Turquoise Energy News #145
covering June
2020 (Posted July 4th 2020 AD / 25 AI - After Internet)
Lawnhill BC Canada - by Craig Carmichael
www.TurquoiseEnergy.com
= www.ElectricCaik.com
= www.ElectricHubcap.com
Month
In
"Brief"
(Project Summaries etc.)
- Bugs Ugh! - Building a Wall - Ground Effect Craft: a little
more work - Lithium Battery Charging - A Thought about Open Loop Air
Heat Pumping
(OLAHP) - Electric Transport Infrastructure is Improving -
Compressed Air Locomotives
In
Passing
(Miscellaneous topics, editorial comments & opinionated rants)
- Gardening and Chickens - Bug Bite Rash - Food, Economic, Population
and Disease Woes "Medley" - Wall Building Pictures - Small Thots - ESD
- Detailed
Project Reports
-
Electric
Transport - Electric Hubcap Motor Systems
* Miles Truck: 5:1 Planetary Gear replacing 40 pound transmission (Why
isn't this finished?)
* 'Electric Hubcap' Unipolar Motors: "Outrunner" Radial Flux Design?
* Ground Effect Vehicle - working on the model: Sigh, battery issues!
Other "Green"
Electric Equipment Projects - No Reports
Electricity Generation
* My Solar Power System:
- New Panel Connected & Heavier, Shorter Wire improvement -
Monthly
Solar Production log et cetera - Notes.
Electricity Storage
* Turquoise Battery Project
(NiMnOx-Zn in Mixed Alkali-Salt electrolyte) - No
Report
Once again I
seemed to have
a hard time getting around to energy projects. For one thing, after
almost 3 years I finally built a wall on the windward side of the roof
shell covering the travel trailer to keep most of the rain out. Then,
there
just seem to always be too many
other things that need doing, and every time I walk from one place to
another, I am distracted by something that needs doing there. The
gardens, once planted, as usual seem to get badly neglected but usually
need some pressing attention anyway. Everything is usually
underwatered. (I bought some sprinkler system components, but haven't
got
around to hooking them up.)
And I think I'm spending too much time watching various
videos and reading things on line in the
evening. One result of all this is a long In Passing section of
collected facts and my opinionated opinons, and only a couple of boring
"detailed
project reports".
On the 20th I finished framing this end wall and putting
up
the plywood. This roof over the trailer just might become a
dwelling if I ever get to finish it. (More wall pictures in In
Passing below)
Then I took a short break and in talking with my neighbor
where
he was mowing a lawn, apparently I got badly bit by the dense
cloud of "no-see-ums" (midges, gnats?), stirred up by the lawn tractor.
They must have hit a critical mass of bites. I got a red itchy rash
over my whole body and with 3 sleepless and itchy nights and days, then
one more day 'blitzed' from antihistamines I didn't
get much of anything done. For anyone interested I wrote it up in
several paragraphs in "In Passing". (I seem to do a lot of complaining
these days.)
I did some
little bit of work on the ground
effect craft. I finished the
battery tubes and ran one of the ducted fans. But the lithium
(lithium-iron phosphate?) cells, which doubled the whole weight of the
model and which I had fully expected would supply adequate current,
were disappointing. When I turned the motor on full, the voltage
dropped from 23 to 11, with just 33 amps coming out from the two
parallel sets of cells - only 16.5 amps per set. It made a lot of
wind, but the model didn't slide on the floor. I ordered some specific
model aircraft batteries to match the motors. It will be about 1.5 Kg
(and I 300$) lighter with those. And have a lot more power. ...and they
are supposed arrive in August, when I thought it just needed some
assembly now to try it out.
(I might hook up the present cells and see if I
can coax it into motion anyway.)
Someone pointed out that some things like the canard front
of and behind the fans, and the motor wires, will cause drag. Perfectly
true but I'll worry about them if it gets moving fast enough and still
doesn't fly well. Even after all this time, it's still just a proof of
concept model. If it works well, I'll be on to the full size version if
I pursue it further on my own. (I'd rather get some support.)
I also put together one set
of the chargers I had envisoned for lithium batteries. In the original
plan, each cell in series would have its own charger with a floating
output. Then I realized that that was a bit of overkill: if two cells
in series were charged together, there was still no chance (besides a
cell failure) that one charging first would go over its rated voltage
before the second one equalized. (With low current charging, even 3 or
4 cells are okay.)
I ran into a snag when I couldn't find isolated output DC
to DC converters that could be set to the right voltage. They are
apparently more difficult to make than non-isolated because of the
challenge of voltage feedback for regulation from a floating output
voltage, usually using an optical isolator.
Then I got
some "10 amp" adjustable 120 VAC to DC converters and found they had
the worst voltage regulation of anything I've seen since the 1970s.
(Like, completely unregulated for line, load or temperature, and the
slightest touch of the control
sent the voltage way up or down.) Charging batteries needs a precise
maximum voltage. So then I finally thought I could use those to get the
isolation and then a DC to DC converter. Even then they needed a diode
at the battery to block discharge when the chargers weren't plugged in.
Somehow my "simple" lithium
charger idea was getting more complicated than just buying a specific
multi-cell "balance charger". or (hmm!) several cheap regulated lab
power supplies. (That actually might be a good idea!) But I did get one
pair made and put it in
the Sprint car.
The result seemed good. Once set up, I set the DC to DC
buck converters to about a 6 amp limit (not trusting the crappy AC to
DC units
for their rated "10 amps") - not a fast charge, but certainly more than
a trickle. One of the cells responded by refusing to rise above 2.998
volts.
Its mate in the charging was obliged to go up to 3.66 - still well
under the 4.2 volt limit, as planned. With more charging the troubled
one dropped to 2.98 volts instead of going up. I finally gave up and
turned it off. Days later it sat at 2.991 and the other at 3.66.
Between that and one other
cell
that died down to zero volts when I left the Miles truck uncharged for
a couple of weeks, I seem to have at least two bad 100 amp-hour lithium
cells. And I now only have one spare cell, which has an "X" drawn on it
- not auspicious.
I can pull one more 4-cell battery out of the Sprint
and still have it work, but I feel like I'm running short of batteries.
Perhaps I should get back to work on my own 'everlasting'
nickel manganate-zinc cell designs!
A Thought about Open Loop Air Heat Pumping (OLAHP)
I have an additional perspective based on the experiments
earlier this year. As estimated at the times, the first and smallest
fridge compressor (~75W)
seemed to give not a lot of heat, but had the highest COP at 4 to 5.
The
larger fridge compressor (~120W) didn't do much better for heat and the
COP was lower, maybe 3. The large Makita compressor (920W) output the
most heat, but it had the lowest COP, not even 2.
I had lamented that the first compressor had a very narrow
pipe inside, restricting the flow of compressed air. The second one was
more free. The Makita moved a lot of air.
Of course, much of the expectation of high COPs is that
the passive outdoor heat exchanger will raise the temperature of the
outdoor air much of the way toward room temperature before the
compressor uses it. I think my exchanger as built is adequate for the
smallest compressor, "underpowered" for the second, and very inadequate
for exchanging heat with the high air volume consumed by the Makita.
Evidently a
larger exchanger, one with more heat exchange surface areas, is needed
for
house heating. (And of course, the lower the outdoor temperature, the
better it needs to be as well.)
This simple passive component evidently needs very careful
design consideration.
On July 2nd I talked with someone who I might want to work
with as a
business manager. We came to the tentative conclusion that OLAHP for
small spaces might be about the best project to pursue first in a
sequence. Providing the simplified "ROVAC" compressor and the outdoor
heat exchangers can be made satisfactorily, development is otherwise
pretty straightforward, and there would surely be no shortage even of
local
customers.
