Wildfires are nice for Solar Business

softdown · November 2018

https://www.quora.com/Why-havent-we-figured-out-how-to-extinguish-forest-fires-quickly

OldMan · January 2019

Dave Angelini said:

softdown said:

Seems like I always read about strong winds aiding the worst California fires. I'm not currently aware of mankind extinguishing a truly major western wildfire without an assist from Mother Nature. We just can't replicate rain.

Not understanding you? Major wildfires are extinguished often without rain. Bulldozers, firepeople, fire equipment, fixed wings and good old time.

Rain would be nice but?

CDF also uses helicopters when appropriate.

Dave Angelini · January 2019

Definitely, I forgot that... Ever have a Skycrane land near your house? One had an emergency a few years back and came down in a clearing near our place. By the way CDF is still there but called CAL FIRE now.

ScoobyMike · January 2019

mike95490 said:

In the 1850s and 1860s, the typical Sierra landscape was of open fields of grass punctuated by isolated pinew scattered oak trees. The first branches on the pine trees started about 20 feet up—lower branches having been burned off by low-intensity grassfires.

I have spent a lot of time in the Freeman Giant Sequoia grove, near Forks of the Kern in southern Sierras. In the late 1800s and early 1900s the sheep herders would set the high ground on fire when they left for the the winter grazing grounds. Modern fire suppression practice has allowed the Ponderosa Pines to grow to the point that they have now intermingled with the crowns of the Sequoia trees. This very effectively short circuits the Sequoia's natural fire defense mechanism. It will be a sad day when we loose a Giant Sequoia grove.

Santa Ana winds are utra low humidity. I have watched healthy, moist vegetation shrivel to dried leaves that crumble in your hands within an hour or two. I lived at ground zero (San Diego Country Estates) for the Cedar fire, and watched the fire take a steep 600' open space hill behind my house in a matter of seconds, spawning hot mini tornadoes that ran back down the hill. I had a horse at the time and I had 100' of bare dirt between my house and the open space. Almost all of the houses in my area that burned had allowed thick vegetation to build up around their house or garage, which is similar to the issue of Ponderosa Pines in the Giant Sequoia groves.

BB. · January 2019

Add a reason why even off grid people should follow NEC and other codes/good practices the best they can. This does not sound like a solar installation, just privately installed power lines/system (?):

https://www.sfgate.com/california-wildfires/article/Tubbs-Fire-State-blames-private-electrical-13559073.php

An 80-page report by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention, or Cal Fire, faults a “privately owned conductor or equipment” at a home in Calistoga, or next to it, for the blaze. However, the document doesn’t narrow the ignition to a precise location nor identify exactly what went wrong. The fire destroyed much of the wooded 10.5-acre lot, making an already difficult investigative task even trickier.

The heavily redacted report, which has been in the works for 15 months, suggests that at least parts of the property’s electrical system were not “professionally installed.” It also said that two fire-safety violations had been found on the parcel during a 2015 defensible-space inspection. Still, investigators concluded that there were no breaches of state law associated with the electrical issues that ignited the Tubbs Fire.

The owner of the property, Ann Zink, 91, could not immediately be reached for comment. In 2017, she told The Chronicle that her Calistoga home was unoccupied at the time of the fire but she thought trees hitting wires during fierce winds started the blaze. She said she was at her other house in Riverside County when the fire erupted.

I don't know that that was the cause of the fire, but PG&E stock holders were pleased that 1 major fire may not have been the utility's fault:

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Update-Pg-E-Responds-To-Cal-Fire-s-Tubbs-Fire-13559703.php

Pacific Gas and Electric shares shot up nearly 75 percent in the moments after a new Cal Fire report determining that the utility's equipment was not the cause of the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Napa and Sonoma counties.

The announcement under an hour before the closing bell saw shares skyrocket from the $7.50 range to close at $13.95, a 74.59 percent increase over the opening price. Still, the shares have fallen exponentially from the $70 range after the utility was linked to investigations of multiple wildfires in fall of 2017.

Don't know about how this affects the bankruptcy filing of the utility.

