Holy daffodils batman!

Spent this morning pulling apart the old flower beds in front, removing the bulbs and flattening the dirt out level.

The boards were rotted, and the beds full of weeds, mostly dandilions and some volunteer tree of some kind, and it wasn’t worth trying to save them or the dirt in them.   I’ve got cedar boards to replace them with, and some fresh topsoil and manure.

Apparently the folks we bought the house from liked daffodils.  There are little clumps of them ALL OVER, at least three different varieties, plus the ones in the beds.  I also knew they were in desperate need of being seperated just from the way they were clumped together.

This is a 15x15x6″ box.  Its full to over flowing with bulbs.

I’m not sure they’re all daffodils either…I DID pull out what appeared to be a couple volunteer wild onions, but even taking into account the different shapes that occur when a baby bulb splits off there are more than 3 different sizes/shapes/varieties of bulbs there…..


What we blew our budget on this summer

(if you click on the picture to see it big you’ll see a face peering out the door trying to figure out what I was doing)

The install finished last Friday.  Today the power company came out and swapped out the meter for one that will role backwards, and we turned on the panels.  Course, its raining today, with a pretty heavy cloud cover.  But they’re pulling in some power anyway, just from the ambient light.  Currently the monitor says 30-31wh per panel.

Right now this is just a standard grid tie system.  Eventually our intention is to put in a battery back up system, but that’ll have to wait a couple years probly.

I’m going to try to make this a regular thing, to report on what we’re getting for power in (basically the sort of thing I was trying to find when doing my own research). 

In that spirit, here’s the upfront information on this:

This is 16 250w Solar World Monocrystalline panels, with 16 Enphase micro-inverters.

Full cost, including labor: $18,000

NYSERDA 2012 incentive:-$6,000

County incentive: -$2,000

Our upfront cost: $10,000

 

Federal tax rebate: -$3,000

NY state tax rebate: -$2,500

Our total cost after tax rebates: $4,500


Ok, thats just cool

I found this over at Borepatch.  Now the guy who taught my highschool physics course did an awesome job, and showed us quite a few dramatic real life examples, but we never did anything like this.  On the other hand this is exactly something he’d enjoy, if he was still teaching I’d be sending him this video.

 


Yes we will

James over at The Next Chapter put up a quick post on how we’re not going to need driver’s licenses by 2040.

For some reason I can’t figure out how to leave a comment there.  I’m sure its my failing, but it might be Blogger too, but it HAS been that kind of week….

But that means I’m going to comment here instead.  Maybe I ought to do it more often, I’d end up with more posts anyway…

ANYWAY, back to the original topic: yes we WILL still need drivers licences, cause I refuse to trust my life to a hackable computer dammit!!