Electric Transport Infrastructure is Improving
As time goes
on electric transport infrastructure is gradually improving (except on
Haida Gwaii so far). Petro-Canada stations around the country have put
(or
are putting) in DC fast chargers for those traveling. The price is of
course such that they will make a good margin, but if you're traveling
across country, anywhere you can stop and charge without having to
spend the night is a blessing. And of course it's still a lot cheaper
than gasoline.
(Pictures by Tom Sawyer)
Someone asked me how I was
going to charge a full size ground effect vehicle. Good question! They
certainly aren't likely to have electric charging stations on wharves
any time soon! If one went somewhere, one might have to stay there
overnight just because of having to charge at a 120 V, 14 A receptacle.
Compressed Air Locomotives
I ran across a video about historic compressed air
locomotives and their operation. Yes, they really were in use in
various places around 1900 including for passenger transport in cities.
Near the end of the video he mentions Elon Musk's
"hyperloop" type air driven transport, and finally the "perpetual
motion car" using compressed air (1934). I think the diagram below
illustrates my
little point from TE News (?)143, about the more complex something is,
the harder it is to pick holes in why the perpetual motion won't work.
While he talks in French really fast (a bit like Hank
Green in "Sci Show" etc.) and I couldn't follow most of it, there are
diagrams and things many in English, and photos of compressed air
locomotives, here and there throughout. I've copied a few below, just
because I think the subject is interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5ejsEzvq9g [En
Français, channel "monsieur bidouille"]
But I must assume electricity made things lighter, easier
and less costly. Metal air tanks are bulky and have an explosion risk.
(The new "explosion proof" carbon fiber tanks would be much better, but
I assume a rip in a tank could still be deafening to those nearby.)
Batteries are of course the key to electric transport
except on fixed routes where power wires can be strung. Better
batteries further improve the value of electric transport technologies.
Even
where electricity to run motors or charge batteries is generated by
'dirty' power sources, it centralizes the problem instead of having
zillions of individual fossil fuel burning machines, making potential
solutions simpler and more worth while.
In Passing
(Miscellaneous topics, editorial comments & opinionated rants)
Gardening & Chickens
I had left one patch of garden by the greenhouse, where I
grew potatoes last year, to plant some later crops. I got some things
planted but suddenly it was overgrowing with potatoes faster than
anything else was growing. I
guess it's a potato patch again this year! (Far end, 2nd picture
below.) Potatoes seem to grow like weeds around here. Any tiny potato
or piece left in the ground is soon a big, healthy potato plant
overgrowing whatever else was planted there. Of course, if there's a
food scarcity something with calories that grows like a weed, anywhere,
is probably a good thing. Millions of Irish couldn't be wrong. At
least, until the potato blight.
The month's produce included asparagus, arugula (which
soon went to seed), an egg shaped cabbage as big as any a in grocery
store (started in the indoor LED garden last winter), the beginnings of
peas in the greenhouse, a couple of good broccolis (and more still
growing), a few leaves of lettuce, green onions, and I started digging
up some garlic bulbs that were planted last fall with the foliage now
dying off. Some of the earliest wheat plantings are starting to form
seed heads.
Mice! No, Birds!
On July 2nd I noted that of some beans I had recently
planted in the greenhouse, only one had come up. I thought maybe the
seeds were too old. At this time of year, the best growing weeks go by
and planting delays may mean no crop. I found some scarlet runner bean
seeds and planted them. On the 3rd I looked and found that mice(?) had
dug at least some of them up and eaten them.
I had rats digging up pea and bean seeds when I lived in
Victoria. (No crop that year in spite of repeated plantings. I caught
on too late why nothing would come up.) I had finally learned to make
shallow wire fence mesh
"baskets" to put over seeds until they came up. I didn't think they
were needed in the greenhouse, but I now replanted the beans and put a
couple of those over them. (These bean seeds are 4 years old, too! Will
they come up?)
Then I looked at the peas nearby. Some had been almost
ready to eat the day before (if not a week before). Instead I could see
that there were a lot of peas gone! I thought it was mice eating them
just as they got ripe! No wonder they were "almost ready" for so long.
I found chewed open pods both on the plants and on the ground. And in
climbing up they were knocking over the plants and breaking the stems.
Mice have been a plague around here this year. This wasn't anything I
had considered. I've never had anything but deer eat my growing peas
before. How does one make a rodent proof greenhouse, and yet let
pollinating insects in and out? I would certainly have to tear it down
and start over. I pulled up the pea stems and wove them through the
support wire. That looked better!
Then I (again, July 3rd) found a small bird "trapped" in
the greenhouse when I went in. And all those pea plants I had just
pulled in close to the stucco wire support the previous evening, were
eaten through and all their pods were gone! Only peas and pods farther
from the supporting wire were left. Arg! It wasn't mice, it was birds!
They weren't in there by accident! That actually has happened to me
before, in Victoria. The guy at the plant nursery up here said he'd
never had trouble with birds. But here it was again: give them a handy
place to land, and they chew up your pea plants. I shouldn't have
trusted he was right. I suppose that's a main reason people use string
"pea netting" instead of wire. A lesson I've now learned twice. I think
I'll switch to chicken wire, oriented vertically so there's no
horizontal surfaces to land on. I wonder if I can remove the present
wire and swap
that in? Seems like an unlikely prospect.
And back in 2017 Jack had mentioned birds plucking out his
seeds. Maybe the bean seeds, and the plucked wheat seeds in the new
garden in the spring, was the work of these little brown birds, too,
and not the mouse plague at all. (In fact, IIRC the wire "baskets"
placed
over the seeds was Jack's idea, now that I think of it.)
Apparently we have airborne mice around here!
Slug Fencing
The slugs got some good quinoa, squash, chard, sunflowers, lupins,
beans, corn and miscellaneous other vegetables. This month I cut up
some 4 liter PE milk
cartons into plastic 'rings' and put them around some plants, pushing
them a little into the ground on all sides. While I'm pretty sure the
slugs *could* climb up the plastic, they don't seem inclined to do so
(so far), and I have some zucchinis and chard growing nicely in the
rings where my plantings of quinoa and chard earlier in the spring had
been chewed to bits. It seems to be much the most effective thing I've
tried.
That gave me the idea to put up 6 inch tall pieces of
plastic around the whole garden to keep them from coming in off the
lawn and from the bushes
(where they're everywhere) in the first place. I didn't get very far,
but I did one edge of the new garden and planted beans inside of that.
Before these might not have lasted long enough for me to know they had
germinated, but this time they have at least got a good start, a couple
of inches high with unchewed leaves. (There are some missing, tho,
empty gaps in the line. I'm going to guess birds dug up the seeds and
ate them. Hmm... July 4th some more are poking up. Maybe just slow
germinating.)
I bought a piece of 'coroplast' (PP?) plastic and sliced half of
it into four 6 inch 'slug fence' pieces. (The other half into three 8
inchers.) I
would be best to put it all the way around to complement the deer
fence. (Yet another garden job that ought to get done!)
Toward the end
of the month, the corn that was planted early under the PE plastic
"cold frame" was pressing on the plastic 'roof' and I took it off. The
tallest one is waist height; a few others are over knee high. The ones
closer to the house wall (some replaced owing to slug damage, but I
think they get less light too) aren't as large. The idea is that it has
now had a "jump start": it has grown enough, early enough, that it will
produce corn before summer is over. But much still depends on how nice
the summer is. (Sigh, another place to put in slug fencing, all along
beside the sidewalk!)
