Solar Electricity generation thoughts

How to do it and what you need to know.

1. Where do you live. This means the latitude of your home. this is needed because the sun only shines straight down on homes between the tropics of Cancer and capricorn  at Midsummer and midwinter respectively.  At my latitude ( 41 degrees North) the best angle of the sun at Midsummer is xxxx degrees.

2. the angle of your roof. If solar panels are flat on your roof, then this affects the best angle that the sun can have on your roof.   This can be calculated by counting the number of bricks horizontally and then the number of bricks vertically between the eave and the peak, and then measuring these distances against the bricks at a lower height, and calculating the tangent of the angle.

3. is the orientation of the peak of the roof. Ideally it should be East-West so that the roof faces south. As the sun processes across the sky it will be at the best angle at Midday in this instance. If the roof is at a different angle - My roof faces SW by W. Then the sun strikes the roof later in the day.

It is a double integral to calculate the amount of incident sunlight on your solar panels over the year. It also depends on the efficiency of the panels at every angle.

See: http://www.4x4powersolutions.co.za/orientation-of-solar-panels.html

There is another double integral of the depth of the atmosphere at every angle to take into consideration.

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Two quotes received. One for a 4kw system and the other for a 2.6 kw system as that is what he thinks will be sufficient.  However, the question is- when will it give this power? At Midsummer at noon?   If I play that game I would say that I want a system that will deliver 700watts during most of the day, say from 8AM to 4PM in midwinter. 700 watts seems to be the high regular sort of usage I see on the power meter, with peaks up to 2kw when the kettle is in use.

These quotes  have very basic calculations to determine the values, but are based on charts of radiation that contain some of this information. 

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Accepted the quote for the 2.6KW system using Microinverters  and 10 panels.

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Assuming I wanted to have two more panels added to this system. Is it viable?

from a DIY Solar PV site I found figures for panels.

Assuming  a panel + inverter costs £350, including the trivial cost of installation with the rest of the system.  What is payback on that £700?  

Negative - That £700 could earn me 2%? in the bank.

2 panels  generates maximum 270w  x 2 =540watts.

Cost of generation income = 14.38p/Kwhr + export  of 4.77pKwhr for 50% of generated electricity (= 2.38pKwhr)     = total revenue of 16.76pKwhr.

equation is 540w x h   = 700£ / (£0.1676/Kwhr)

h = 700 £Kwhr / (£0.1676 x 540w)  =   7734 hr

(Ultimate guestimate) Assuming that you only get this power for 4 hours a day, this gives 1933 days for payback =

 5.3 years.

Security Certificate Fun&Games - or a warning to the wise

Recently there has been a difficulty reaching Google mainly on the XP machine. We keep getting the message about an SSL string too long. I know that I found an indication that TalkTAlk accepts responsibility and is working on it.  

As an attempt to cure the problem as it mostly appeared in Firefox and sometimes in Chrome, I went into Firefox options and deleted a number of Security certificates that looked dodgy, like the one for homeland security, and ones with a tk or ru suffix.

This caused grievous problems as we couldn't get into Facebook, 23snaps, or a number of other sites. I was told this morning that the banking site was unavailable as it didn't have a valid security certificate. During the week some sites have said that the certificate was not there and wouldn't work, and some would let me proceed if I allowed an exception, which I did. I should have kept a record of those.

Today I exported all of the certificates from the Linux computer Firefox, copied those that would on to a memory stick, and started importing them into XP's Firefox. I was able to export the certificates to disk as a single action, but had to import them back in one at a time in a tedious process.

Initially If the first of a named set indicated that it was already installed, I didn't bother with the sub-ones, but later at about the 'c's I realised that the sub-ones sometimes were not present when the main one was, so started being more thorough. I have now installed up to the 'g's, leaving 97 certificates not touched, and it looks like everything is back working. 

I'll keep the certificates on the memory stick for awhile until I am sure. .

Saturday and Amazon gave a certificate warning, so I have put back the rest of the certificates. Of course some were already installed, but I did have to restore some. I had 302 certificates on that memory stick. 

The moral of the story is, don't delete the certificates unless you have taken a backup first, and then only do a few at a time.

