I’m considering adding solar power to my house.  I’m not interested in leasing.  The cost of solar power continues to plummet and now soft costs (non-hardware) are about half of the total cost.  The national average cost installed before incentives is now around $3.6/Watt and Maryland costs are around the national average.  Interestingly, America is still the most expensive country in which to install photovoltaics; in Germany it is *much* less expensive…the free market doesn’t seem to be working so well in that regard (much like our health care or telecommunications systems).

Although the green aspects of solar power appeal to me, it needs to make financial sense too.  In 2014 I paid $2130 for delivery of an average of 1328kWh/month = $178/month ~= $0.134/kWh.   electricity.  Given Maryland’s daily hours of insolation (around 4.2), to offset my usage I’d need a 15kW system which would cost around $54K before incentives/rebates/etc.

I met with a reputable local solar installer and received a quote; they performed a detailed analysis of my house roof and estimated that my maximum array size would be 46 panels x 270W/panel = 12.42kW.  Given the panels’ locations, angles, etc. they estimated that they would generate 1093 kWh/kW/year or 13,570kWh/yr.  They did not use any sales pressure tactics and were very professional.  They used some higher end equipment and their terms are outstanding; the total cost was estimated at $48,680 (before credits) or $3.92/installed Watt which is somewhat higher than average ($3.6) but not unreasonably so given their warranty/support.

There is currently a federal 30% rebate and a $1K Maryland tax credit on the purchase of panels which brought the installed price to $33,426 ($2.69/installed Watt).  Maryland further adds Solar Renewable Energy Credits or SRECs for the energy you actually generate which traded at an average of $0.14/kWh in 2014.  This would yield an additional $1900/yr, but there’s no telling how long that will last.

The panels are permanent…the cost to remove and re-install would be prohibitive so they effectively become a part of the house.  Moreover, the cost of solar (and therefore the value of the panels) will continue to decline; the SunShot initiative targets an installed cost of $1 per installed Watt by 2020 and panel and inverter technology will surely continue to improve and the panels themselves have a limited (20-30 year) life…usually 25 year guaranteed.  So you can assume the panels have no value at the end of their life.

In some ways, with SRECs, this looks pretty appealing: $4K/yr * 25 years = $100K which corresponds to a 4.5% rate of return on the original $33K investment.  Moreover, although it has declined recently, electricity inflation has averaged 2-3% for the last 20 years, so the rate of return is really more like 6.5% to 7%.

The remaining question for me is how the scenario plays out if you sell your house before the end of the panels’ life (i.e. if you sell after 10 years, what value do the panels retain since they will continue to generate money for at least another 15 years)?

Update: Although I was very impressed with the solar company: Astrum Solar (now Direct Energy Solar) I ultimately decided against it.  If I were very confident I’d be in this house 10 years from now, I would buy the panels and I’d buy them from Astrum – they were very professional.  However the numbers didn’t work for me.  My house is fairly energy efficient and we have gas heat and hot water so our electric bill is already pretty low.  As a result, the ROI was 10+ years and if we decided to move after the kids were in college (6 years!), we’d potentially take a big loss on the system.  A realtor friend told us that panels don’t really affect the house price one way or the other; i.e. the panels would convey for free to the next owner or we’d have to go through an expensive process to have them taken down, shipped, and re-installed on the next house.  It’s just too big a risk.

It really amazes me that so many people enter into very long-term solar leases given the onerous costs if the lease is broken.  Leasing effectively requires any future buyer to assume the lease which might seriously encumber a sale.

I’m old enough to remember when everyone didn’t carry a powerful computer and advanced digital radio transceiver in their pockets.  Back then, long-distance wireless communications still seemed exotic and well aligned with my love of electronics, so I got an amateur radio license (N3XWK).  While I have done lots of commercial work with wireless communications, I have sadly done very little in the amateur space.

In the hope of changing that, I recently bought a Baofeng UV-B5 dual-band (2m/440cm) HT (handheld transceiver):

Baofeng UV-B5

It is a Chinese brand that has received a lot of attention and generally good reviews and I can see why.  The transceiver is as well built as any Icom or Yaesu I’ve had and costs $30-$35.  It feels rugged and good in your hand and has every feature you could want (offsets, CTCSS, DTMF, 5kHz steps, narrow/wide band channels, 99 named memories, LiIon battery and charging base, etc.).  It is an incredible value, highly recommended.