Well, even if it goes well, I won't have much to share
with neighbors or trade with. But I might expand on the idea next year,
with more, taller plastic enclosures, in the larger new garden with
slug fence set up. And I'll grow the "early" variety corn. Altogether
it seems promising.
I think it's probably too
cool and breezy around here for locusts. I rarely see grasshoppers or
crickets. Seeing what's happening in other places around the planet,
that at least is a blessing.
The chickens are now over two months old. There being two roosters and
generally too many chickens in an enclosure I had envisioned for just
two or three, one beautiful brown rooster regrettably was made into two
dinners in late June. The other four have now traveled around the yard
and house in the "chickenmobile". (It has two doors. I guess that
makes it a "coupe".) I move them often. They spend a little while
pecking away at the lawn, then I guess they've got everything and after
a while they just lie around. Unfortunately they still eat quite a lot
of chicken feed. Eggs are still 3 or 4 months away. Someone said the
grayish one with tufts of feathers sticking out her cheeks will
probably lay blue eggs!
An eagle flew into a nearby tree on the 30th. I suspect it
was checking them out. But with wire over the top, they should be safe
from hawks, ravens and eagles. (I think they're too big now for ravens
to tackle.)
(The dark colored ones blend into the shadows much better
than the white ones.)
Bug Bite Rash
My neighbor Ron was mowing the lawn. I went over talked
with him for a few minutes. A dense cloud of "no-see-ums" (midges,
gnats?), doubtless stirred up by the lawn tractor, descended on me. I
kept wiping
my exposed skin, but I only had a sweater on instead of a jacket and
they must have been getting in through the loose weave. Soon we had
both had enough and departed. But soon my armpits were itchy. That
seemed like an odd place to itch. I ignored it for an hour while I did
another little job in the crawl space. But it was getting worse fast.
The tiny biters must have hit some critical mass.
I had a bath, but it continued getting worse. Then an
antihistamine. A red itchy rash with welts spread all over my body
except my head and below the knees. (The lower legs and feet got it
too, the next day.) Perhaps I
spread it by scratching or rubbing the itches.
Then I rubbed warm sugared salt water on my skin. (Sugar?
I don't invent home remedies, I just use them. I think the sugar makes
it sticky so the salt stays on.) That didn't help much.
It seemed more like the rubbing had just spread the rash. The next day
I tried again with much saltier water and doused it on rather than
rubbing. That seemed to work a lot better, but wherever clothing put
pressure on it, it started itching again. So I sat on a towel on a
chair at a computer with no clothes on, and was a bit chilly but
started to
feel human again.
After two sleepless nights I had called the hospital and
went to see a doctor. She recommended/prescribed some antihistamines,
but by that time the drug store was closed. The 3 hour trip (there was
a long wait) with no treatment and my clothes on left it all getting
rapidly worse again and I did some more sugared salty water, since that
seemed to give the most relief. But it was hard to teach myself to just
slop it on instead of rubbing it in.
And of course it meant another trip to town the next day
to go to the drugstore. (which has been closed except for prescription
pickup since April. Apparently everything else can go ATRS while
there's the vague threat of this wuhan virus with zero cases on this
island so far.)
Then I remembered I'd had this same, or very similar, itch
and occasionally welts before when I lived in Victoria. And, I think,
just a couple of times
since I moved. It would be a small area on my hand or my wrist.
I would rub or scratch it, and it would spread around nearby. Most
unpleasant! I never did understand where it came from. I thought
perhaps spider bites, but I never found a culprit. I'll bet it was
midges, maybe just one or two, getting into my bedroom at night and
biting wherever was exposed. If it happens again I'll have to note
whether it only happens when bugs are in season or also in winter.
Food, Economic,
Population and Disease Woes
* I have on occasions felt somewhat sick to my stomach. It comes in
bouts lasting on and off for perhaps a week. It started happening
again. What's wrong with me? Then I thought, the stores here don't have
my favorite "Orowheat" bread any more, and now I was mostly baking my
own bread in my bread machine. For a change, I had bought a loaf of
"Dempsters" bread (that's what was available) and was almost finished
it.
I think it's the bread. There are some strange ingredients
towards the bottom of the list and I suppose one of those could be
causing the problem, but nothing stood out to me as a "red flag". "100%
whole grains"... sounds healthy... but what whole grains?
I suspect it's made with Monsanto "glyphosate herbicide
tolerant" GMO flour(s), which is known to cause digestive problems. (It
seems to have caused millions of people to decide they're "gluten
intolerant", and the effect has been called "wheat belly".) I stopped
eating it. I
stopped feeling sick. I fed the last of it to the crows, not my
chickens.
The genetic engineers, and the executives at Monsanto who
pursued this massive experiment with the world's food supply and all of
humanity as guinea pigs knew it wasn't healthy, but did they realize
just how
much insidious, almost planet wide harm they've done to everyone's
wellbeing? (And just as the glyphosate lawsuits started coming,
Monsanto was sold to Bayer. I suppose those who were in charge then
have
retired rich and laughing instead of being shot.)
I remember at one point people were demanding that food
products with GMO ingredients be labeled as such. (Was that the
California 'initiative' where the state government "lost" 100,000
signatures so that there weren't enough to cause it to be on the
ballot?) Someone promoting them said "You might as well label them
'poison'. No one would buy them." 'Poison' would only have been a fair
warning for splicing in the "glyphosate tolerance" gene. But big money
once again forced its way through over the real interests of society.
Now you don't really know what you're eating.
* And lately you don't know where it came from either, foreign foods
now getting a "Product of USA" label just because a US company imported
them. I'm not sure if that's also the case in Canada. But a tin of
herring with a Canadian company name on it didn't it say where the
herring came from. I think we can be sure that they would have said
"Product of Canada" if they had come from Canadian fishermen.
* Say... when did we start using herring so much instead of sardines,
anyway?
Isn't herring the species that's suddenly so scarce that the whole food
chain that lives off them is starving? Are we strip mining the whole
ocean of everything? When do we start eating krill? Oh, wait... we
already catch the krill, and feed them to farmed fish. Oh, wait... all
the
"mysteriously" dead whales in the news... no krill would mean they
would starve! Then
we eat
the farmed fish.
Nothing sinister about eating "farmed fish". Might as well have just
kept whaling until they were too scarce to bother. They could go the
way of the Stellar Sea cow.
I saw a video on youtube
of a gigantic fishing operation with a ship traversing a wide circle -
a mile or more? - letting out netting. When it reached the starting
point it
was tightened and pulled in, and everything in the huge circle was
netted and brought on board, tons of small fish. A dozen or more people
were working on it. I was shocked.
Is that where my herring came from? How many ships do that daily? What
is still left in the oceans? What happens when it's all gone?
* And so many people still think the world isn't overpopulated, let
alone heavily overpopulated and headed for disaster. When I was born
(1955), the population was estimated to be 2.75 billion. This was
already the largest population ever. In 1960 it hit
3 billion. I could only shake my head and gape in amazement as it hit 4
billion (1974; start of homelessness in USA around (?)1982), then 5
billion (1987), then 6 billion (1999), then 7 (2011). And nobody ever
seemed concerned. Except the most idealistic people who decided not to
have children themselves. Now we are
approaching 8 billion!
In the 'developed world', birth control was developed and
people started having smaller families, even below replacement levels.
In the less developed countries without birth control, people also kept
having sex and the big
families kept coming. No one from the 'developed world' seemed to want
to help educate or lend a hand - we just sent food aid so they could
have more and more starving people. We should have been sending birth
control pills and teachers to initially teach their teachers of the
methods and the absolutely essential need to manage the population if a
good quality of life was desired and starvation of their children was
to be avoided. (Better still, bring their promising teaching students
to North America and Europe to learn, and then send them back.)