-Bill

mcnutt13579 · January 2019

The Valley fire of 2015, very near here, was attributed to faulty hot tub wiring, and as far as I know, they threw the book at the responsible party.

http://calfire.ca.gov/fire_protection/downloads/FireReports/Valley/15CALNU0008670_Valley_Redacted.pdf

Dave Angelini · January 2019

PG&E still has the other 17 (I heard fires) where it will be very hard to prove that they are not at the main cause and deep pocket. Socal Edison has fire and mud so they are not much better off.

Add into the decisions in some cases to shut down power in high winds and to not (Paradise fire) and it will be hard for investors to not sell short, like they are.

I try to always exceed code for offgrid, always have

Estragon · January 2019

"difficult to prove they are not..." It's logically difficult to impossible in general to prove a negative.

Essentially, it makes me guilty of everything for which I lack an iron-clad and evidentially provable alibi. This puts guilt or innocence almost entirely in the realm of political expediency - a situation I'm inclined to stay away from on both the long and short side. The short side does tempt me though.

Dave Angelini · January 2019

You may not be the size of deep pocket the creditors are looking for

BTW, logic is not required with lawyers!

Estragon · January 2019

Nope, I'm definitely not that that kind of pockets. They'll be looking for the "we the people" kind

mcnutt13579 · January 2019

Dave Angelini said:

PG&E still has the other 17 (I heard fires) where it will be very hard to prove that they are not at the main cause and deep pocket. Socal Edison has fire and mud so they are not much better off.

Add into the decisions in some cases to shut down power in high winds and to not (Paradise fire) and it will be hard for investors to not sell short, like they are.

I wish I had had the foresight to buy into pge at the low, though. I think it was $7, after that Tubbs fire announcement it popped up to $11 and change, good money to be made there.

Dave Angelini · January 2019

Hindsight is 20/20 and unless you have a crystal ball, the best way to invest is a diversified, balanced, and disciplined approach. IMO.

I keep hearing that TOU changes in march and buy you grid solar now. How bad a deal is it Bill or anyone? Too lazy to look it up

BB. · January 2019

I am not sure, but I think this is the standard Residential Time of Use:

https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHEDS_E-TOU.pdf

: This voluntary schedule is available to residential customers on an opt-in basis. There are two Schedule E-TOU options: tiered Option A with a baseline credit and peak hours from 3:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. on non-holiday weekdays year-round, and non-tiered Option B with peak hours from 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. on non-holiday weekdays year-round. Option B is subject to an initial enrollment cap of 225,000 customers.

This, especially during winter, moves most of my solar generation into off peak times... As a GT solar person, it bugs me. As an engineer (or as an MBA), it makes sense as this is the typical peak power usage in California at this time (people going home and firing up their stoves/washers/Air Conditioners).

The really scary stuff is look a the charges:

OPTION A TOTAL RATES Total Energy Rates ($ per kWh) PEAK OFF-PEAK Summer Total Usage $0.39853 (R) $0.32296 (R) Baseline Credit (Applied to Baseline Usage Only) ($0.08594) (I) ($0.08594) (I) Winter Total Usage $0.28056 (R) $0.26627 (R) Baseline Credit (Applied to Baseline Usage Only) ($0.08594) (I) ($0.08594) (I) Delivery Minimum Bill Amount ($ per meter per day) $0.32854 California Climate Credit (per household, per semi-annual payment occurring in the April and October bill cycles) ($39.42)

Boy--That is scary, I looked that the rates and we are at $0.26 to $0.40 per kWH with a $0.086 per kWH credit on the first (my my area) 300 kWH per month (-$0.086 off the full rate).

And we get a ~$39.42 credit twice a year (I think that is how it reads).

Anyway, read through the 8 pages of the Tarrif and see if you can figure out how much a person actually pays.

I think I still use 300 kWH per month or less, and my solar power system still generates more kWH more than I use--So, I still pay $10 per month connection fee, plus I get some money back from over generation (Less than $100 now?).

Technically I am grandfathered on the older E6 plan (after I lost my first grandfathered plan) for a few years--But this stuff is crazy.