I find cross-platform and (mostly) open-source software meets nearly all of my needs these days.  On a new computer I install at least:

• LibreOffice
• Firefox
  • AdBlock Plus
  • Clean Links
  • XMarks
• Thunderbird
  • Lightning (calendaring)
  • Provider for Google Calendar (google cloud calendars)
  • Google Tasks sync (google cloud task list)
  • Lookout (read MS email attachments)
  • Enigmail (encryption/signatures)
• Skype
• Software Development
  • Gcc ARM Cross Compiler (ubuntu ppa is here)
  • Java SDK + Netbeans
    • Better Swing Application Framework
    • Fluidon (Java FX SceneBuilder integration)
    • Gson
    • Matisse (Swing GUI builder)
    • Plugins: CVS, C++, GdbServer
    • Primefaces
  • Em::Blocks (windows only)
  • ProjectLibre (like MS Project)
• Hardware Development
  • Eagle and/or Kicad
  • GerbV (linux) or Graphicode Prevue (windows)
  • LT Spice (windows/wine)
• Adobe Reader
• Gimp (bitmap graphics)
• InkScape (vector graphics)
• eDrawings Viewer (solid modeling viewer – Windows/Mac only 🙁  )
• TeamViewer (remote control / family tech support)

For cross-platform embedded development I use gcc + NetBeans.  On Windows I really like Em::Blocks.

Update August 2015: I still love the C720.  I’ve replaced the SSD with a larger one (not really necessary, but nice) and installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on it (from here).  Ubuntu absolutely flies on it and the distro includes all of the drivers so it installed and ran without a hitch.  The portability and price of this machine simply can’t be beat and it’s fast too!

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After years of disparaging them, curiosity (and ever declining prices) got the better of me and I bought a Chromebook: an Acer C720 for $130.  I bought it because I missed having a netbook: a small computing platform that can run all day on batteries and is cheap enough that I don’t have to worry about it getting lost or broken.

The C720 is actually a pretty nice looking piece of kit:

It has a crisp 11.6″ 1366×768 screen with a speedy 1.4GHz Haswell dual-core processor and a battery rated for 8hr operation.  It is incredibly thin (0.75″) and light (2.76 lbs) and has the minimal set of important features (USB 2.0, 3.0, WiFi a,b,g, speakers, camera, etc.)  The primary limitations are: 2GB DDR3 RAM, 16GB SSD, and ChromeOS.  The keyboard isn’t ideal, but it’s usable.

It only took an hour to confirm that I had no interest in ChromeOS; it requires living online within the Googlesphere and if I were a corporate fanboy, I’d be using an Airbook.  Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to install Ubuntu (Chrubuntu or Bodhi) as a dual-boot or replacement OS.  So far, I’ve partitioned 9GB of the SSD and installed Chrubuntu and it works nicely [see update below; I replaced the OS with Bodhi].  I had to follow these instructions to fix some things in Chrubuntu like resume and a long delay at boot up.

Now I’ve got a snappy netbook with ubuntu and most common apps like Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, gcc.  I added Java, NetBeans, and other development tools.  The main limitation is RAM and disk space…so far I haven’t been able to do PrimeFaces development on it for lack of RAM.  RAM is not upgradable.  The SSD is upgradable, but it would defeat the ultra-low-cost goal to spend money on it.

Update 8/30/2014: I removed ChromeOS and Chrubuntu and installed Bodhi as the only OS on the C720 and the results are very nice.  Bodhi is an interesting distro; it is a very lightweight minimal ubuntu-based system with enlightenment.  The disk and RAM footprint is minimal.  I then installed only the apps I wanted (firefox, thunderbird, libreoffice, skype, netbeans, gcc, etc.).  It is ideal for this space-limited netbook; after all apps were installed, I still had 2/3 of the drive empty and 3/4 of the RAM free.  The system is *very* snappy running bodhi.  The only issue was lxdm which has problems with ecryptfs (you *must* encrypt at least your home directory on a portable machine right?) so I replaced it with lightdm.  I like the Bodhi shelf/gadget system and the iBar gadget which is like Cairo/Apple app dock.