For a while I thought at least the developed world would
be okay, that our populations would stop growing with the lowered birth
rates. But alas, our "Ponzy scheme" financial system demands
exponential growth to prevent financial
implosion, and rather than face the difficulty our amoral leaders just
imported more and more people
from the bulging populations elsewhere and we allowed ourselves to be
overrun. In fact, as the population continued to grow, surely white
people have had even fewer children owing to the worsening quality of
life. (White births are now a minority everywhere and in a few more
generations there may be no more white race, and a somewhat similar
situation applies to the Japanese. China is headed in that direction
too.)
The quality of a civilization can only reflect the quality
of the people who compose it. Ideals doesn't survive if the idealists
of each generation allow themselves to be pushed aside and killed (or
they are
never born) by those who give ideals and even practical matters of
future sustainability little
thought.
I understand that with the ever-growing population, each
generation since World War Two has
been poorer than the generation before it. In the last decade,
large numbers of people have been barely eking out a
living, with a growing number living in tents and on the streets.
Worldwide. Now, in 2020, the virus lockdowns are bringing things
rapidly to a head. The "everything bubble" was already starting to
unravel, especially by
2019. Its collapse has been
greatly accelerated by locking down society.
Little comment is needed on the
above.
The graphs below of USA housing payment defaults provide a
glimpse of the extent of the economic troubles. Almost 1/3
of all Americans surveyed suddenly can no longer pay for
their accommodation. There are already swelling populations
of homeless people in many cities. Now for many more, the wolf
will be at the door when the "mortgage forbearance" runs out.
The mortal future for vast numbers of people in the USA
(and one suspects most everywhere) is suddenly
in grave doubt -- they literally may not have one. Food production has
already suffered global
catastrophes of weather and plagues in and since the 2019 growing
seasons, and
now work has been hampered and halted in spring planting season by
decisions of politicians, so casually made to prevent a few deaths by
virus with no thought to any other consideration. The governor of
Washington
state decided if fruit pickers were afraid of the virus, there would
simply be no fruit picking this year. A whole state: food production
canceled! With record high populations everywhere! How far detached
from reality are the decision makers?
Food production can't be
brought back in weeks or months: planting time for 2020 is over, and
many experienced farmers and companies in the food production and
distribution chain have been bankrupted - could it be even half of
farmers? - making "back to normal" in 2021 almost impossible, too.
Even many types of seeds are now in short supply after two years of
disastrous plantings.
Countries have been trying to buy food from other
countries, and some of
those countries are banning exports to be sure they have enough for
their own populations. And now the best producing countries last year,
those of South America, are being ravaged by locusts.
I expect deaths from certain of
these causes to
be "ballooning" rapidly in the coming years.
* I hear that some well-to-do people, in their recognition of the
seriousness of
the overpopulation problem, "ideally" want to reduce the population to
500
million. Even if there were some reasonable and humane way to attain
this, it would surely be swinging the pendulum much too far the other
way.
There are ridiculous estimates of "10 or 20 million"
people for the global population way back in hunter-gatherer times. But
the population of North America alone was estimated to be around
50
million hunter-gatherers in 1550 before smallpox struck down perhaps
90% of them over the next century. Scaling up from that we can assume
that the whole world
population was more likely around 500 million even in the most
primitive of times tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Agriculture, even early agriculture, has been said to
quadruple the man-land ratio - always the ultimate deterministic factor
in population levels - so the world population could have been up to
around 2
billion any time since recorded history began. I'm not at all confident
that figure was never reached, or at least approached, at any time
before 1927 as is often claimed. It
could perhaps have been there for example in the most prosperous of
Roman times, with China and India also agrarian and well populated. Of
course no one was taking global censuses in that era.
I suspect that in this modern age, with our present
technologies and those we are now uncovering (esp. 'free' energy from
HE rays, and small scale automation... and perhaps low energy heating
and air conditioning) the world could comfortably support up to perhaps
3 billion people - certainly well over 2 billion. If the 'free' energy
were
used to desalinate sea water and turn vast deserts into gardens,
perhaps
that would rise somewhat. If the population should ever go down to 500
million, would modern civilization with all the technological gains -
and the few but priceless social gains - all so hard-won in recent
centuries, be
maintained and human progress continued? Debatable. 2 to 3 billion
would do it much better.
After the coming "population bubble" collapse, such
numbers, which will be willingly kept stable by all to prevent a
repeat calamity, will have a high and sustainable quality of life with
global cooperation and no wars, leading to tremendous advances in
social stability and finally social sustainability.
* Here is a Youtube video, several years old now (ie, well before
Wuhan), about how disease organisms cross the species barrier from
animals into humans and are likely to cause a future pandemic - just
such as is now in progress. Such
crossings happen 'all the time', so the present viral concern is most
unlikely to have been a conspiracy as many have speculated. What is
making it so serious is the huge human population that will help a
pandemic to spread rapidly, especially in overcrowded cities - just as
has been seen in Wuhan and New York for example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI11hHOya34
The next one could be far worse, and someone has just told
me [June 29th] that there is some new human disease brewing in China,
said to have come from pigs. Uh-oh! (Okay... so far only spreading via
pigs, not human-to-human. Yet.)
12 foot unplaned 2"x6" wall studs are a lot heavier than
the 8 foot
2"x4" ones I've dealt with before. In fact, compared to dressed "stud
length" (90"?) x 2x4s, they are about three times the volume and
weight of wood. (No wonder I only carry one at a time, and set them
carefully
so they won't fall over unexpectedly!)
I used 1/4 inch plywood instead of 3/8" because I could
hold up a sheet
with one hand while on a ladder. I could use my other hand to get it
into the exact right place, get the cordless drill from between my
knees, and get a couple of screws in to hold it in place. They didn't
have 1/4" fir so I got birch. Seems nicer anyway.
Next: the south wall footings. (Ugh!)
Small
Thots
* I was born two years
before the first "Sputnik" satellite was launched into near Earth
orbit. I am "Pre space age".
When I was reminded that after leaving the protection of
Earth's magnetic field for a week or so, the lunar astronauts had
mentioned seeing bright flashes of light with their eyes closed, and
then was told that some of them had developed cataracts at relatively
young ages, I realized that we are not sending humans to Mars or
anywhere else that will take months or years with our current
technologies. Along with food and air production, we need to be able to
generate and maintain a strong "mini Earth magnetic field" to protect
the astronauts from cosmic 'rays' (high energy charged particles)
during their journey and at their destination. Now a new statistic has
come to light: a high level of cardiovascular disease among that same
select population.
Until the last couple lf decades, a film camera with a
mechanical shutter gave us the best pictures, and someone had to be
there to take them. The first photo of the entire Earth rising over the
moon's horizon from Apollo 8, and then the televised first landing on
the moon, were global consciousness altering events.
But now digital cameras can take an almost unlimited
number of very high definition images. We can see far more with
unmanned spacecraft, in far more places, without risking lives. When I
was young, it was a thrill to see grainy pictures of Mars or Venus,
where not so long previously it was never thought we'd be able to see
in our lifetimes. The idea that distant Uranus, Neptune or Pluto could
ever be
reached without a spacecraft traveling for a century had never been
conceived. The images from the Pluto flyby are of unparalleled quality.
A human trip to Mars or elsewhere would be, if not highly deleterious
to health or impossible, at least pretty much redundant for everyone
who couldn't go, who have already seen more images and data from more
worlds than manned missions could ever make possible.
* One day while watching youtube, an ad came on for a device intended
to restore hair growth to thin or bald patches. It was a little drum
wheel
on the end of a handle. The drum had countless short points sticking
out, said to be 1.5mm, "Acupuncture for the Scalp". One simply rolled
this back and forth over bald areas or thinning hair.