-Bill

BB. · January 2019

It even gets more crazy in that our local governments (SF Bay area or possibly just SF peninsula) are now switched over to a local "green energy" supplier that knocks a couple pennies off the per kWH charges for our power bill. We just "pay PGE" for our delivery charges and this totally made up quasi governmental thing for generation.

Anyway, when it gets close to $0.50 per kWH, battery based off grid systems start to look pretty interesting.

I am going to have to pay more attention to my electric bill... May have to seriously start turning everything off again when people leave the room, check standby energy usage again on TV's, Roku boxes, etc...

Seriously nuts.

-Bill

Dave Angelini · January 2019

It is hard to go back to shutting everything down again. We had a similar trying period when I was testing a smaller battery and could not use my house bank because of the test.

Thanks for the pricing info. My long gone Gramps from Italy always said only in California. Maybe he knew something about the Nuts?

The Roku is one of the best things I ever bought. I hear you on that one. My u-tube account on Roku is fabulous the way Roku presents the content.

We put all the video on one power strip and the Audio on another. It is getting hard to justify the hassle when most all new devices have to draw no more than 1 watt when off.

I heard that the unfunded retirements in 28 states and locals is now over 1.4 Trillion. I am sure we are a leader here in California

BB. · January 2019

Yes all us private industry workers get 401k and self funded retirement accounts.

The government workers in general, most seem to still get pensions that can be manipulated into insane payouts (xx% of last two years of pay, etc.).

And few government entities seem to be 100% funded to date.

USPS (the post office) got into big accounting problems when they went not government and had 5 years (?) to fully fund pension and retirement health care accounts.

Roku is working nice. We are also using a raspberry pi (B+) and Pi Hole and blocking software to kill ads and tracking on our home network (basically DNS server that black holes requests to any software and computers that yet to download advertising and logs (phone home).

Use wifi for your phones and it kills most advertising on cell phones too.

$10 to $50 depending what (size of deck of cards) computer you get. And free blocking software and updates (basically Linux operating system and free application).

https://www.raspberrypi.org

https://pi-hole.net/

Bill

mcnutt13579 · January 2019

See, here in the off grid world we know how budgets and deposit/withdrawal work without any fudge factor to go back on. Once the battery is depleted the lights are out, no borrowing from the next guy over.

Estragon · January 2019

In a sense, state/local are 100% funded. They just have to take your 401k & that's the funding problem solved!

Dave Angelini · January 2019

mcnutt13579 said:

See, here in the off grid world we know how budgets and deposit/withdrawal work without any fudge factor to go back on. Once the battery is depleted the lights are out, no borrowing from the next guy over.

Well you can borrow from battery B to pay for a dead battery A offgrid

Dave Angelini · January 2019

Estragon said:

In a sense, state/local are 100% funded. They just have to take your 401k & that's the funding problem solved!

Do you guys have IRA's up there? Thats where they would get me....

Dave Angelini · January 2019

Bill, why did you decide to use https://pi-hole.net/ ?

BB. · January 2019

The Pi-Hole is a DNS server that does not "know" about Internet Sites that people have found to be scammy, log your history, or serve ads (any site listed in the various block lists does not return a "real" IP address).

For folks that use FireFox and other browsers with an ad blocker (ublock origin, adblock plus, noscripts, etc.), Pi-Hole does not really add anything.

However, if you have devices that don't allow adblockers (some phone browsers, phone applications, Roku boxes, Internet of Things, etc.), it is a great secondary method of adding adblockers/do not track to those devices on your network too.

There are limitations--Pi-Hole can only look at the URL site (i.e., www.xyz.com), it cannot look at the content of your links to the right (www.xyz.com/hyjack_this), and cannot stop stuff that comes in under https:

You point the DNS server to the raspberry pi computer (that you have assigned a static IP address to on your router), and then Pi-Hole software will review the DNS (domain name server) requests before passing them on to the outside world to be converted into IP addresses.

And for devices that tended not to allow adblockers (like IOS and Iphone browsers), Pi-Hole provides adblocking for those too.

