No.  We are not going to sit around after hot yoga and do “Ooouuummms” all day.  We’re not doing chakras, we’re into another kind of energy – the sort you write checks for.

Energy of three types, in fact.

• Moods in soft space of the living room while the telly is on.
• How to get the max out of solar panels.
• And how to get the greatest effective radiated power (ERP) from your ham radio adventures working HF DX.

Why, it’s the kind of Column that should attract people from all walks of life:

• The Suzi Homemakers trying to capture that Sunset Mag look.
• The Greezers trying to save a buck on power bills.
• And  the Exceptionals who are ham radio operators.

The only things missing are sex secrets, flying stories, and a couple of shots of hooch.  Ah, but hey, the day is early… Just don’t confuse the teflon drawer spray with the adult lubricant and…oh…off script?

The Halogen Hanging

No bones about it; I was terribly disappointed in the Amazon Prime deals this year.  Maybe it’s because we’ve slammed into the wall of Consumer Super-Saturation (we all have too much shit).  Or, maybe because when the end of Life is in sight (most of us can find it on a map now) the detachment process gets organized.

Case in point?
That halogen torchier lamp in the living room. Dimmable. Elegant. Also, stupid.

Elaine had it on one night, and I — being curious and a bit reckless — held my hand over the top of it. Just to see how much heat it threw off.

Answer?
Too damn much.

Picked one up during Prime and it was like $55-hucks. The reason was simple.  Halogen lights are a two-edged sword.  Not only will they put off 300 watts of light, but most all of that turns into heat.  And in the summer in East Texas, you get to pay twice.  Because with the five ton unit running hard enough to keep the house a comfortably 75, we were (dumb as it sounds) paying twice.

• Once to generate heat the light threw off
• And again to get rid of it

Laying on of Hands:  It’s gone.  Into the guest room (/G2 quarters when he’s around).  That room is fairly well-insulated and vacant in the summer.  In the winter, a 300-watt with it’s heat lamp costume on is fine.  Live and let live.

Let’s Run the Numbers

8,760.  Number familiar to you?  No?  That’s how many hours are in a year.

At 300 watts (light and heat) and another 300 watts to remove it, that’s 5.256 megawatt hours a year if the light’s on all the time.  Or, 5,256 kilowatt-hours.  Which at 20 cents each sucks how much out of the wallet? Potentially?  $1,051 per year.

The new LED light – cranked up as far as it will go – tops out at 30 watts – so that makes its energy consumption annual right around $105 bucks.

Beer Money Found!!!

Obviously, the savings of $900 and change won’t happen IRL (In Real Life) because no one is stupid enough to leave a 300-watt halogen all the time.  (Unless you have kids or guests, then all bets are off so let’s just pour shots and be done with it.)

Still – given Elaine likes soft ‘mood lights’  the payback on this could be as little as 4-5 months. Certainly a one-year break-even.

And that’s how we “channeled some energy” from the hot house back into the wallet. This free up beer money, though at just $75 a month for beer you won’t have many friends…

Ready for another OGT (Old Geezer Trick)?

Solar Rewire

The second energy channeling session this weekend involved the weekly inspection of the solar panels.  We (finally) had a few days of full sun this week and the solar was happily cranking, not selling back as much to the grid as I was expecting.  Here’s what the Solar Detective found:

No, that solar 3-way “Y” connector didn’t come from the factory that way, melted to that odd angle. It simply got up to near the melting point because I had done a “simple” job of wiring the north array panels.  Current becomes heat if you add enough – remember welding school?

A simple wiring of panels is easy, but you have to use big-ass (expensive) thick primary wire.  The racks are all coming in on #4 to the power center and even this was sketchy.  But now let me show you something most people don’t know.  If you just hook up the (+)’s and the (-)’s and run them on big cable to our charge controllers, you may be outside the “normal range” for MPPT (maximum power point tracking) controllers.  Fine print for ours turned up and in the fine print they admit not not getting really useful until much higher voltages are seen from the panels.  How’d I miss that?

The panels that I’m about to replace – in fact I’ll be working on these this morning – is the middle rack which was done this (simple, lazy, quick) way because I started off (2008) with a sketchy charge controller.  But later (2010-2012 – somewhere in there) – I upgraded to the pair of Outback FlexMax 60’s.  Here’s the difference.  The old panels (being upgraded under the same conditions) were putting out like this: (squint, this is a test)

Second line: 26.3 volts times 32 amps.  Volts times amps is power so the old panels are putting out only 841.6 watts.

