Disaster
planning should be part of every single household across America, strike that,
the world. When disaster strikes, people die or lives are changed. In times of
plenty, forego the Playstations and buy extra food. You can explain a lack of
toys better than a lack of food to your children.
Three
years ago, our home caught fire. I spent time in intensive care and almost died,
thus I know from whence I speak.
As
we go into our third season of "This Old Shack", disaster planning and
survival episodes become more important. After all, that's what alternative
energy is - the ability for you to survive without an infrastructure. All of our
episodes of This Old Shack and our new show, "CSI:SALINE" will reflect
this in 2009. Oh, of course there's going to be laughs and beer drinking - this
survival crap is depressing to think about.
So,
practice your fire drills with the crumbcrunchers, practice evacuating
yourselves, your pets, your neighbors. Learn how to use a fire extinguisher. And
watch our videos!
I can sit around smoking a cigar because I'm
an energy mogul!
Drawbacks:
Maintenance.
Installation.
Bunch of black glass panels sitting around.
Northern Michigan Solar Cabin
Official home of "This Old Shack"
Learn
about alternative energy, hybrid systems and watch
pointless videos!
Updated:09/20/2009
It's
winter time here in Michigan and the cabin is inaccessible because of the deep
snow in northern Michigan. So while we're taking some time off, you can browse
the site or visit some of our other sites. If you
haveany
questions, send me an email!
I'm always happy to provide a convoluted answer to
a simple question. At this site, you
can learn
from my real world experiences in solar energy
production and how I produce power at our cabin in
Northern Michigan. The cabin is located right
on the 45th parallel near Gaylord, Michigan. Check out our photography
site which has some photos around the cabin in the nature and winter
sections!
Silverlight. Know what that is? It is the best way to play
WMVHD videos - Imax movies are done in this format and now This Old Shack is
too! Silverlight requires a browser plugin to play the videos. If you don't have
it, you will be prompted to download it.
Well, I got tired of listening to the usual garbage about oil
and food prices and why there're rising like a loaf of bread with too much
yeast. Now I investigate and you get to read about it in my Energy
Blog
4-16-09: The first episode of "This Old Shack" is being
shot this weekend.
Don't ask me why, but I've recently become interested in
studying earthquake/volcano activity around the world; ash plumes and such. I've
added a page with RSS feeds and links to satellite imagery.
And finally the data you've been looking for, excerpts
from the NREL redbook!
The National Oceanic Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) has released their datasets
for the climate.
Look, using testing equipment is all well and
good but those spec sheets don't mean squat if you can't run YOUR stuff
for as long as you want to. So what I do (so you don't have to) is get the
equipment (batteries, inverters, solar panels) and put what I run on it.
Usually about 30-50 watts at 12 volts or a few amps draw. You know, turning
lights on and off, running a computer (a laptop) and whatnot.
Throughout the test, a digital meter is run on
the bank and a hydrometer is used once an hour to determine whether the meter is
reading the correct voltage. During the sunlight hours on the panels, there is
another digital meter installed at the primary junction box (where the panels
feed into the 10 gauge cables that feed to the charge controller) that measures
panel voltage and amps. Here is the Excel
file of one of the tests.
One of the things that I like the best about
alternative energy is that you can make it as complicated or simple as you like.
Some people, even though they use alternative energy simply don't have a good
grasp on the entire substance that goes into the makeup of an engineered system
that has been built from scratch.