That would seem to offer the scalp stimulation of a good
hair brush in spades. I suspect it would work. (Perhaps the points
might even stab the tiny Demodex Follicularum mites that probably cause
baldness, and thereby deal with them!)
I clicked over it without going to check it out further.
That may have been a mistake. I never saw the ad again and I don't
remember what the device was called. (That's at least a couple of times
I seen a
useful looking ad only once and regretted paying it little attention.
Useless ads always seem to be repeated over and over "ad infinitum".)
Later I tried just rocking the hair brush back and forth
instead of brushing. The bristles, while not sharp, had a vigorous
effect that was probably similar. (A brush with plain straight nylon
bristles, not the ones with little balls on the ends.)
* I don't get it. You scratch your scalp to stimulate hair growth. You
scratch your back and it eventually gets nasty moles on it.
* Someone in Venezuela reported that his biggest "prepper" shortcoming
was in not putting away enough food beforehand, not realizing how long
a crisis could drag on. (Hopefully a garden and chickens can greatly
extend the time stored food will last. But at some point we are all
dependent on others to grow the things we're not so we can all have a
good diet. Nobody here grows oranges, bananas, wheat, rice, sugar beets
or sugar cane, canola or olives...)
* Here are a couple of "posters" received in e-mails.
ESD
(Eccentric Silliness Department)
* Do these names have a familiar ring?: Robin, Peter2, PayPal.
* Why is the word called "mirror". Shouldn't it be "mirrim" or
something?
* I have a great idea for a movie, set in ancient Athens. I'm not sure
what it'll be about. Well, I have a cool title, anyway: "Apocalypse in
the Acropolis".
* Having sold the cellar to the buyer, I had to have the rest of the
house moved.
* Why is it called a "stapler"? Shouldn't it be called a "staypusher"?
The thing to pull them out again should be called a "staypuller".
* There were three geologic periods when reptiles reigned. The first
was called the "Triassic". Shouldn't that have been the last period,
with the first two being the "Monassic" and the "Diassic"
* Between the Triassic and the Cretaceous periods there were huge
"sauropod" dinosaurs with very long necks. That's why it was called the
"Giraffic" period. (Many have seen the
movie, "Giraffic Park".)
"in depth reports" for
each project are below. I hope they may be useful to anyone who wants
to get into a similar project, to glean ideas for how something
might be done, as well as things that might have been tried, or just
thought
of and not tried... and even of how not to do something - why
it didn't
work or proved impractical. Sometimes they set out inventive thoughts
almost as they occur - and are the actual organization and elaboration
in writing of those thoughts. They are thus partly a diary and are not
extensively proof-read for literary perfection, consistency,
completeness and elimination of duplications before
publication. I hope they add to the body of wisdom for other
researchers and developers to help them find more productive paths and
avoid potential pitfalls and dead ends.
Electric
Transport
Miles Electric Truck: New Planetary Gearbox
(8th) I connected the Curtis Programmer, "OEM Mode". It said "system
detected" and told me the model number of the motor controller. But it
didn't say anything else. On "monitor" there were items like "throttle"
and "battery", but no numbers beside them. Likewise no numbers in
"settings" or "programming".
I went to the Curtis site and found the motor controller.
It said "Manual is not publicly available for this model. Contact your
OEM." WTF! Miles isn't even in business any more. Now what do I do?
Junk a whole truck because "the manual is not publicly available"? I'll
have to assume I can find some way around this.
(9th) I took the right rear wheel off. The problem wasn't with the
brake itself. Rather, the brake line had rusted through and was leaking
right next to the wheel. The next day I went into town and bought a new
brake line that fit. That evening someone helped me bleed the line. No
more pedal sagging gradually to the floor when I braked!
(11th) Having retightened the setscrews and put some "locktight" in the
threads, I drove the truck out of the garage and got half way around
the driveway. It got worse and worse until I had to go underneath and
retighten them just to drive back into the garage, and they were
already loose again by the time I got there. Obviously, and much to my
surprise, set screws to hold the shaft in place was a complete failure.
This was disheartening to say the least. Now what?
(13th) Okay, so the spline on the shaft was a bit too small in diameter
for the socket. New ideas occurred to me. I could pound on one side of
the shaft with a maul and flatten it into an oval. Well, it was hard
steel. Working steel is done by heating it red hot, then pounding.
It wasn't quite the same number of splines: 18 in the
socket versus 19 on the shaft. (This would seem to be yet another
amateurish feature of the Miles truck: I've never seen an even number
of splines before. Odd is probably just smoother, since a groove on one
side then lines up with a ridge opposite.) So, would bulging it out
until the splines met be helpful anyway? Probably. I could clamp it in
a vise or something just below the splined end, heat it up, and pound
on the end with the maul, "drop forge" style. To my mind, that should
make the end bulge out. How far down would the shaft bulge? 1/4 inch? 1
inch or more? in between? How even would it be? Could I avoid bending
it off center? If any part bulged out a little too big, I could file it
down. or, to keep it centered and straight, turn it on the lathe. grind
inside the splines if necessary.
Egads, did I want to get into forging steel, something
totally new for me? Borrow an acetylene torch from someone? Maybe I
could find someone who does that sort of thing? That would make more
sense.
Then I thought that for the small end of the shaft I could
- hopefully - just use the 'swirljet' propane torch. So the hard parts
will be to properly support the shaft so I can heat the end and then
pound on it, and to hit it square on and not have it bend off-center in
the pounding. Probably no one around here would have anything special
that would hold the shaft anyway. (A vise might be useful, but
something (an anvil, perhaps?) has to hold the bottom very solid so it
can't slip down as the top is being pounded on.)
(14th) I got the shaft out. (The motor end was easy. The compression
fitting end on the planetary gearbox, for which the shaft was
supposedly the exact right size, had to be pried out mm by mm by hammer
and screwdriver, with visegrips solidly clamped on the shaft and
repeatedly released and moved back against the housing.)
With the shaft out it was obvious why the setscrews had
kept "loosening off". They weren't. Instead, they were scraping the
splines right off the shaft, all the way around until it spun freely
again. Stainless steel isn't hardened steel. This shaft was from a
washing machine, not automotive and the splines definitely weren't
"case hardened". And it must be that the narrow grooves in the shaft's
spline didn't fit over the ridges of the motor's, so the side opposite
the set screws wasn't solidly locked into place as I had expected.
I noticed the splined end had a hole drilled along the
shaft center. Well, that should make the end both heat up more easily
and bulge out more easily by pounding on it. Then what? If the shaft
fit pretty tightly, I could grind some flat spots - or drill indents -
into it for the setscrews. The tight fit should center it and stop the
vibration, and - surely - setscrews set into indents couldn't get loose.
It seems to me now what I should have done (if I had
realized the project would drag on and on) was to cut a length of blank
shaft and made my own splined end. (It was long enough to have cut both
ends off.) I could have used the rotary table to turn it to exact
angles for 18 even splines. Hopefully I could have found a small, thin
cutting disk for the milling machine to make the actual grooves. Then
I'd have put the shaft on the lathe and turned it down (just a bit)
until the splined end fit into the splined motor socket.
(24th) I suppose predictably, a wind came up while I tried to heat the
end of the shaft. I tried to heat the top inch and a half, but when I
did pound on it only the end 3/16" mushroomed out. Did the heat do
anything? It seemed a little silly to think that that short length
might grip.
