Highlighted Posts
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My Experience with Emporia’s Vue Home Energy Monitor
About my Setup My Home I have solar panels and a battery that feed into a Load Center (LC). Most of my home’s loads/circuits are wired to the “House Panel” (a sub off of the LC) while a few others are wired into each of the Load Center, the Garage Panel, and the Main Panel…
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AI-augmented “Reading” — Many-to-One
In Reader-augmented Writing, I present a way to think about how communication has evolved; how written language, the printing press, and digital media have allowed more people to reach more people with ideas (one-to-many), with readers adding to what authors wrote (many-to-many). Now, with the recent significant developments of large language models (LLMs), I’m adding…
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Our Heat Pump Water Heater – Part II: Our Experience with It
Installation & Initial Heating Choosing a plug-in, shared-circuit model made installation relatively straight-forward for me as I didn’t have to get any electrical work done first (no need for a new dedicated outlet nor hard-wire junction box). I just plugged it into the same outlet as my clothes washer and dryer, which hasn’t been a…
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Our Heat Pump Water Heater – Part I: Choosing a Water Heater
Essential Concepts Crash Course Hybrid vs Heat Pump-Only Water Heaters (≃ 240V vs 120V) Most “Heat Pump Water Heaters” are actually hybrid, meaning they have both a heat pump and “traditional” resistive heating elements. The resistive heating elements are basically just coils of wire that get hot when electricity is sent through them. Using the…
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More than one (or larger) electrical energy storage battery?
There are various reasons to want a second battery, and a second battery is less helpful to some of those reasons than others, so there’s no simple answer. But if I had to make a general recommendation, it would be to get a second one because it’s an important factor in going all electric; that…
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A look at the production and finances of my Tesla Energy system
There are so many factors that affect how a solar energy system will perform and behave, including latitude and longitude, house construction, house orientation, roof shape, trees, neighboring buildings, nearby mountains, HOA, utility rates and regulations, family size and habits, whether you drive an electric car and how much you intend to charge at home,…
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Understanding my Tesla Energy System
Major Components Load Center This is where everything comes together: PV, Battery, Home, and Grid (via the Tesla Gateway). Using the pneumatic system analogy (of the previous post), this is simply a chamber where everything is connected so air moves freely and pressure is equal throughout the system.
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Home Electricity Fundamentals
Electrical Energy Fundamentals While energy generally flows in one direction through the network of wires in your home — from the grid, towards your outlets — they don’t have to. You could plug a generator into any outlet in your home (but don’t do this, it’s dangerous) and energy flows “backwards” from that outlet to…
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Reader-augmented Writing
Words gave us the ability to effectively share ideas and knowledge, and writing allowed those words to spread further and be carried across time. The printing press accelerated that spread, and electronic mediums allowed even more people to share ideas more quickly. Yet articles and books — even e-books — are still largely static and…
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Containerized Passenger Transportation
Getting someone from point-A to point-B will often — even in the distant future — involve a variety of methods of transport. For example, getting someone from their home in San Francisco to an office in Los Angeles might primarily (the majority of the distance) be served by something like high-speed rail or Hyperloop. However,…
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