Eight days into winter

It was a very strange Christmas at our house this year. The electricity blinked off at 7 or 8 pm on the 23rd. We were having an ice event. Over the next 24 hours more than a half an inch of ice built up on everything outside...encasing everything in ice. I used a rubber sledge hammer to break it off the Audi the next morning. This afternoon, three days later, we saw electrical repair trucks on the West Rd. and the crew said we would have power restored in an hour.

Fortunately, our house has some built in advantages to surviving without electricity in winter. I charged up the heated slab with extra heat prior to the storm and this heat stayed with us for quite awhile. We have a Finnish fireplace that can crank out a lot of heat if stoked for two or three days. Plus we had a lot of solar gain as the two days following the storm were bright and sunny. The fireplace has an oven and Gina cooked potatoes and squash in it for Christmas dinner. I grilled t-bone and porterhouse steaks (Don's grass fed beef) in the weber grill on the porch...the morning of the 24th it was 4 degrees F when we got up and temperatures during the 3 day outage ranged from 4 to 21 degrees...all in all a memorable year.

We are close to having another resource during outages....the Volt can be used as an emergency generator to power 120 volt loads like our oil-fired heating system, lights and chargers for electronic equipment, freezers ( we have a quarter of a steer in ours plus fruits, veggies, etc.),  I was thinking about buying the inverter kit prior to the storm...I guess I'll get it now. The only problem remaining would be water supply...our well pump is 240 volts and won't run off the Volt. Next outage we'll have electricity and heat and fill the bathtub with water to flush the toilets.

The Volt will be so much quieter than the generators we listened to through the woods. Our house is the last one on the circuit so our neighbors Kathie & Kim and Cal and Glen are on a different circuit and had electricity the whole time!! But down in the hollow and beyond the generators ran around the clock for three days!

It's the morning of the 29th now and the forecast calls for 5 to 9 inches of wet snow tonight!! The trees and everything else are still encased with ice and weighted down by snow we got two days ago. We are dumping extra heat into the slab just in case....

Good results

I got the results of Wednesday's bone marrow biopsy on Friday and it confirmed I'm still in remission. That makes it a year that I'm in remission. I'm happy!! Where are those emoticons when you need 'em. 

I feel good today. It's good to know that the fatigue that makes it impossible to pass up a nap on many days is due to the drug (Dasatinib). It lowers the number of red blood cells. At the end of July I had to stop taking it due to very low platelet levels. In some ways I was lucky. I was off the pills for 10 weeks, including most the time we were on our road trip. I felt normal! 

By mid October, my platelets recovered to a level where my doctor re-started the Dasatinib. My hemoglobin has slid from 15.5 to 11.7 since re-starting 10 weeks ago. Normal is 14-18. So I'm anemic and my body has not adjusted to it. I get winded easily. I'm supposed to take Dasatinib until June and some days I don't know how I'll make it. The situation is complicated by the fact that there is no evidence yet that taking Dasatinib at this point is helpful. That is one of the goals of the clinical trial, to begin to test that hypothesis. I agreed to participate so I'm reluctant to drop out but I've decided I won't start in on blood transfusions just to stay on the drug. I had too many transfusions already and the level of iron in my blood is sky high. I may have to take additional drugs to lower my iron levels after finishing with the Dasatinib. Unpleasant side effects from iron lowering chelation drugs are common. Yuck! Well, given the alternative, I can't complain too much. Looking at the statistics, my chance of a relapse has gone from 40% at the outset to 10% today. So far, none of the 45 patients in the clinical trial who are less than 60 years old have had a relapse! It appears that Dasatinib has worked well!

We are in the midst of a powerful nor'easter and 10-14 inches of snow are expected. I have new x country boots and I'm itching to try them out. Gina got some nice new skiis and I want to try them out too. We ski up to the top of Buttermilk Hill on an old abandoned road thick with trees. At the top you can see Mt. Washington on a clear winter or spring day. Then we ski back down a broad slope on its north east side then through the woods to some lower fields. From there, we ski past the long abandoned foundations of a house, barn and some outbuildings, all over grown with big trees and loop back up to the West Road through tall pines. I'd like to ski it...hypnotically beautiful after almost 30 years. It's only 2.5 miles, but in deep new snow it's a lot. I'll be pooped, not sure how far I'll make it.