Update 7/26/2015: I still really like the C720.  The screen is too small for extended work, but for many purposes it has the right combination of size/weight/battery life/power – you can take it with you to appointments (car/doctor/kids’ practices, etc.), and it is small, fits comfortably on your lap, and doesn’t need a charger.  The main limitations are the 2GB of RAM (I wish I had bought the 4GB version) and the 16GB internal SSD.  The RAM can’t be upgraded (BGA components), but the internal SSD is socketed and easily removed so I replaced it with a 128GB SSD (probably overkill).  With more storage space, I decided to upgrade to a newer linux OS.  Bodhi 3.0 would not install in 2GB of RAM and with the larger drive, it wasn’t clear that Bodhi offered much so I installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS which, from first use, seems to be great.  Some things to note about the upgrade process:

• I didn’t want to put the dozen+ screws back in after replacing the SSD in case there was something wrong; so I just put the bottom on loosely and tried booting and it would not boot; I quickly swapped the 16GB SSD back in and it didn’t work either!  I thought I’d bricked the c720 and I spent a lot of time on this, but it turns out that for the unit to boot you need at least the battery screw installed (screw #6 here: http://www.chromium.org/_/rsrc/1381990807648/chromium-os/developer-information-for-chrome-os-devices/acer-c720-chromebook/c720-chromebook-annotated-innards.png)
• I installed ChromeOS on the new SSD (and later on the old 16GB SSD to wipe it): I used the Chromebook Recovery Utility to create a recovery USB flash drive which worked pretty well see here and here for more instructions.  You can create recovery flash drives using Windows or Linux.  Linux was very smooth; if you use Windows, be aware that you need to delete the partitions on the flash drive before installing the recovery image or the process gets stuck at 0% writing.  The Recovery Utility provides a mechanism for deleting old partitions.
• After installing Ubuntu, wifi wasn’t working properly until I found this link that suggested adding a wifi configuration file (/etc/modprobe.d/ath9k.conf) with a single line of configuration:

  sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/ath9k.conf
  Then add:
     options ath9k nohwcrypt=1 blink=1 btcoex_enable=1 enable_diversity=1

So I finally have a current Ubuntu with long-term support installed and it works beautifully; it is fast, the trackpad, camera, speakers, microphone, wifi, etc. all work well, and with the larger SSD I have plenty of space.

I just bought a pogoplug (mobile) for $7.35 shipped:

• 800MHz ARMv5 processor
• 128MB of RAM
• 128MB of NAND flash
• USB 2.0 port
• GbE port
• External 12v power adapter.
• Ethernet cable
• Tiny and sharp looking

What makes this interesting is that you can easily replace the built in software with ArchLinux for ARM using an external USB flash or hard disk drive.  With that, it becomes a full fledged linux server (albeit with less RAM than I’d like) that only consumes around 5W.  I installed ArchLinux 3.15 on it using an ancient 4GB USB flash drive I had lying around and I really like the result.  With the following installed, it still has 2.2GB free on the flash drive and 80MB RAM free:

• Apache
• PHP5
• Samba
• MariaDB (MySQL)
• Webmin
• gcc, perl, python
• SSH, NTP, Lynx, Vi, etc.

It boots very fast (much faster than my main server); despite having a relatively wimpy processor and drive, it feels snappy and responsive.

It’s hard to argue with the price, particularly since this makes quite a viable server for many things (mail, web, wordpress?, file storage?)

If I setup another, I’ll probably get the E02 Pogoplug which has 256MB RAM, 4x USB ports, and a 1.2GHz processor or maybe the series 4 that has a USB 3.0 port.

UPDATE: July 27, 2014

I liked the first pogoplug so much I bought another; this one is the slightly older E02 version and cost nearly $20 shipped but has better specs:

• 1200MHz ARMv5 processor
• 256MB of RAM
• 128MB of NAND flash
• 4x USB 2.0 port
• GbE port
• Built-in power supply and cable management
• Note quite as tiny but still sharp looking

Like the newer model, installing ArchLinux was a piece of cake requiring only a USB flash drive (I used a Kingston 32GB flash drive that cost $12) and following simple instructions.  After updating the install, I added a few packages to make it usable as a generic LAMP server including: apache, base-devel, hdparm, lynx, mariadb, php, samba, sudo, and webmin.  With everything configured and running:

• 2.75GB of flash storage was used (leaving 26.5GB free)
• 60.8MB of RAM was used (leaving 190MB free after buffers/caches)

I love a 4W completely silent $32 server.

Pogoplug Optimization

I bought an Obihai OBI202 VOIP box in November 2013 for my home office; these are $70 from Amazon and elsewhere and often on sale for less (I paid $52.24 shipped).

