• We plan to be in this house for at least 10 years
• We have an enormous amount (900+ square feet) of un-shaded, south facing roof, ideal for a solar array
• We have higher than normal power bills, partly due to our increased home size (more A/C), and partly due to our lifestyle (fish tanks, computers, etc). Power prices keep going up, especially now with tiered rates.
• We’re about to have a new roof installed due to hail damage (thank you, homeowner’s insurance)

So when 1 Block Off Grid started another summer campaign, I signed up. 1BOG, contrary to what you might infer from looking at their site, is a company (not a non-profit) that negotiates bulk deals with local installers. The installers are checked out and verified (financials, company history, warranty claims, etc — way better background than you would ever do yourself), and the deals are more than likely better than you’ll find through other local installers. 1BOG gets paid a commission once your system is installed. In my area, 1BOG is partnered with REC Solar — you may have seen them at a Costco road-show. Both 1BOG and REC Solar are affiliated with SunRun. SunRun is the key to making solar affordable.

So based on the first 6 months of power bills at our new house, we’re using an average of 1,404 kWh per month, or around 47 kWh per day, or around 16,848 per year. That’s quite a bit. Solar arrays generate more power during the summer than the winter, which means its a lot easier to think in terms of yearly usage than monthly.

A solar array will generate full power approximately 4 hours out of the day, so a 10kw array will generate somewhere around 40 kWh per day (that is, 10kw times 4 hours per day). Since 10kw is the largest system you can build and still get the rebates from the power company, I’ll probably build a 10kw system.

So Brian from REC Solar came out. He said I have a perfect solar roof (which I knew), and based on my power usage, a 10kw system is the right size. He estimates the system will produce 13,500 kWh per year (that’s a conservative figure based on numbers from NREL for these panels in my area). The cost of such a system? $50,325.00. The local utility would pay a rebate of $23,716.00, and a federal tax credit of $7,982.70, leaving $18,626.30. gulp We could borrow that amount from our home-equity at 5.5% for 10 years, and the payment would be $202 a month, and then we own the system outright. That means for the next 10 years, we would pay the equivalent of 18 cents per kWh ($202 * 12 / 13,500), but after that, we pay nothing. Since power is currently 10.5 cents per kWh (more in the summer due to the recently introduced tiered rates, but still less than 18 cents), that’s a tough one to swallow. Historically, the cost of power has gone up by 6% a year, whereas solar has a fixed cost, meaning, solar is a hedge against future power prices. Still, a lot of people get turned off of solar because of this up-front sticker shock, even though down the road it’ll pay off. I don’t know how to figure out the return on investment over 20 years, but lets keep going.

Enter SunRun. They will purchase the system up front with little or (in my case) no up-front cost. They insure the system against damage (had your roof checked for hail lately?), maintain it and fix it when it breaks down, and monitor it, all for a flat monthly payment. SunRun’s own website, as well as REC and 1BOG describe SunRun as a PPA (Power Purchase Agreement), where they own the system, and you buy the power from them at a set cost. I think of it more like a lease, because you’re not paying for the energy produced, you’re paying for the use of the equipment generating the energy. In other words, you own the energy, so if you have a good sunny year and it produces more power, your payment stays the same even though you got more out of it.

So the proposal from SunRun for the initial 10kw array comes to $87 a month for 20 years, with no upfront cost. After 20 years, you can either keep it all for free (zero buyout), or they will come remove it at no cost, or you can sign a new lease. By asking questions, I found that a number of factors go into that rate. First, the total system cost, obviously. Most systems are priced in terms of a cost per watt, so that’s an easy one. Second, SunRun doesn’t get the up-front rebate from the power company, instead they get a certain amount per kWh that it produces, so the better your roof, the more energy the system will produce, the more money they’ll get from the power company, and the less I have to pay. Third, the amount of that payment from the power company. Locally, Xcel is nearing the next tier of their renewable energy targets, and once they pass it, the amount of the rebate will be reduced, which means I would have to pay more. So back to the numbers, at $1,044 per year ($87 * 12) and 13,500 kWh per year, that works out to 7.7 cents per kWh. Whee, that’s already less than I’m paying now, meaning, I’d start saving money in the first year. Best of all, the SunRun lease is transferable, and there’s no cost (actually a slight savings) to pre-paying the lease, or you can buy it out at any time at a pre-determined fair market value. This means if we sell the house in the next 20 years, we’re not out anything, and the system could add significant value to the house.

So we signed up… After a few additional items of paperwork, now we wait for the rebate approval from Xcel, approval from the HOA, and the final design of the system. They’re currently targeting early October for the installation, which I guess means we missed out on the summer sun, but there’s always next year… That will also give us time to get the new roof done (remember the part about the hail? Yep, us too — thank you, homeowner’s insurance).

I’ll post details once the system is up and running!