Smokestacks

Buxie's blog is back! Thank you to those readers who said they want more. Yes, there were at least one or two people who told me that....

Warning, you may find the following blog somewhat turgid and technical...and hopefully inspiring.

Gina and I leased a Chevy Volt last Friday, completing the circuit from our photovoltaic array through our house to our car battery. Here is a picture of the dynamic duo...the car and it's array. In reality, we have a grid connected system, so the power produced by the PVs goes onto the grid and the car battery charging takes place in my garage, plugged in to grid power. 

Many people don't think about the smokestacks in their lives but we all have a few of them...the dirty power plants we don't see consuming massive amounts of fossil fuel (the biggest CO2 emitters world-wide), our vehicle tailpipes (add them all up and you'll start to wheeze) and the chimneys sticking through our roofs. Wouldn't it be great to eliminate or at least eviscerate these polluters before it's too late?

Your monthly power bill probably hovers well below your phone/internet/TV bill (unless you are unfortunate and you heat your house with electricity). At our house, our monthly electric bill is less than $50 per month. Electricity is a bargain!

So, you may be thinking, if electricity is such a bargain, why spend the money on a photovoltaic system? Isn't that expensive? The short answer is no. 

The 6.4 kW double axis tracking system we installed cost $24,600 after the 30% federal tax incentive and the $2,000 state rebate. I figure our annual savings on household electricity are a paltry $500. We don't use a lot of electricity here. But our PV system produces more than twice as much electricity as we use in the house. We can drive the Volt 14,000 miles per year on the excess electricity!! Driving around central Maine in an endless loop of work, play, schmoozing, partying, errands and food shopping. Assuming 30 mpg on our old car and $3.50/gallon for gas, the annual gasoline savings will be $1,600. Of course we'll have to drive the Volt at least 38 miles (the Volt battery's range) every day of the year to save that much. Alternatively, with two electric cars, Gina and I can each drive on the solar power. This will require each of us to drive our car at least 3.5 times a week....not unreasonable at all. It will be interesting to see what other plug-in cars become available...I looked into the Tesla but the nearest dealer is in Massachusetts. Prices are coming down.

As you can see, the $1,600 per year gasoline saving is more than 3 times the $500 annual savings on  household electricity. This points out how expensive it is to drive gasoline cars and how efficient it is to drive on solar electricity. Electricity is well suited for driving...so much better than the internal combustion engine. (Important note: charging your car on coal fired electricity is way more polluting than running your car on gasoline!)

The combined gasoline and household electricity savings from our $24,600 system are $2,100 per year. So the payback (that holy grail for people who don't include unquantified externalities as well as misinformed naysayers) is about 12 years on a system expected to last 25 years. That's equivalent to a 7% return on investment at present gas and electricity prices. Not bad at all.

A smaller roof mounted solar system designed to meet household requirements costs about $9,200 as opposed to the $24,600 spent on the larger tracking system we had installed...and the savings would be about $700 per year...

So how does this relate to those lovely smokestacks in your life? Eliminating exhaust from 14,000 miles of driving every year is huge. Plus, you have eliminated power plant emissions by substituting solar for household electricity use. The new, less expensive PV systems combined with the new plug-in electric vehicles are the best energy technology developments of the early 2000's. If someone developed a large solar farm and started leasing solar powered plug-in electric vehicles would you lease one?

We, the public, have paid a massive amount, literally trillions of dollars, for electrical infrastructure...the grid. What we need now is the political will to overcome vested interests and invest a little more to replace the coal fired power plants that hang on the grid producing massive quantities of CO2 and the nuclear plants that resemble radioactive time bombs. A utility grid powered primarily by renewable sources supplemented with natural gas combined cycle plants will be a beautiful thing!