Fixing the Crank

When I updated the Raleigh Grand Prix with a  cotterless crank a few years ago, I didn't notice anything wrong,  but when I replaced the front derailleur recently I did notice that the sprockets are too far out from the frame. As this picture shows the inner sprocket is at least a centimetre out from the frame at the back, where it should be quite close, and the derailleur is at full stretch to get to the large sprocket. I know from looking recently that the spindle is a 5T with a 42mm length on the sprocket side.

Another thing that has bugged me is that when I had to replace the left hand crank I couldn't get a straight one like the old one was.

Then I looked up into the rafters and noticed that the Wasp ( yellow Peugeot with black mudguards) had a straight crank, so I thought that I would swap them.

When I took the crank off I noticed that the end cap seemed to be protruding more that I might have expected, leading me to believe that the spindle had too large a centre measurement to the shoulders. Note the picture (sorry that it is not a good focus)

So I removed the spindle and replaced it with one of the correct size. The one that I removed seems to be quite large in the central dimension. To understand this you need to consult www.sheldonbrown.com/bbsize . The markings on it are not common ones. I will expand on that when I have an explanation. It is possible that it will fit appropriately in the Grand Prix, though the ideal spindle is a 5N.  

11/9/14   Still cannot find an explanation of the markings, but it seems that the central dimension is 57mm, according to the LBS, therefore not appropriate to the bike. So I binned it.

Another test that I did today was to come on to the smaller sprocket and note that the shaft of the derailleur was still 9mm extended, so therefore in theory I could reduce the length of the spindle by 9mm from the current 42mm.


4 Feb 2015

This 5T spindle  was not symmetrical. I have been shopping around for the 'ideal' spindle as noted above, and yesterday after visiting the Forge Cycle Works in Ringwood and asking if they had a spindle to fit, I came home and swapped the spindle around so that the long end is on the left side. This has made the changer fit nicely and work well, and then I decided to measure the distance from the seat post out to the end of the crank. On both sides this was 6 cm which means that the crank is now, as far as I am concerned, symmetric. Also each crank  missed teh frame by about 1.5 cm at it's rearmost position.

Too me this is perfect and I am a happy guy.

My bicycles

Again from my 2003 Onetel web pages.

Michael and I have enjoyed working together over the last few years building bikes. It all started when our neighbour was letting his old one go to rust, and Michael wanted a 'racing' bike. That one took us a long time to rebuild, mainly because the saddle post was well rusted into the frame. We stripped it right down and repainted it and rebuilt it. Most of the extra parts that we needed we obtained from the Tip [or dump, in some parlances]. After that we continued getting bikes from the tip and doing them up, so that I could have a mountain bike to go out in the woods with Michael, and also just for the heck of it. On more than one occasion we have come away with a bicycle that has only needed air in the tires. We now have a mentality that will only allow us to buy consumeables such as brake blocks from the bike shop. So, at the end of August 2003 there are 7 or maybe 8 bikes in the garage - no room for cars!
Maybe one day I'll build an electronic bicycle.

A couple of my favourite web sites for inspiration are Ken Kifers pages, and also Sheldon Brown's.
I am going to use this page to highlight some of the bugbears and differences that I have found while rebuilding bikes from parts obtained from scrap. One of the most difficult to overcome has been the problem of removing freewheels from back wheels. I bought one freewheel tool, but every other wheel I have come across since seems to require a different size of tool. The other pain is saddle posts. they come in different diameters, and the frame is not labelled. Of course I have a collection of a dozen or so, but the one to fit the frame never seems to be there.

My bike book tells me how to adjust my front derailleur if it is not working correctly, But doesn't tell me the position to mount it originally. I have worked out that it should be parallel to the sprocket, but about 2mm away from it. I set it so that the outside of the derailleur is in that position relative to the large sprocket initially.