(25th) Not seeing any better plan, I pounded the shaft into the motor
socket. When it got in far enough, apparently the fattened end was past
the tenon splines and it just spun freely. Well, maybe if I could set
it in place just so the fat part was at the second pair of setscrews? I
could tighten them up, and maybe it would be enough to not slip?
Unexpectedly, getting it off - after having pounded it to
fit on - was harder than on. I had to lock the visegrips tightly onto
the shaft at the tenon and pound on them with the hammer, a teensy bit
at a time and then move them, turning the shaft 1/2 turn and resetting
the visegrips against the tenon. Almost the whole way off, over an
inch. All under the low truck not on the ramps.
Sometime near the end of the month I finally tried to put
everything back together. I was having trouble getting the shaft as far
into the motor socket as I had planned. Somehow I got out from under
the truck and haven't gone back under yet, maybe a push and a couple of
bolts away from "done". (Not confident of a good result... the project
is getting quite discouraging.)
Electric Hubcap Unipolar Motors: "Outrunner" Radial Flux?
Until now the few motors I've made have been axial flux,
with the coils and rotor magnets across from each other. It's a great
configuration. It has a wide - and adjustable - flux gap that prevents
rotor magnets from deteriorating as they do with minute gaps. They are
also the easiest motors to
make. The magnet and coil surfaces face each other flat instead of on a
curve.
The one main problem is that it's hard to make the magnets
really secure on the rotor. Centrifugal forces make them want to fly
off to the outside, like bullets. In lieu of some complex magnet
holding design, that limits the maximum RPM to a
lower level than
an "outrunner" configuration with the magnets on the inside of the
outer rim and the stator coils on the inside of that diameter.
Since the magnets in that configuration simply press
against the steel rim as RPM rises, centrifugal force can hardly make
them fly out. So
the safe RPM is higher. Outrunner model airplane BLDC motors turn at
ridiculous speeds. Any magnets might potentially come loose, but it's
less likely even at higher RPMs and less potentially catastrophic if
they do - they will
probably jam the motor as it starts or at low speed rather than fly out
like bullets when it's at top speed.
So a question that's long been in my mind is, Why are flux
gaps half an inch in axial flux motors, but hundredths of an inch in
radial flux motors? Why not have wide gaps in a radial flux motor? What
is the difference in the parameters? One thing that occurs is that the
side of the drum is likely steel and close enough to interact with the
coil magnetism. Does putting the rotor magnets much closer push
the effect into the background? What if one used a steel ring (eg, a
short
section of thick walled pipe) as the rim for the magnets, and had a
non-magnetic side for the drum - perhaps PP-epoxy composite?
As the motor diameter becomes larger, it would seem that
the differences between axial flux and outrunner radial diminish. The
magnetic interface surfaces become less and less curved, and the coil
windings start to have almost as much room as with axial. With an
"infinite diameter", they become flat again, moving linearly past each
other.
The 12 coil, 8 magnet pole unipolar motor design which I
worked out a year ago is probably large enough that if flux gaps can be
larger than miniscule, the magnets and coils could be flat-faced and
thus eliminate some manufacturing and component headaches. It could use
the same iron
powder coil cores, the same rectangular magnets, and be a very similar
large diameter. I set some coils up and came up with about 375mm for
the outside of the spinning rotor - somewhat larger if one wanted a
stationary outer shell outside of that, and a little smaller if one
"squeezed" in the coils. It would probably be a
little fatter (150+ mm?) of a cake. It would have the same potential
for
experimentation with permanent magnet assists and most anything else
that might be tried. It would be rather similar weight - perhaps
lighter with a largely PP-epoxy rotor. And one thing might be better:
if one made a huge diameter motor, it would tolerate a little flex
better than the axial flux. But I think I'll stick with the 12 coil
version as the maximum size. (I wonder if parts of the stator could be
3D printed with the higher-temperature 'nylon' plastic filament?)
Will I ever get around to this? I haven't even done
anything with the now one year old axial flux design. Can I get more
people involved? I think with so
many valuable projects, only some sort of funding or support is going
enable building them all, or even a large proportion of them.
Ground
Effect
Vehicle
(1/4
scale model)
(16th) Getting this running was (like too many projects) more than
"overdue". I finished making the battery tubes, with the finicky bolts
and little copper bits that compress the cells together and make the
connections - 'little' jobs that always take longer than anyone would
expect.
I started soldering the #8 'stove' wires and I put one
tube into a hull. What was wrong? Well, the leads on the motor
controller were pretty short. Another 2 or 3 inches would have made a
big difference to get them out into the open for connecting. And the
stove wires were just so STIFF! It all made the wiring so difficult. I
still have trouble wrapping my head around that these ducted fans will
draw over 100 amps, at 22 volts, and so require such heavy wire. I
stopped and worked on the house wall. In the evening I searched my
garbage pail of wire and found a #8 AWG three wire 'cab tire' cable I
could strip open. But every inch of 'cab tire' is hard to strip. I'd
already stripped the stove wire cable. I went back out and found a
piece of very flexible "#8 AWG" stereo speaker wire (really #9 if
that!). I
decided to use the stove wire after all, with this to make little
short, flexible connection pieces.
(18th) I got some wiring done. I fired up one motor. It made a lot of
wind and the back of the fairly well balanced model lifted up. But with
the weight of the battery pack it failed to slide the model across the
floor. (With wheels it certainly would have rolled.) I hope it'll lift
off the water with the two of them. If not I could reduce the batteries
to one string of six per motor instead of two strings to reduce the
weight, but then that would probably reduce the fan speed a bit.
In fact things should be measured... Okay, on full power
the voltage dropped as low as about 11 volts. Currents hit about 30
amps. That's about 330 watts. The rating was 112 amps at 22 volts: 2464
watts. Apparently the battery power was very insufficient. We must note
that 2400 watts is substantially more power than the 1500 or 1800 watts
one can obtain from a wall plug. Hmm... when is the last time these
were charged?
It was a nuisance clipping a voltmeter onto the wires.
Maybe I should install those little self powered voltmeters? If I put
them after the circuit breakers they would turn off with the model and
not drain the batteries when it wasn't in use. (Next, where would I
mount them?)
So now I started realizing I might have another concern:
where I thought "any good batteries should do", if I'm not getting the
power even from all this mass of lithium cells, I might just have to
order the exact batteries the manufacturer recommends.
On testing I again noted that the 'throttle' worked
backward both mechanicly and electricly. To stop the motor the stick
was pushed forward instead of back and full power was with the stick
pulled back. And if the transmitter was turned off (or, eg, if the
model got out of range), the motor whizzed up to full power instead of
stopping. Might I say I don't like that? I don't understand why anyone
would make or want it that way. I may decide to put in an opamp circuit
to
invert it. If I do that, while I'm at it I might as well make the
'throttle' (forward-back) do both motors and have side-to-side cut
power to right or left. That would be much easier for directional
control, too.
(23rd) I finally got around to trying to charge the batteries. I
brought in the only lab power supply that went to 30 volts (the old
"Circuit Test" one that would no longer put out more than 2 amps
instead of 10 for no apparent reason) and connected the battery tube
that
wasn't installed yet. I had been charging at 4.0 or 4.1 volts, and I
set it to 24.0 to charge the tube of six in series. The two parallel
rows, drew 1.4 amps. How much did these cells hold? Again there being
no
identifying numbers didn't help. I put them on at 1:10 PMPDT and set a
timer for 3 hours. That would be 4.2 amp-hours. I doubted they were
much more than that - per row. Mostly they balanced at about 4 volts,
but one was up to 4.33 V - no doubt the one added to the set and
already charged. I decided that if they charged and held about 3.8 or
so for ages, that must be within allowed limits. After all, typical 3.2
volt lithium cells are allowed to charge up as high as 4.2 volts. It
wasn't getting warm, so I let it continue. But I was only going to keep
it on charge while I was there to monitor it. Or else charge them away
from the house. I left it on for an hour.
