Blogging has taken a back seat for the last few months as life has
kept me quite occupied.  Now that the winter rainy season has set
in, I have a bit more time to penning some thoughts.

##Laptop blues

The cooling fan failed (again) on my laptop.  Since this is the
second failure of the cooling fan on this 10 year old laptop (within
the span of a year),the decision was made not to replace the fan as
the machine was probably not worth the effort.  I was forced to fall
back to the old Raspberry Pi Zero which was okay for most of my
basic work, but on those rare occasions when I needed to run a full
featured browser (for online banking etc.) running the Chromium
browser would almost bring it to a stand still.  I had no particular
desire to purchase another laptop, consequently I decided to give
the newer Rapsberry Pi 4 (2 GB ram) a shot.  At USD $45, I figured
it was worth the gamble since my needs were fairly modest.

Thus far it has been rather surprising how well this little unit
performs, although I must admit I set the bar pretty low since, as I
mentioned earlier, my requirements are pretty simple.  The Rpi was
originally designed as a project board, but since that time
improvements made to the soc (system on a chip) has allowed it to
now serve nicely as a desktop unit.  Also what was appealing was
it's tiny energy footprint.  As a comparison, I fired up my ancient
behemoth desktop machine and checked its power consumption with a
Kill-a-Watt meter.  It dialed in at 120 watts whereas the Rpi was
the featherweight at 5.5 watts.  Things have come a long way in 10
years!

## Energy and the new normal

"Public safety power shutoffs" in California has added an additional
challenge to supplying our energy needs here in the sticks.
Normally, if power has been disrupted because of storm damage or
other factors, the power would be disrupted for perhaps a few hours.
On one occasion during a storm, it was out for 40 hours.  This year,
the latest power shutoff left us without power for a week.  Under
ordinary circumstances we would have been okay since I do have a
generator and our satellite internet is on solar, although the
batteries seem to be fading.  A problem arose when we lost our land
line telephone network after a couple of days, which was a bit
unnerving.  Since we do not have any cell signal at our particular
rural location, we would not receive any reverse 911 calls from the
local authorities in the event of a fire in our area.  AT&T, for
obvious business reasons, is not maintaining their landline networks
(nudging customers into wireless...insert choice expletive here
____) which is most likely the reason for their battery backup
failure.  Thankfully, we have Google Voice and Skype to use with our
satellite internet which is probably the best fallback option
considering our current circumstances.  This means, of course, that
our satellite modem and home network would need to remain active
24/7 during an outage.  It's time to upgrade the solar by adding a
couple more panels and perhaps a couple more batteries to the bank.
Currently we have a single 255W panel and 2 6V golf cart batteries.
After 6 years of use, the batteries are probably getting close to
the end of their useful life, but I'll check them with a hydrometer
to ascertain their health.  Even if they are still healthy, it is
not sufficient energy storage in the event of several days of rainy
weather which is typical for this part of northern California in the
winter.  Although expensive, I might look at Lithium Iron Phosphate
batteries as an option.

For us, determining energy sufficiency seems to be a matter of
setting priorities.  Having some experience under our belt with
regard to power outages, we have concluded that the most important
line items are (not in order of priority):

 1. Refrigeration
 2. Heating/Cooling
 3. Communications/Internet
 4. Lighting
 5. Water pumping

Refrigeration is the tough one as the old fridge we have is an
energy hog by today's standards.  During some of the more brief
power outages, the refrigerator stayed cold for several hours before
we had to concern ourselves about the contents.  If the need arises,
I can connect it to the generator to keep it running.  I may
eventually purchase a chest freezer that can act as a
fridge

https://fridge0.branchable.com/ 

with one or two pv panels and its own battery.

I generally keep a cord of firewood for the colder days although
with the Mediterranean climate we enjoy in this area, it does not
get terribly cold.  Cooling is a different beast although we are
also lucky that there are very few days that exceed 90°F
(32°C), so we can probably make do with fans when required.  I
might look at a couple of 12V fans.

Communications/Internet is critical which is, as I mentioned
earlier, the big reason why I am upgrading our solar for more power
and storage.  The satellite modem alone consumes 30W and if you add
in the router and other ancillary equipment, we might be approaching
50 to 60 watts which would need to run 24/7.  

For lighting, we of course have flashlights and candles, but I also
have some 12V led bulbs that screw into standard sockets on some
floor lamps.  I have hacked a standard 120V ac plug to accommodate
the lamp plug and to plug it into a 12V cigarette lighter adapter on
an extra battery jumper power pack.  The light pulls very little
power and can probably run continuously for several days before
requiring a recharge.

Getting to the water department, for now, the generator connects to
a power transfer switch at the main breaker panel which provides
power to the well house.  Putting this on solar would be a costly
affair and will probably have to wait.  Running the generator for
the well house is only required for taking baths, doing dishes etc.
Once the system is pressured up, we have sufficient water for
flushing toilets several times without running the generator.

Going completely off grid is a budget buster, but the goal is to be
able to function during a protracted shutdown.  It appears this is
going to be the new normal in these parts.  Stay tuned...

Tags: computing, energy, wild-fires