Trivial, but still a pain when you want to do something quickly. Michael took back his drop handlebars from the Dawes Shadow, and gave me some straight handlebars. More pain because we had to find a top headset that the handlebars would fit into. Broke one set trying to expand it. Always be very careful with these top headsets. They are brittle. I fitted some old Mtn brake levers on the new handlebars, but cannot use the old cables because they require a disk type nipple rather than the drop nipples on the cable. Sourced different cables from the spares box. 29/8/03

I have had to use my inventiveness on more than one occasion. I have designed a tool to assist in removing pedal shafts from the axle, as the tool that we have has very worn threads, and in many cases the ally threads in the pedal shaft are worn out.

Hint:- Working on Bicycles always seems to involve grease which gets all over me. A shot of WD40 on my hands, rub them together, and wash off with dish soap, and they are as clean as a baby's.

In the UK, Wilkinsons is a good source for bike parts. They don't have everything, but what they have is cheaper priced than at a bike shop

History
My first bike was a paratroopers bike. It had hinges in the middle of the frame so that it would fold up sideways. It was possible to ride it with the handlebars and front wheel beside me. The number of times Dad had to get the frame welded together I can't remember. Then there was a 3speed CCM Cadet that I put many miles on delivering papers around Kalamalka Lake. When I went to university in Vancouver I bought a 'Lorne Atkinson' 10-speed, but it was stolen quite quickly. I replaced that with a Raleigh Grand Prix in Blue,  (This picture nicked from the Internet, but the bike is the right size as you can tell from the headpost)

which is what I am still riding,

except that it now has a green frame after I tried to ride through a parked car. This creates a philosophical argument. What defines a bicycle: The frame with all the attachments, or the original whole bike? Anyway I am still riding it, though over the years it has had a few modifications, such as the brake levers that allow the cables to run flush with the handlebars rather than having nice curves of cables. To add to the menagerie I now have a Dawes Shadow, also extensively modified, and for riding through the rough countryside, this EMMELLE hybrid thing. The Emmelle was bought at the University from a police sale and needed minimum work.

A lot of these bikes might seem quite big. It's because in my prime I was 6 foot 2 and needed a fairly large frame if I was to straighten my leg. The Raleigh Frame is 25 1/2 inches. The Dawes Shadow is only 23, but the rake of the front forks makes it nice to ride - for short distances - as my knee problems mean that I have to straighten out my leg to be comfortable.

2014 - The Shadow which was only a 23" frame and a bit too small I sold to a student and never saw again. I had offered to buy it back at the end of the year. I also sold the ML.   I then bought an old MTB at a police auction on campus. Really it is too small for me. I kept it at the university for getting around between classes.

The Green Raleigh is now a black Raleigh due to the same sort of accident.

Having looked up Grand Prix bikes on the internet and found how many people do them up an love them, I am trying to get mine back to close to original but still modern. I have just sourced and original front derailleur and replaced that as the Delrin (plastic) one  was cracking after 40 years.

A few years ago I changed the cottered cranks for a set of cotterless cranks that i got from a Raleigh that I rescued from the tip, only to discover now that the crank axle (aka spindle) is too long. That's another post to tell that story.

July3 2015- Better update that story. I spent a lot of time researching Bottom bracket spindles, to discover that the Raleigh has 55 mm separation between the bearing mounts on the spindle, and not the more common 53 mm.  Also that the 5T spindle that I had  was asymmetric in that the lengths of the stem outside the bearing lips was not symmetric, and one side was longer than the other. When I turned it around the gear sprocket is in the right place, and everything fits nicely, except that I have a feeling that it is all slightly wider that it should be. But it works.

Cycling Diatribe

Way back in 2003 I created a web page on my Onetel account, and it included a couple of pages about my bicycles and cycling. I wrote this diatribe for it, and as I have just found the stuff again I thought I would post it here. Nothing has changed, except that some cycle lanes have almost disappeared because the paint has not been redone. 

Cyclists Revolt!

Why should we cycle on the rough part of the road? Have you ever noticed as you are cycling that the centre of the road is nice and smooth, and the part that you are cycling on is full of uneven patches, potholes and drains that are either an inch high or an inch low? It becomes obvious that the people who come along and do work on the roads use cars to get everywhere. If they were cyclists they would take more care to see that the job was smoothly set into the surrounding road. The fact that a drain is an inch high or low is nothing to them, but to me on a bicycle hitting one of them must be the equivalent of driving into the curb at 40 miles per hour.