This innocent looking page is actually quite bad…  It has many implications – for starters, Qwest is almost certainly making money on this page, due to the search traffic.  The privacy aspects are chilling – who knows what information Qwest is passing along to Yahoo (the search provider), or what information they’re storing about what domains you mis-type (or what domains you type correctly, so they can advertise more accurately when you do make a mistake).  The whole thing scares the willies out of me.

Thankfully, there’s a clever link in the upper right corner that says “Opt out of this service”.  Once you click that, the page changes and you have to click through to “Frequently asked questions”, and select the one that says “Can I opt out of this service?” (the fourth one down at present), and then read through the answer until you find the one-word link, and then acknowledge that you really want out of their super-awesome service by clicking “No, I don’t want to stay in this service”…  Dude, Seriously?!?!?  My past experience is that, once you do this, you are correctly and permanently opted out, but we have an employee that went through this exercise last night, and is still getting the search page.

It seems that Comcast, the “other” internet service, has jumped on the bandwagon.  I received a ticket for a similar issue, and after brief troubleshooting, I asked “Do you have a Qwest DSL?”  The answer was, “Nope, Comcast”.  Guess what though, same problem:

Comcast is making it even more complicated to “opt out”.  When you click “Disable this error service”, you’re taken to a page with a link that prompts you to sign into “MyComcast”.  A smaller link has step-by-step instructions for opting out, and the first step is going to a site called dns-opt-out.comcast.net.  Well, whadya know, “Page cannot be displayed”.  Pretty amazing that the only way to remove a so-called feature that is intended to steer you away from those totally confusing error pages is to go to a site that cannot be displayed????

OK, look.  I get it, I understand.  We’re all in tough times, and ISP’s are no different.  People are downgrading their service, price-shopping for the best deals.  They’re also watching less TV (and less premium channels), and generally spending less money.  However, that’s absolutely no excuse to hijack one’s DNS lookups – seriously…

I’m of the opinion that services like this are anti-competitive, immoral, possibly illegal, and generally objectionable.  I believe people should email the FTC and the FCC and complain.  Does anybody disagree?  Can you explain why this is a good service?

One of the things Obama talked about while campaigning was reforms in the area of telecommunications.  I usually don’t believe a single thing a politition says, but that goes double for when they’re on the campaign trail.  Right, left, Red, Green, Blue, Purple, doesn’t matter…  Most of them will say whatever they think will get them (re)elected.  You have to judge a person by their actions.

Obama’s new FCC chair recently proposed new rules regarding the neutrality of network service providers of all types, not just common-carriers.   In the past, they’ve had a “policy” on this, pretty much saying “net neutrality is good”.  The new rules pretty much say that service providers of all types can not discriminate when it comes to certain types of traffic (for example, a cable company would not be allowed to block or de-prioritize Vonage packets because they compete with the company’s own VoIP product).  I strongly feel this is a good thing.  Strangely, the industry seems to be fairly supportive of this action — but this might just be a case of ‘if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu’.

The rules seemingly apply to wireless, too, which has the cellular industry up in arms.  Previously, the cellular companies have had strict rules against utilizing any product, application, or service intended to make phone calls without using per-minute airtime (meaning, no VoIP, no Skype, no Google Voice…)  Of course there’s not a lot they can do if use my EV-DO card on my laptop, make a VPN connection to the office, and then fire up my soft phone — but per their policy, this would not be allowed.  In any case, this means they won’t let you run VoIP applications directly on the handset.  (Some carriers, such as Verizon, take this a step (or two) further — every handset made today has a GPS chip, which sends your location when you call 911.  Smartphones of course can make use of the GPS for other things — Verizon sells a service called VZNavigator, for $9 a month, which puts GPS-based street-level navigation with turn-by-turn directions  in the palm of your hand.  The problem?  Google Maps is available for free, and would happily utilize the GPS chip, except that Verizon locks them out of it…  But I digress…)

My first impression is, if you’re pissing everybody off (and not just one side or the other), you must be doing something right…  It feels like this might just be another way to bring down the big mean corporations, how dare they make a profit!  But this is something I can get behind, in order to make the internet as a whole more fair for everybody.  In the interest of a free and open internet (generally speaking), no provider should be allowed to block or hinder access to other providers content, even if that content competes with a product offered by the provider in question.

One exception I can think of is that a company like Comcast should be able to prioritize their own VoIP traffic above all other internet traffic (in a way that doesn’t discriminate at all).  But even that could be considered anti-competitive — they’d be making their product better at the expense of everybody else’s product in an otherwise neutral environment.

Somebody I talked to once suggested that carriers should not be allowed to provide content.  In other words, the owner of the pipe isn’t allowed to own the bits going through it.  There’s something to that, but I’m not ready to go there yet.

Thoughts?