As always, there are work arounds that advertisers and spammers can use... But so far they have not (in general). However, there are new things that are being tried all the time, even the "big names" continue to work on new methods to serve up ads and log your history:

https://www.cnet.com/news/google-may-break-ad-blockers-with-upcoming-chrome-change/

A Google plan to improve the Chrome web browser has triggered an explosion of concern that it'll also cripple extensions designed to block ads, improve privacy and protect against security problems.

Google's proposed approach would torpedo ad blocker uBlock Origin, tracker blocker Ghostery, privacy and password manager Privowny, JavaScript software blocker NoScript and a malware blocker from F-Secure, according to their developers.

In a statement Wednesday, though, Google said it's trying to improve Chrome while keeping all those extensions working.

"We want to make sure all fundamental use cases are still possible with these changes and are working with extension developers to make sure their extensions continue to work while optimizing the extensions platform and better protecting our users," the company said in a statement.

If you add an VPN (virtual private networking) to your router and mobile phone, you can use the Pi-Hole back at home to remove ads from your phone remotely too.

-Bill

PS: I should add that *.logs.roku.com is the number 2 blocked access on my system (I have two roku devices) with over 1,200 "phone home" events a day... It is probable that many of these are "retries" because the first phone home did not work. But I find quite a few other devices (like Amazon Kindle and others) that try to phone home a lot too.

And for some reason, my netgear routers do phone home ~3,000 times per day... Not blocked currently, but got to take a look at that an figure out why...

Estragon · January 2019

Dave Angelini said:

Estragon said:

In a sense, state/local are 100% funded. They just have to take your 401k & that's the funding problem solved!

Do you guys have IRA's up there? Thats where they would get me....

We have RRSPs, which I think are much like a traditional IRA (contributions in pre-tax $, withdrawals taxable), and TFSAs, which I think are like a Roth IRA (contributions in after-tax $, withdrawals tax free). Both have lots of rules, limits, and other gotchyas.

They have some creditor protection features, but if your electric bill/property tax/employment tax/fees/tolls/fines etc. means either eating cat food or drawing down the savings, the protection doesn't help much

Dave Angelini · January 2019

Thanks Bill,

Nothing has bothered us ever, so far.... We use chrome and don't do anything financial online except monitor an IRA that can only have withdrawals with voice recognition, the right phone number, and a cell code. Anyone can donate to it BTW

So why do you think I should do something like that again....

Dave Angelini · January 2019

Estragon said:

Dave Angelini said:

Estragon said:

In a sense, state/local are 100% funded. They just have to take your 401k & that's the funding problem solved!

Do you guys have IRA's up there? Thats where they would get me....

We have RRSPs, which I think are much like a traditional IRA (contributions in pre-tax $, withdrawals taxable), and TFSAs, which I think are like a Roth IRA (contributions in after-tax $, withdrawals tax free). Both have lots of rules, limits, and other gotchyas.

They have some creditor protection features, but if your electric bill/property tax/employment tax/fees/tolls/fines etc. means either eating cat food or drawing down the savings, the protection doesn't help much

Thanks.
I should point out that some cat food is fit for human consumption. There is a commercial on the radio that the guy tell his wife that and adds we can all use the same bowl. She says, I want my own bowl

Estragon · January 2019

LOL. Cat food may actually be better for us than some of the human food we eat

Estragon · January 2019

Pi hole reminds me a bit of the real time black hole lists for email spam back in my ISP days, with similar pros and cons.

The pro is reasonably effective spam/ad blocking, which some find really annoying and intrusive.

I pretty much accept that any notion of privacy is dead (I have a piece of tape over my laptop webcam, but that's just a silly denial of reality). That Alexa is a thing tells me lots of other folks have pretty much given up too. The boss gets pretty freaked out by the ad targetting though, so I might give the pi-hole a go.

The main con, especially for RTBLs at the ISP level, is the risk of false positives or overbroad blackholing censoring "legit" traffic. Pi-hole appears to mitigate this to some degree in that it's done at the LAN edge, so user configurable to a large degree. Sooner or later it will block something you may actually have wanted to see (eg a discounted price on something you intend to buy anyway).