But the voltages didn't seem to add up. Then I found that
both meters on the power supply were lying. The current meter needle
still read .4 A disconnected and the voltmeter said 24.0 but another
meter said 24.3. When I turned it down to actual 24.0 the cells were
slightly discharging instead of charging. Disconnected, no cell read
under 3.95 volts. Surely that set must be quite fully charged.
Instead of trying to extract the other set from the model
I set the power supply close to it on the floor and got alligator clip
leads to make the connections. At 4.0 volts it charged at a real 1.2
amps or so, dropping from an initial 1.7 over a few minutes.
When I tested again after charging, at full power it still
put out just 33 amps at 11 volts: 363 watts. It sounded like a lot of
power and it blew a lot of air, but I guess it's capable of much more,
and more is needed. I had thought that, being from some electric
motorbike, these cells would be very high current, but after all there
had been 12 in parallel and 12 in series in that application, 144
cells. If say each cell would put out 7 amps without serious voltage
drop: 7 amps (per series set) times 12 parallel sets, times 44.4 volts
is over 3700 watts. But with just 12 cells in two sets it would be 7A *
2 * 22.2V
= 310W per fan.
I started thinking these cells just weren't putting out
what was needed. If I added more rows in parallel (if they would even
fit) they would only make it absurdly heavy for a flying model. I
looked at the recommendation in the one-page "owners manual" for the
ducted fan: Li-Po 6S 5500mAH 35C. "22.2 volts". Deciphering that:
lithium iron phosphate batteries, 6 in series, 5.5 amp-hours, capable
of delivering all their energy in under (60/35) 2 minutes.
I looked on Aliexpress. There were a lot of cells with
those sort of specs, all saying they were for drones and model
aircraft. Apparently they are quite specific and special. I ordered
two: "LiPo 6S 5200mAH 80C". "80C"*5.2AH=416 amps. There was the power
to fly. And I suppose it will only fly for a few minutes. But flying in
the ground effect I should be able to turn the power down lower and it
should go quite a bit longer than a high-flying model of similar size.
(24th) Oops! I went back to check the weight and found the ones I had
ordered were only 7.4 volts. I went to "cancel". If "cancel" goes
through I won't have wasted 100$. (It didn't.)
Then I found some better ones at a different store: "LiPo
6S 6000mAH 100C" -- and "22.2V". (I should have known I wouldn't get
away for under 200$.) The weight of these ones is about 800 grams. The
inadequate ones I have are over 1500, so this will cut the weight by
about 1.5 Kg. Yay!
Here I thought I had everything and was just a few
assembly steps away from testing it. Now I've spent more money and I
have to wait until August for these new batteries to arrive. I might
install the other battery and get both fans running, but I don't have
much confidence it would fly or even move on the floor - at least
unless I put wheels on it. On to another project for now!
Other
"Green" Electric Equipment Projects
(No
Reports)
My
Solar
Power
System
New Panel & Heavier, Shorter Wire
I helped someone out setting up a small solar system. In
that I used some 4 to 1 MC4 (solar panel connector) combiners for his
several small 100W panels. And I thought, I've got two panels on the
lawn and lots sitting around that no one has bought, why not use a set
of these combiners and connect three panels? A simple, ten minute
job... Ha Ha!
(30th) The house system altogether was doing about 1100 watts. I took
off the 2 to 1 solar panel combiners. In doing so, a wire (my wiring)
pulled out of its MC4 connector pin. It was a bad connection owing to
corrosion! And the insulation looked a little scorched, as if the pin
had been heating up. How long had it been like that? When I pulled
another connection apart, water came out of it. (Imagine that,
connectors out in the open on a lawn, getting damp and corroding!) So I
redid the connection. BTW those MC4 connectors are frustrating to get
apart. In the evening I went on line and ordered some of the special
tool to push both catches open at once, along with some more combiners
and some 2 meter solar panel extension cords.
Then I put on all three panels. For the wires to reach
each other at the combiner I had to turn the two outer panels sideways
with the middle one tall. (They're going to cast shadows on each other
in early morning and late PM.)
When I turned the inverter back on with another 305 watt
panel connected, the power had gone up by a whopping 30 watts. What was
wrong? Finally I realized it must be the skinny cord. I had originally
only planned to put one solar panel on the lawn, and I had used a 100
foot, #16 AWG extension cord from the refuse station. I had doubled up
the black and green on "minus" for #13 equivalent, but "plus" was still
just #16. I thought that was sufficient for one panel. "#16" is rated
for 10 amps, and the 305W solar panel was just over 9 max. Then I had
added the second panel. And now I had added a third. As the current
went up so did the voltage drop through that long, skinny wire. From 34
volts at the MC4 combiners, it was down to 28 at the grid tie inverter.
6 volts was being lost, and apparently the inverter decided 28 at its
end was the MPP. The weather has been crap, but the bad connection
(probably reducing the power for months) and the long, thin cord is a
reason power has
been a little lower than it should have been.
It was silly running so many amps through such a long cord
when much of it was just wound up in a coil. I had recently got a 50
foot, #14 AWG extension cord wire from the refuse station, and I wired
that one up instead. It still had plenty of slack. Again I doubled up
black and green, making the 'minus' wire "#11". (This time I soldered
the MC4
pins as well as crimping them.) When I turned it on, the system was
soon putting out 1450 watts - an extra 350 watts with one more 305 watt
panel. It illustrates a somewhat extreme case of voltage and power drop
at higher currents in a long, thin wire compared to a more properly
sized wire. (Even then heavier wires, #12 or #10 - or double #14 on
both sides, wouldn't have hurt at all.)
If the house install was making any more power, it would
have to go on a separate AC circuit. So, the solar power figures should
[so far do] look better in July. (I figure the time I had it turned off
and the extra power output after pretty much canceled each other for
that last day of June - it seemed to correspond pretty much "as usual"
with what the
unchanged trailer installation put out. So June no change and July a
fresh slate.)
Month of June Log of Solar
Power Generated [and grid power consumed]
(All
times are in PST: clock 48 minutes ahead of sun, not PDT which is an
hour and 48 minutes ahead. DC power output readings - mostly the
kitchen hot
water heater for some months, then just lights - are reset to zero
daily (for just lights, occasionally), while the others are
cumulative.)
Solar: House, Trailer => total KWH [grid power meter
reading(s)@time] Sky conditions
May
31st 444.32, 1305.87 => 9.56 [74941@21:30] Scattered
sunshine between clouds.
June
1st 447.82, 1308.34 => 5.97 [55Km,chj;
74967@20:00]
Clouds, rain, cold. Ran woodstove. Great start to June!
2nd Where did this day go? Call it 10 & 9.51 ?
3rd 458.54, 1317.13 => 19.51 (TWO days) [55Km,chj;
74998@21:00]
4th 463.22, 1320.89 => 10.24 [75011@21:30] AM sunny except
thick jet trails, PM cloudy
5th 470.71, 1326.45 => 13.15 [85Km; 75035@20:30] Mostly sunny
PM, scattered jet trails
6th 474.03, 1328.85 => 5.72 [55Km; 75054@21:30]
Seemed pretty sunny AM (some jet trails), but thunder & rain in PM.
7th 481.00, 1333.74 => 11.86 [40Km; 75073@21:00] Fair bit of
sun.
8th 487.60, 1338.55 => 11.41 [75085@21:00] much like yesterday
9th 490.09, 1340.24 => 4.18 [55Km; 75109@21:00]
No sun until glaring thing appeared behind trees just before sunset.