The less old panels (bought used) – the south rack – are sitting right at the output limit of the charge controller:

Shopping tip:  the current rating on charge controllers is on the output of the controller – which for the Flexmax’s is 60 amps on the output to the 24 V battery bank.

26.5 volts times 60.2 amps. (second line down). Which is (V x I = P) 1,595.3 watts.  When the new panels go on the middle rack, even without any change to the charge controllers, we will pick up a “free”  754-watts so about one more horsepower (which is 745 watts) worth of “work”. And that will be all the time. (yes, when the sun’s up…duh)

That that doesn’t solve the “melted connector” part of the equation. That’s on the north array.   Again, simply paralleled the panels.

Because I was using old Trace C40’s and was running the “simple” wiring – which lead to the high current fail of the connector – the right answer was to dump the old C40s and put in a 100-amp MPPT controller which ought to be along this week thanks to Prime days.  When it shows up, the north array will put out 80+ volts (open circuit -VoC) and the current will be halved.

When all’s said and done, we can then sit the FlexMax’s combined 26.5 volts and 120 amps, plus an additional (up to 100 amps at 26.5) which should let us sell a lot more power into the grid.  This will get all the panels into the “sweet spot” for MPPT controllers (1.5-2X battery voltage) and that in turn will give us another (effective) 1-2 hours of daylight driving the system.

Side-by-side the MPPT with series parallel panels (putting out 80V into he charge controller which drops it to 24 V) was putting out almost 300-watts early in the morning while still in the shade. While the “normally wired” (all parallel panels) was only putting out between 60-90 watts.  Because our panels are oversized (if you go by the NEC specs) we will still be getting useful power even on partly cloudy days.

The NEC spec for the FlexMax’s recommends 2000 watts of panels (on a 24 V system).  The additional above that (on the new middle rack which will be 3,250 watts of panels) will be current-limited to 1,600 watts.  BUT on those partly cloudy days, lower light and all, we will be much closer to breaking even on all but air conditioning loads.

A further bonus: Because the wire runs (on the #4 wire from the racks) will now be at twice the voltage the ampacity tables tell us to expect big reduction in power losses.  You can illustrate this by remembering #12 house wiring at 120 volts can do up to 20 amps (If pushed),  but that means at 240 volts, you can run the same current and get twice the work done.  Because it’s 2.4 kilowatts on the 120 volt circuit and 4.8 kilowatts on the higher voltage leg.  Same principle works on panel to controller wiring.

No, you won’t have to take a test on this, but if you want the most power (least losses) in like an RV install, remember that two panels in series putting out 40 volts instead of two parallel panels with VoC of 20V, will have better low light and less wire losses.

My God, you’re clever, huh?

Ringing the Decibels

Here – look at this off-center fed dipole antenna.  Spot the problem?

“Does that line to the left really go UP? Up on the right, too”

Bingo!

That’s why my fascination with getting rid of the big (very good) balun in the middle came from.  It’s too heavy to get up really high on a floppy fiberglass pole.  I haven’t had time (or the inclination) to take the antenna gun or drones out to flop a halyard over the 100 foot pines, besides, those leafy trees gotta come down anyway and it’s still too hot for logging. So I just hung it at the 30-foot level over the summer.  That worked, OK…but barely. And on 20-meters modeled out like this:

Yeah, not totally sucky for what it is:  4.41 db compared to a dipole which makes it about 5.87 dbRef (adding back modeling losses) and then add back the dbi convention (2.15) and it’s been OK with the middle at 30 feet with much higher ends.

Definitions:  dBRef is the EZNEC model gain relative to a reference antenna.  When you are modeling to compare to sa conventional dipole, the comparison is set to 2.15 dbi.

Now look what will happen when I get the middle up to where it should be – and this is before the bonus from going to ladder line and a balanced tuner!  Like with solar, higher voltage = lower losses.

Now we have 7.22 plus the modeling loss add-back, so what’s that 8.67 dbRef.  Yeah…that’s more like it.  Laid up at 50′ and with the antenna north-south (remembering that at multiples of the primary frequency above the second harmonic, OCFDs and dipoles in general tend to become ‘end-firing’ – so yes, this will be like running the amplifier, but without the power bill.

OR, finally getting around to DXCC-QRP but not sure if I’ll have time for that on this ride through Life, or not.  There are booked to write, shop projects, and a 77th birthday at DisneyWorld you know…

OK, still have to open up the new Evolution table saw and do that whole review deal, but I won’t mention it because that tends to jinx things. Has so far…

Write when you get rich,

[email protected] /ac7x