Moving On

[thunderhead]

I attempted a diary entry, but the glaring lack of a <PRE> tag made posting a table too frustrating, and I put it in my LiveJournal instead.

[Phil Timmons]

That was interesting.  Thanks.

Nice to see thing well structured and analyzed.

Really liked this phrase:

"they've become steadily less practical and steadily more preachy"

I swear I know those people

From the table it looked like not a lot of sun

Guess I am addicted to sunshine -- and probably one day will have skin cancer to show for it.

Even though all Summer, I wind working nights because all this Texas sunshine makes things just too hot to play (work) in the day.  

I suppose the wind-to-resistive-heat makes good sense.  Seems that often the coldest days are the most windy and cloudy.  Might try that myself.  Never have made a lot of sense of the battery bank stuff.

[thunderhead]

Sorry I didn't notice this - I was looking for comments on LiveJournal, but forgot that diary entries here attract comments.  My bad. :-(

Guess I am addicted to sunshine -- and probably one day will have skin cancer to show for it.  Even though all Summer, I wind working nights because all this Texas sunshine makes things just too hot to play (work) in the day.

My brother lives in Texas - near Houston.  The heat never struck me as fun, especially without air conditioning; and as for the hurricanes...

I suppose the wind-to-resistive-heat makes good sense.  Seems that often the coldest days are the most windy and cloudy.  Might try that myself.  Never have made a lot of sense of the battery bank stuff.

I think heat stores are a good way to store energy that is going to be used for heating: both the collectors and the stores tend to be cheaper than electricity.  Underfloor heating can make good use of water at 40C; and by using homebrew solar panels as a preheater and a much smaller evac tube panel as the last in the chain, it should be possible to get the heat store up to 90C - important from the point of view of things like Legionella.  Between 40oC and 90C water stores a lot of heat.