The Obi202 is another great VOIP box, even better than Ooma IMHO, but for more technical users.  For the first year, it provided an absolutely free phone line via Google Voice.  This year (May 2014), Google dropped its support for free outgoing calls, so I signed up for a year of service for $60 with PhonePower.  So far the service has been perfect.

The Obi202 features include:

• Supports 2 lines
• Supports multiple VOIP providers (unlike the Ooma Telo which only works with the Ooma service, the Obi202 is not locked to a particular provider and you can configure the box with up to 4 different VOIP providers)
• Crystal clear phone calls

dd-wrt is open-source linux-based firmware that can replace the stock firmware on many wireless routers and it is awesome.

I use dd-wrt with my dirt cheap ($22) Rosewill RNX-N300RT router and it takes a low-end router and makes it a powerful tool for managing my network.  Some of the key things I like about it include:

• Separate WiFi guest network that is fully isolated from my home wired and wireless networks
• Fine control over hours of usage by Wired and Wireless clients (helps limit kids’ access to reasonable hours)
• Superb web-interface for diagnostics and administration
• Excellent firewall

dd-wrt maintains a database of routers they support; if you are technically inclined and your router supports it, I highly recommend trying dd-wrt; note that you almost certainly void your router warranty by replacing its firmware.

In mid-May 2014, I purchased a Foscam FI8910W wireless IP camera to replace my ancient X-10 analog video camera and my experience with it is described below.  Overall, I’m very happy with the camera; it’s a great value.

PROS:

• Excellent feature set: pan/tilt, VGA resolution, awesome IR night vision, 2-way audio, motion detection, automatic uploads/emails, decent mounting bracket, long PS cable, etc.
• Low cost: I bought it for $55 on eBay from Adorama Camera.
• Good web interface (excellent in IE, adequate in FF, Chrome)
• Nice Firefox add-on available
• Great Android client application
• The IR night-vision works beautifully; images are clear as day.  This snapshot from my front porch was taken at night; the porch lights are off and it’s pitch black to the naked eye, but clear as day with the IR camera (sans color of course).
  This one shows the front porch (looking the other way thanks to the camera’s pan/tilt) so you can see how far the IR lighting reaches: you can see the pine tree at the edge of the property…notice how the American flag hanging above the bench has no color in IR.  Again, the front porch is pitch black to the naked eye.
  

CONS:

• Poor security:
  • Access requires unencrypted username/password (http/telnet/ftp)
  • Once logged in, you can ask the camera to display its complete configuration information which sends all users/passwords in plaintext!
• The web interface is optimized for IE.  The Firefox interface is adequate but a little kludgey (especially the audio).
• There is a known defect in the DSP image processor in some units that causes the video to drop and the camera reboots when pointed at an image with lots of fine detail.  It took me a while to figure this out; it worked fine until I pointed at my front yard in daytime where the fine grass, leaves, etc. caused constant reboots.  I sent the camera to Foscam for RMA service, they provided a free shipping label by email and within a few days I had a new camera that works perfectly.

Foscam High Gain Antenna

I initially attributed the DSP problem to an inadequate WiFi link because the camera worked beautifully indoors on wired Ethernet or on WiFi.  Foscam makes the camera with a standard SMA connector (I didn’t think this was allowed anymore under FCC regs) and the stock camera comes with a stubby (claimed 3dBi) antenna.  So I bought their add-on 9dBi dipole antenna ($8 on Amazon) that is 12″ long plus another ~2″ for the base!  Naturally it didn’t fix the DSP problem and the stock 3dBi antenna works just fine, giving me a very good signal through several walls.  However, the 9dBi antenna is very nice and well worth $8 if you need more range.

Update 8/24/2014: I just bought another…the best endorsement.

In December 2013, I bought an Ooma Telo at Costco for $100 and paid $40 to port my home phone number; the  monthly service is under $5 (you just pay the government taxes/fees) instead of $30/mo for Comcast phone service so it pays for itself in less than 6 months.  I have been using it for a few months now and unlike previous VOIP services I’d tried, the sound quality is excellent and the service has been very reliable.  The device itself looks sharp and works well, you connect the Telo to your Ethernet (broadband internet) and plug your old phone system into the Telo.  They have a wireless (wi-fi) version too, but I prefer wired.

Update: After 6 months, I continue to like the Ooma box; it just works.  I bought another for Deana’s home office use and it has provided a good experience too.