shaft didn't get bent and the motor looks fine.
prop is broken, but that's why I buy packs of 10, no biggie.
the only reason why the plane wasn't flying 1H later was the plastic piece that is holding the motor is broken and I'll have to buy another one. It's more the time to go get one than the $3 it likely costs (update: very strangely, one of my aileron servos died, considering I have zero impact damage on the plane, I was very surprised when I went to the field after fixing the plane, and it failed preflight due to a broken servo. Bummer, now I have to wait a few more days for a replacement...).
lipo got compressed during the sudden stop but looked ok.
Plane damage isn't too bad
I had a look at the lipo and it looked like only the connector piece of it got compressed but the 3 sheets of lipo were otherwise unbent/unarmed. The lipo looked ok so I put it back in my car with the rest of the pieces and drove home.
A good 25mn after the crash, it self ignited on the desk I was working on. I was able to throw it on the ground and then away from close to my car where it landed while the 3 layers of lipo ignited one after another. Nothing actually got burnt despite an otherwise intense fire as the 3 mostly fully charged layers caught fire one after another (it shot pretty vivid flames 2 feet sideways). Sorry, I was too busy watching the fire to take a video :)
this is what's left of the lipo
Needless to say that on top of very limited damage to my plane, I'm very lucky that the lipo didn't self-ignite in my car's trunk, or later on when I wasn't watching it.
Moral of the story, a charged lipo that got any kind of reasonable shock is a ticking timebomb! Check Lipo Fire on youtube for more examples.
After adding a tail ribbon to my plane (to make it easier to see where is the front and back when it's far away from me), I went for a few more flights to catch some higher altitude HD video.
My first flight went mostly ok: (make sure to select HD in the resolution slider)
Unfortunately, on the second flight, the motor crapped out. First it started vibrating a lot, hence the shaky video, and when I removed the throtlle in flight when preparing for landing, I wasn't able to re-engage it. The video after the fact gives the 4 beep code from the ESC which means motor failure, shutting down. At that point, the minimag with all that weight feels like a 2 for 1 glider at best. I don't remember if I tried to flare, but it looks like I barely had enough lift glide energy left to make it to the edge of the hill (beyond that, it would have gone below my field of view)
Turns out I was able to restart the motor on the ground after a full shutdown, but it didn't restart in flight and you can hear the unhappy motor sounds :)
Just like motor, the video had a problem: after downloading it on my laptop, I screwed up while recompressing the first video and wiped the second video in the process. The second video was still on the sd card, but its cluster table had been freed since I had reused the card already.
In this case, photo recovery software usually only has to find the signature of the file by scanning blocks, read the file header and deduce how long the file is from that info since it's already lost in the cluster table, and then rely on the fact that all blocks are super likely to be contiguous, so you can just keep reading linearly until you have the whole file. This usually worked well, but Christophe GRENIER's very handy photorec wasn't succeeding there, and neither were other pieces of commercial software I tried: the restored file would not play (I restored the file by hand myself too by just copying the blocks and got the same result).
In the end, I got really good help on the mencoder-users list from Reimar Döffinger, whom I owe a debt of gratitude to: he looked at my sd card image and figured out that my GoPro HD Camera wrote the index-related part of the file header, after the data blocks. With Reimar's help on what offsets I should be looking at, I was able to get the first part of the header at the beginning, concatenate the end of the header that was written after the data blocks, and then add the actual data blocks. After almost 2 weeks of trying, his answer worked and I got my file back. If you are interested in more details, see this message from the mencoder-users list.
Here it is: (make sure to select HD in the resolution slider). Jump to 04:20 for the motor failure.
To make up for the fact that he couldn't join me to Silverton, Arturo invited us for a 3 day weekend in Colorado. Due to our schedules, it was a bit last minute, and the bastards at United just jacked up their ticket price by 50% for the weekend 10 days away, so we took Frontier instead.
This turned out fine, except for the part where the Frontier plane was scheduled way too late on friday and we landed in Denver close to midnight local time, with still a 2H drive in the snow ahead of us (at least we got lucky, Colorado had been quite dry so far and had just gotten a well needed 12 inches).
we got the penguin plane :)
Denver's got it down for skiiers and snowboarders :)
Arturo got us to Silverthorne around 02:30, in the snow, uphill both ways and stuck behind a row of snow plows (actually they did have 4 snow plows blocking the entire freeway while cleaning the road).
All the pictures are geotagged, so clicking on them will bring you to a page like this one
which will show you were the picture was taken.
BreckenRidge
After a few hours of sleep, we painfully got up and headed for BreckenRidge. Unfortunately half of Denver hand their brothers had done the same due to the fresh snow and it took over an hour to drive a few miles, get a parking spot in an off resort lot, and then a bus to the gondola.
I think it was noon by the time we had made it to Imperial Peak (and unfortunately we lost Jennifer in the process who had trouble with the T-Bar).
Jennifer's beloved T-Bar :)
Imperial Bowl from the near 13kft peak
Probably one of the Highest Peaks with a Ski Lift to in the Continental US
BreckenRidge was fun, but just too many people that day, and quite frankly still a bit low on snow.
Nice Powder Run with Arturo off the T-Bar:
The second day, we met up with Arturo's friends: Suwei and Karl and drove to Vail. Vail is indeed a huge resort, and there too we had to drive to an offsite parking lot and take a bus to get to a lift. The next 2 hours were spent crossing the mountain to the other side where we wanted to go, doing some nice runs in the process though.
Vail definitely had more snow, plus what was falling this day.
Pretty
Aspen Trees
The whole crew
Suwei and Karl nicely invited us to their condo that evening, by Keystone, so what we could just walk to the lift the next day.
Nice Ridge run with everyone:
Farther down that run where Jennifer runs into me and I go through some nice trees after that:
Nice Tree Run with Arturo:
Here are the stats, gpx track and map for Day2 at Vail.
Keystone
After another 5-ish hours of sleep (I don't sleep well at altitude), and not much more for Jennifer, we got our butts off the condo and to the nearest Keystone lift.
Arturo, we can't tell it's you with your mask :)
Now you see how I take my GoPro HD videos :)
Snowman, or something :)
Keystone, while a bit smaller, was still quite nice to ride in my opinion, especially with the fresh powder.
Conditions were quite nice, and I did a fair amount of tree runs. The forests however had just enough snow, and it was easy to catch a hidden tree trunk or branch and fall. The trees were also fairly dense, making riding quite challenging, but I like challenges :)
Nice little run with Karl, Arturo and Jennifer, finishing up in the trees:
This was one of my last tree runs, when my brain was definitely slowing down, and I missed a turn in front of a tree, ending up on my back, head downhill and my board stuck behind the tree :)
Here are the stats, gpx track and map for Day3 at Keystone.
This was definitely a great deal of fun, we lucked out on snow, and big thanks to Arturo for taking care of most of the organization, and Suwei and Karl for hosting us and showing us around the slopes.