And the junk that is swept into the curbs. Every time some lout behind a wheel plays bumper cars with the one ahead, they deposit a large amount of glass on the road. What do they do with it? They push it to the side where the cyclists ride! Where’s the logic in that? A cycle tyre is very thin and an automobile tyre is quite thick and has to be replaced when the tread, let alone the tyre wall, gets down to 2 mm. My bicycle tyre is unlikely to be 2mm thick when it is new. Every driver should be made to carry a brush and pan in his car to sweep up the glass they deposit. For second offences they should have to sweep it up with their tongue! Who can I sue for all the new Inner tubes that I need, and the lost time patching tyres after finding some of the glass on the road? I could cycle along in a wandering mode, moving into the middle of the road to avoid all the patches of glass along the way, but drivers would either think I was drunk, or hit me. I don’t think that sliding into a patch of glass is any softer than hitting pavement.

In our local area [Ham Lane] when the brush at the side of the road grew so thick that it was moving into the road, did the council cut it back? Noooo, they painted the white line marking the edge of the tarmac a little further into the road, making the road narrower and more dangerous for cyclist.

Another danger for cyclists not understood by the keepers of the roads are the coloured lines on the road. When they are wet, they are dangerous, not only because they are raised from the tarmac surface due to their thickness, but they are also very slippery. Drivers will have noticed this when stopped at a junction with their wheels on the paint, but not enough to complain. I noticed it the other day when I got the feeling that I was cycling along a thick yellow tightrope, suspended off the road, and I could have lost control if I had slipped off.

I would like advice from the council about these cycle lanes that stop for not good reason at all. There is one that disappears just before a pedestrian crossing, and starts again a few yards later. Cars can go through the restricted area because of the central reservation, but are cycles supposed to fly over, or disappear until they are across. Why don’t they just make the car area narrower, and show the cycle path continuing. Maybe it is because that would imply that cyclists have priority over cars in the restricted zone?

September 30, 2003

Am I a fool?

I don't know what to do. I feel bad, not guilty, but torn up.

Should I: Forgive and Forget?
 - : Turn the other cheek, or
 -: allow myself to be walked all over (again)

In 2006 our mother died, and contrary to what all three of us boys believed, she had made out the large lakeside property where we all grew up and loved over to our sister. Sister persuaded Mom that she could not leave the house where she lived on the property. She has no guilt that she has taken a goodly share of our inheritance.

We have not communicated for years. Richard went to her son's wedding, but that was all.

We three boys have failed in our efforts to discuss this with her. Vivian lives in the same town and seems to have a relationship with her. I have phoned her twice in the last year, once when I knew she was coming to England for a month. She wants to visit with us. Do I make her welcome in our home? or meet somewhere else. I am certainly not having her to stay.

She did say that she understood that I might not want to see her, but as Vivian says, she is my sister. I do want to see her. But why?

I need help. How am I going to react to her when I meet her again?

Charlotte Clay

I don't know why this lady should bother me, but she does. She is the daughter of my great-great grandfathers sister Charlotte Merchant, born of her marriage to Charles Clay. Why should I care what happened to her? She is not a direct relation, but I can't get her out of my mind, because she was born in 1879 (ish), and her parents both died in 1895, when she was still a teenager. For a long time I thought it was because she was an only child, but now I find that she has got brothers and sisters, some of whom have families.

I thought that I had her successfully married off to Ezekiel Parry, but now I find that this is Charlotte Elizabeth Clay, born about 1882 and born somewhere else, and her parents have different names. That eliminates that route.

So at the back of my mind I wonder whether this C.E.Clay is a cousin of the one I am interested in, or not.  I am not going to go down that investigation - life is too short.

And at the back of my mind is the thought that perhaps I am not even looking at the correct family at all, as in the 1871 census Charlotte Marchant is a servant in Gravesend.

Proof of events back 140 years is so hard to find from the environs of my computer. I guess I need to go to Grays Essex and look at the archives.

Perhaps I can find another way around it. I'll keep wasting time on it. I can't leave her alone.