10th 493.41, 1342.81 => 5.89 [55Km; 75132@21:00] Just
Cloudz, wind.
11th 498.45, 1346.29 => 8.52 [75142@21:30] Apparently nicer
than yesterday. Still seems like Juneuary.
12th 506.53, 1352.30 => 14.09 [85Km; 75164@21:00] Much nicer, mostly
sunny with scattered clouds!
13th another day missed! We'll call it 7.5 & 9.33 [55Km; not read]
less nice. Finally days are a bit warmer.
14th 516.51, 1359.15 => 16.83 (TWO days) [75188@22:00] a bit nicer
15th 523.89, 1264.57 => 12.80 [75199@21:00] AM cloudy. PM Sunny!
16th 529.03, 1468.31 => 8.88 [75203@21:00] AM clouds, PM Sun
& clouds
17th 532.97, 1371.16 => 6.79 [60Km; 75219@21:30] Clouds,
bit of rain.
18th 536.98, 1374.04 => 6.89 [75226@21:30] Mor uv same.
19th 539.66, 1376.02 => 4.66 [85Km; 75248@20:30] And yet
mor. (For 18+ hour days, there sure isn't much light!) "Fritter and
waste the KWH in an offhand way-ay-ay" (Pink Floyd)
20th 545.46, 1380.18 => 9.96 [55Km; 75259@21:30] No rain.
21th 551.95, 1384.84 => 10.65 [75271@20:30] Again no rain. Virtually
no sun either. Longest "day".
22th 556.15, 1387.86 => 7.22 [50Km; 75292@21:30] "I've
seen dreary days that I think will never end."
23th 564.51, 1393.93 => 14.43 [50Km; 75315@21:30] Gosh, quite a bit
of sun today!
24th 573.09, 1400.39 => 15.04 [75319@21:00] For once Mostly Sunny
except for spreading jet trails. (Yay, more power made than used!)
25th 575.52, 1402.04 => 4.08 [75327@23:00] No sun today.
26th 580.64, 1405.79 => 8.87 [85Km; 75344@21:00] Hardly
any sun but brighter clouds, warmer.
27th 584.52, 1408.33 => 6.42 [50Km; 75359@21:30] It is
JUNE isn't it?
28th 593.16, 1414.67 => 14.88 [75363@22:00] Sunny, then scattered
clouds, then spread-out jet trails.
29th 599.19, 1419.11 => 10.47 [35Km;55Km; 75380@21:00] Sun,
scattered clouds, sun, power failure cut into collection time.
30th 608.33, 1425.68 => 15.71 [55Km; 75396@21:30] Mostly sunny,
scattered clouds. (What, no spreading jet trails?) Hot 20°! Maybe
it's June after all! Oh, wait... June is over.
July
01st 619.76, 1432.49 => 18.24 [75402@21:30] Mostly sunny.
02d 622.31, 1434.00 => 4.06 [75406@21:30] Rain. Oh
well, we needed it. Cold. Didn't need that.
03rd 632.04, 1439.63 => 15.36 [40Km;Laundry; 75422@21:30] clouds,
cool AM,PM, but sunny & warm throughout middle of day.
04th 641.71, 24.75** => 15.17 [55Km; 75433@21:00] Some sun, some
clouds. **The meter quit working - blank display! Est. 5.50 KWH;
Replaced meter.
Daily KWH from solar panels. (Compare June 2020 with May
2020 & with June 2019.)
KWH
(Each Day)
|
May 2020 (11 panels)
|
June 2020 (11 panels)
|
June 2019 (11 Panels)
|
0.xx
|
-
|
-
|
-
|
1.xx
|
-
|
-
|
-
|
2.xx
|
|
-
|
-
|
3.xx
|
1
|
-
|
1
|
4.xx
|
1
|
3
|
1
|
5.xx
|
2
|
2
|
6
|
6.xx
|
1
|
3
|
3
|
7.xx
|
5
|
2
|
5
|
8.xx
|
4
|
3
|
1
|
9.xx
|
5
|
3
|
4
|
10.xx
|
1
|
4
|
2
|
11.xx
|
1
|
2
|
1
|
12.xx
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
13.xx
|
1
|
1
|
-
|
14.xx
|
4
|
3
|
1
|
15.xx
|
3
|
2
|
-
|
16.xx
|
1
|
-
|
-
|
17.xx
|
-
|
-
|
2
|
18.xx
|
-
|
-
|
2
|
Total KWH
|
313.18
|
283.82
|
277.54
|
Monthly Tallies: Solar Generated KWH [Power used from grid KWH]
2019
March 1-31: 116.19 + ------ + 105.93 = 222.12 KWH - solar [786 KWH -
used from
grid]
April - 1-30: 136.87 + ------ + 121.97 = 258.84 KWH [608 KWH]
May - 1-31: 156.23 + ------ + 147.47 = 303.70 KWH [543 KWH] (11th
solar panel connected on lawn on 26th)
June - 1-30: 146.63 + 15.65 + 115.26 = 277.54 KWH [374 KWH] (36V, 250W
Hot Water Heater installed on 7th)
July - 1-31: 134.06 + 19.06 + 120.86 = 273.98 KWH [342 KWH]
August 1-31:127.47 + 11.44+91.82+(8/10)*96.29 = 307.76 KWH [334 KWH]
(12th panel connected on lawn Aug. 1)
Sept.- 1-30: 110.72 + 15.30 + 84.91 = 210.93 KWH [408 KWH]
(solar includes 2/10 of 96.29)
Oct. - 1-31: 55.67 + 13.03 + 51.82 = 120.52 KWH, solar
[635 KWH - from grid]
Nov. - 1-30: 36.51 + 6.31 + 26.29 = 69.11
KWH, solar [653 KWH - from grid]
Dec. - 1-23: 18.98 + .84* + 11.70 =
31.52
KWH, solar + wind [711 KWH + 414 (while away) = 1125 from grid]
2020
Jan. - 6-31: 17.52 + ------* + 10.61 = 28.13 KWH,
solar+
wind [1111 KWH from grid]
Feb. - 1-29: 56.83 + ------* + 35.17 = 92.00 KWH,
solar + wind [963 KWH from grid]
One year of solar!
March - 1-31: 111.31 + 87.05 = 198.37 KWH solar total
[934 KWH from grid]
April - 1-30: 156.09 + 115.12 = 271.21 [784 KWH
from grid]
May - 1-31: 181.97 + 131.21 = 313.18 KWH
Solar [723 KWH from grid]
June - 1-30: 164.04 + 119.81 =283.82 KWH Solar [455 KWH
from grid]
* Now the solar DC system
is only running a couple of lights - not worth reporting. So there's
just the 2 grid tie systems: house and "roof over travel trailer".
Things Noted - June 2020
* THIS is JUNE? More like Juneuary.
* By the 21st, the summer solstice, it was getting dark a little before
11 PM and getting
light a little before 5 AM. Tell me where midnight is in this crazy
clock system where we're an hour from our real time zone and then
somebody threw in "DST" (Daytime Shortening Time) on top of that?
* Most of June was cloudy and cold to cool. Only occasional days gave
anything like the maximum solar potential. But the last couple of days
looked hopeful for a nice July.
* With the beefed up lawn panels & wiring and an auspicious start
to the weather, my July solar power collection could be a record.
Electricity
Storage
(Batteries)
Turquoise
Battery
Project:
Long
lasting,
low
cost,
high
energy
batteries
Wow... With everything ready to make what should be the
best cell so far... yet again... Sorry, no report!
http://www.TurquoiseEnergy.com
Haida Gwaii, BC Canada