I can understand the Roku phone home thing. Part of the thing is being able to track activity in real time to present more effective content and ads. The router thing is a mystery though (broken check-for-updates?). "Who knows what evil lurks..."

Dave Angelini · January 2019

Thanks for the explanation Estragon. I think I will pass as nothing is linked to our phone on roku or alexa. We have an amazing ISP for how rural we are. The alexa echos are just for prime stereo music and we don't use amazon from her ever. She can tell if I am leaning right or left sometimes so that is weird

BB. · January 2019

Older routers with current updates (only a year or less old). Don't know why...

The Pi-Hole just started as something fun for our younger kid to have a reason for playing with a small/cheap computer. Isn't perfect, but around 25% to 50% of our DNS lookups go into a black hole now (includes things like google tag/asset management, anything Facebook, etc.).

A bit of pain to learn what blocks work or not--But it has a nice web interface that you can click on blocked requests that break something, and white list them.

It does block most of the ads on Roku and content (which they seem to be adding more and more). On rare occasion, you will get 10-30 seconds of black screen while the "ad runs" (saves clicking mute on the remote).

If you are on satellite or other higher cost/limited data plans (like cell phone), it can save money.

Not pushing the Pi-Hole--But is fun to try something new(er) and cheap. Nothing like having a Linux desktop on a 55 inch TV (pi uses the standard HDMI digital audio/video link to a standard TV set).

The Raspberry Pi also makes a fairly good Web and Youtube browser for the TV (I use a wireless keyboard and mouse with a dongle plugged into the RP). Works pretty nice (while still serving as the DNS black hole). With only 1 GByte of main memory and a 32 GByte MicroSD card with 1.4 GHz 4 core 32 bit processor (I use Wifi for networking connection--our pet rabbit keeps eating the Cat 5 cables), it is not the fastest web browser... And playing an HD Youtube video on a 4k TV is about its limit (can stutter on playback if you move the mouse around and/or do other things on the side).

The DNS function uses very little processor power so you can run other applications/software while doing the DNS stuff in background--And you can even use a $5-$10 Pi ZEro as a DNS server (probably not great as a generic web/youtube browser).

Only draws around 1-2 Watts typically (for the "high power" PR B+ version). Just uses about any decent USB power supply you have around the home with a micro USB connector (if you do not boards and other hardware to the RP, it does need a ~2.7 amp USB supply).

Mostly just for fun and a bit of protection against spammy websites and other applications. A useful platform if you have other projects you want to implement (my daughter is reading this as I type--She has a second RP B+ running Retro-Gaming software... Will not run N64 games--Not enough CPU power).

Cool for web surfing and videos with a typical digital TV these days (nice for folks trying to keep energy usage low while surfing).

Also, the base Raspean software includes compilers and educational packages--Plus a version of Libreoffice

https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/noobs/

Includes several versions to support Java, Python, Scratch for coding and Smartsim for digital circuit design.

Does anyone "need one"... Not really if you have any other computers/tablets/smartphones around the home. But it is fun to play with.

You do need a home router that lets you set a static IP address for the RP, and also allows you to point the DNS to the RP (i.e., 192.168.1.45 address for RP)--May need some help/research if using a Comcast/AT&T etc. router that hides these things. And it is handy to have another computer so you can format and copy files to the micro SD card for initial setup (if you do not buy preloaded mSD cards).

-Bill

MrM1 · January 2019

Come for the Fire Stories and updates, Stay for the Investment and IP Advice

Dave Angelini said:

The alexa echos are just for prime stereo music and we don't use amazon from her ever. She can tell if I am leaning right or left sometimes so that is weird

Politically or Physically. Either is weird, one is just more weird than the other.

I am probably really messed up. I have more wifi devices than a person should be allowed to have (3 rokus, 1 amazon tv, 2 phones 4 notebooks and tables, and a host of about 13 wife switches, plugs and light bulbs) and about all I can do is clear my cookies on the notebooks and phones.

Wildfires are nice for Solar Business

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