A woman's work is never done. Yesterday I came home and mopped the solar cell array on the roof. Ah, 21st Century, how I waited for you... and you gave me this.
It was utterly filthy with a sort of London Brand black soot or smut that wouldn't shift with a hose and soap alone. I should get a couple more kilowatt hours a day out of it now.
If you're wondering what the man of the house was doing - perhaps twenty-first centurily eating protein pills and flying around with his jet pack - he was actually on the roof too, fencing it against wild animals. Plus ca change there too.
It's true the wild animals are raccoons, but when they've fallen 10 feet into the atrium and can't climb out again they are like compact cornered bears. They regularly hold Fight Club meetings on the flat roof and I suspect it's the losers who fall off the beams into the house as they are wobbling off home.
Showing posts with label solar power. Show all posts
Showing posts with label solar power. Show all posts
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Aha!
We changed most of the bulbs in our creaky old house (i.e. 37 year-old house; this is the US) for compact fluorescents a few months ago.
The so-called 'instant on' compact fluorescents take about a second and a half to switch on. They're 'instant on' because they don't slowly lighten up from stygian gloom to actinic glare over the course of fifteen minutes like the older type. But the 'instant' part is not strictly true.
Now it doesn't, cosmically speaking, matter if it takes a bulb over a second from lightswitch to illumination. But after several months it still brings me up short. Physically, I'm fine with it. I've learned to hit the switch, stand still for a second, and then walk into the room as the light comes up. Psychically, it's still disconcerting.
The word for knowledge or grokking is 'illumination'. For some time, way back before I was born, the usual symbol for that moment of instant understanding is the light bulb flicking on. The pronunciation is related to light-switches too. We say something has 'clicked'. To go through the house and 'click' and not have the lightbulb obey instantly still jars something inside.
There are murmurings - now reaching a low roar - that incandescents will soon be banned. My iguanas won't like that - they use almost a kilowatt of light as heating during the day. The fluorescents, even 'instant on' ones, won't supply heat. (We have solar power, so don't bother writing in about what a wasteful git I am. And on really sunny days we cut out the middle man and put the iguanas directly under the sun and switch their heat lamps off.) The house wiring won't like that either. The mains is pretty lumpy inside here and it's eating the fluorescents for breakfast.
Disposing of the dead bulbs is always fun. As they are considered hazardous waste because of their mercury content, we have to drive them to the dump where men in chemical hazard suits carefully lift them from the back of our car with gloved hands and then unbundle them from their poisonous content by some secret method to which we are not privy.
I'm hoping something with LEDs will happen soon and I won't have to worry about the mercury thing.
The so-called 'instant on' compact fluorescents take about a second and a half to switch on. They're 'instant on' because they don't slowly lighten up from stygian gloom to actinic glare over the course of fifteen minutes like the older type. But the 'instant' part is not strictly true.
Now it doesn't, cosmically speaking, matter if it takes a bulb over a second from lightswitch to illumination. But after several months it still brings me up short. Physically, I'm fine with it. I've learned to hit the switch, stand still for a second, and then walk into the room as the light comes up. Psychically, it's still disconcerting.
The word for knowledge or grokking is 'illumination'. For some time, way back before I was born, the usual symbol for that moment of instant understanding is the light bulb flicking on. The pronunciation is related to light-switches too. We say something has 'clicked'. To go through the house and 'click' and not have the lightbulb obey instantly still jars something inside.
There are murmurings - now reaching a low roar - that incandescents will soon be banned. My iguanas won't like that - they use almost a kilowatt of light as heating during the day. The fluorescents, even 'instant on' ones, won't supply heat. (We have solar power, so don't bother writing in about what a wasteful git I am. And on really sunny days we cut out the middle man and put the iguanas directly under the sun and switch their heat lamps off.) The house wiring won't like that either. The mains is pretty lumpy inside here and it's eating the fluorescents for breakfast.
Disposing of the dead bulbs is always fun. As they are considered hazardous waste because of their mercury content, we have to drive them to the dump where men in chemical hazard suits carefully lift them from the back of our car with gloved hands and then unbundle them from their poisonous content by some secret method to which we are not privy.
I'm hoping something with LEDs will happen soon and I won't have to worry about the mercury thing.
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