Monthly Archives: October 2012

PV (solar panel) and charge controller with battery

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Depending on where you are you might want electricity.

Solar power is a convenient, low maintenance way to get electricity if you have sunlight.

For this example I will consider a 80W 12 V solar panel and a charge controller capable of 6A at 12 Volts.

The panel

80 W  (maximum power)

12V

P = VxI

P/V =I

80/12 = I

6.66 A =I (maximum current)

 

The charge controller

12V

6A

P= VxI

P = 12 x 6

P =  72W

Close enough to matched, remember the panel lists it maximum power not typical power rating.

A charge controller is a fancy battery charger which can put unused solar power into stored energy into a battery.

Usually there is a load circuit for things you want to run directly off the solar panel and a battery charging circuit. For this example there is a maximum load of 72 watts from the controller load wires.

For a larger load than the controller allows disconnect the battery from the charge controller and use the charged battery.

There is often a wet type battery for flooded lead acid cells check you documentation as to whether it is connected to the positive(+) or negative (-) terminal of the flooded battery.

A typical arrangement:

PV charge controller and battery wiring diagram.

For 12 Volt setups the car cigarette plug and socket system of connectors is a good idea, simple and common. There is also a wide variety of electrical items made especially for this connector format.

 

The connectors on solar panels are waterproof, the connections on the charge controller are not, make sure they are waterproofed or kept away from water.

War: It’s all about the oil and gas, and who controls (and profits from) it.

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I was going to write a long article about this, but in my research I found someone else already had done so.

Kudos my friend.

As you can see Iran is very close to the center of a large struggle over whether oil goes east or west, and its sitting on the worlds largest reserves of natural gas and a substantial quantity of Oil as well.

Any discussion about Iran must be made in the context of Oil and gas because that  is what any possible conflict with Iran will be about.

http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/the-wars-in-middle-east-and-north.html

Electrical power: P = V x I

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Power for an electrical system is relatively easy to determine.

Power in watts  [J /s ]

Voltage in Volts  [J / C ]

Current in Amps [ C / s ]

P = V x I

But what is power?

Power is energy consumed or release in a given quantity of time.

Power is different from energy as energy is conserved meaning it cant be created or destroyed.

Power can be increased or reduced by altering the amount of time the energy is exerted over.

In the normal mechanical world energy is either potential or kinetic.

Ek = 1/2 m * v²

Ep = mgh

Etot = Ep + Ek

If we consider a ball being raised 1 meter of the ground in a period of 2 seconds and then dropped to the ground reaching the ground in 0.5 seconds, the balls combination of potential and kinetic energy levels remain the same.

However the ball has gained power by expending its energy in a short period of time. this is the subtle difference between energy and power.

 

Only 1/4 of the power released was used to raise the ball.

Power is simply how quickly energy is stored or expended.

Collapse (2009) Mike Rupert, Directed by Thom Powers

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Mike  Rupert explains peak oil and it’s connections to peak population and the general instability of and oil based world.

A personal, sometimes intimate interview, with some archive footage to help explain some concepts and parts of history.

Mike’s solution: grow your own food, disconnect from oil and get to know your neighbors.

http://www.filmsforaction.org/Watch/Collapse_2009/

Political correctness: What you need to know.

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It seems that political correctness has its roots in Marxism. Critical theory is just  criticism without actually offering a solution because the solution (unspoken) is to destroy everything and replace it with Marxism.

having failed to get support from the working classes they turned to minority groups and academia to get support and created the language of political correctness.

Did you ever wonder what kind of politics the language was correct to?

Whats wrong with Marxism? Well Marx never had a job in his life so what exactly could he know about labor and economics?

Marxism has failed numerous times as an economic/political model because ultimately it’s an inefficient form of fascism.

Other forms of fascism are more efficient, not that it makes them inherently more justified, just better at distributing wealth and rewarding useful work.

It’s interesting to talk to people who use a lot of politically correct language in order to sound educated or intelligent, often quite quickly in a debate they become completely lost because their ideas have very little in in-depth analysis to them. They have simply not thought about what they have been told and rely on the flimsy arguments they were given and assume a theory (unproven) is a fact.

 

A theory is not a fact, and political correctness seems to be Marxism in disguise, that is a theory.

Seagulls, scarcity and politics

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Seagulls live in an unpredictable environment. Many small meals and the occasional feast. This is evident in their behavior.  Seagulls spend a lot of time flying in search of food, and generally do so alone. When a seagull finds a small meal it quietly swoops down, eats it, and then returns to the search.

If a seagull finds a large meal such as a wash up of dead fish, It’s community spirit is activated and it lands and lets out a loud and distinctive call (in between mouth fulls) to all other seagulls. All seagulls come come to share a massive feast that might otherwise go to waste, being that it is more than one seagull could eat.

So the simple social contract seagulls have is similar to this: Every one spread out and search for food, if you find enough for just you, eat it, and keep looking, if you find the mother lode, shout out and everyone gets a meal.

A flock of seagulls converge on some food. from http://furiousphotos.com/2009/04/flock-of-seagulls/

These two different responses to scarcity and abundance in a stochastic (random) environment shows two different modes of of economic operation in line with two different economic situations.

Scarcity and abundance.

Interestingly, one mode is that of the rugged individualist in scarcity and the other is the socialist in  abundance. Lets be clear that seagulls have no government, kings, queens or gods. So both of these economic modes are anarchistic. So we have seagulls operating as anarcho capitalists in scarcity and anarcho syndicalists when faced with abundance, these modes of operation must be sustainable, or otherwise seagulls would have died out long ago.

It’s worth noting that seagulls are smart enough to pick up closed seashells and drop them onto hard packed sand in order to crack them open and eat the contents, and smart enough to develop two different modes of economic operation in scarcity and abundance.

Dumb birds, I think not.

Go and watch some seagulls and learn a bit about politics. It’s really funny to watch a seagull displaying dominance to scare other birds away from the food, and while busy doing this, the food scrap is then snatched by a third party.

Lesson: if you spend too much time asserting your rights to a found asset, you many not get an opportunity to actually benefit from the asset.