There’s two basic categories of computer (or for that matter any technology) purchases.  One school of thought is to get the cheapest available that will do what you need, because it will either break or become obsolete soon anyway, and you can just replace it when necessary.  This is the category in which most consumers fall — spending as little as a few hundred dollars on a new computer every 12 to 24 months.  The other school of thought is to spend the most you can afford now, and buy the warranty to protect your investment for a longer term.  Generally this means you buy a higher end system, hoping it will still be usable in 3 to 5 years.  This is usually the direction the corporate IT guru leans.

There’s benifits to both.  By getting something somewhat less expensive, but more often, you’re likely to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to “the latest thing”, especially when it comes to software and operating systems.  You’re likely to experience a speedup with each new system, although I might argue some of that is because you’re starting anew, without all the cruft that accumulates after years of using the same computer (un-used software, possibly spyware, viruses, etc).

The Computerworld article points to the cost of fixing computers versus replacing them.  My argument is simple — use it until you have a problem, and then either replace it or fix it, depending on which is more cost effective.

To all of my corporate IT friends, what do you think?

One of those acquisitions was MySQL, which is a free and open-source relational database with excellent performance and useful features that has enormous popularity, even in the medium and large business and enterprise markets.  Sun’s purchase of MySQL made some sense at the time, because MySQL enjoyed a loyal user base, solid revenue from support and licensing (for those who don’t want to play by the open-source rules), and a competent development effort.  Sun wanted to show good faith in their “open-ness” play, and buying MySQL was a relatively cheap way to help support that image.

Fast forward to now.  Most experts believe that Sun can’t survive on their own.  They talked with IBM, which would have made some sense — Big Blue has a large following in the financial and government sectors (where Sun is also well represented).  IBM has been a supporter of Java, previously maintaining their own JRE based on the Java specification (Blackdown Java, which wasn’t very successful).  IBM has also supported a lot of other open technologies, including Linux.  It was not to be, however, and Sun gave IBM the finger after they couldn’t come to terms.

Hours later it would seem, Sun went to the open arms of Oracle, the largest database software vendor.  Oracle’s database product and applications (which obviously require an Oracle database) run really well on Sun’s hardware and operating system, and Oracle’s value proposition looks better when they can sell a “application to disk” solution that is fully integrated, all from one vendor, with one single sales and support channel end-to-end.  The deal is appearently done, see the Sun press release for $9.50 in cash per share.

So where does that leave MySQL (remember MySQL?)…  That’s really tough to say.  MySQL probably represents the single largest threat to the future of Oracle’s database and applications, and this purchase obviously removes that threat.  Oracle says, “MySQL will be an addition to Oracle’s existing suite of database products…”  Oracle Sun FAQ  Missing is any guidance on future development, availability, open-ness, support, etc.  Other bloggers have spouted some pretty wild stuff, both bad and worse.  At the very least, nobody thinks it will be good for MySQL users like myself.

What do you think?

• Shutting down and winterizing the hot tub — should save at least $40/month

So that’s it so far…  I have a couple other things I’m looking into, but it doesn’t feel like there’s that much monthly expense that we can easilly do without (that is, going without being a no-brainer).

For a long time I have lothed Qwest.  Probably for many of the same reasons I don’t like Comcast…  So I’ve been with Liberty Bell Telecom for several years now.  They have excelent customer service (real people in my state answer the phone when I call), and are cheaper than Qwest when compared side by side.  They recently increased their prices though, so now I’m paying about $50 per month (times two, since OnTheSide Productions, LLC has a line with them as well).  True, this includes voicemail (with several nice features Qwest doesn’t have) and a ton of other calling features.  But seriously, $50 a month is a chunk of change…

Even only a few years ago I would never have considered VoIP for my home phone service.  Vonage would be the logical VoIP alternative, but I’ve had too many rough experiences calling friends with Vonage.  Several other residential VoIP providers exist out there, but even several of the big guys have gone under.  Even with that in mind, I think residential VoIP is probably ready for the prime time — or at least as ready as it’ll ever be.

Having built and maintained a VoIP phone system at work based on Asterisk, I’m well aware of how VoIP works and what its limitations are.  I was even tempted to build my own Asterisk system at home, but that doesn’t solve the issue of getting actual dial-tone (even at work we’re using a traditional T1 circuit for connection to the phone company).  So I went on the hunt looking for inexpensive, but reliable residential VoIP providers.

DSL Reports has a “report card” showing a number (actually a high number) of residential VoIP providers.  They rate the website, ease of install, call quality, reliability, tech support, and value.  I started at the top, and immediately ignored anything over $20, and anything that requires a computer to make work (eg, MagicJack).  I also skipped over anything that didn’t have at least A all the way accross.

Actually, lets back up.  Before I found the DSL Reports site, I did a google, and through a Adwords link, ended up trying out Voip.com.  Their price is $20/month, and their site has lots of information.  The activation fee is $36, but the first month is free, and they have a money back guarantee.  So for $10, I signed up, and got their adaptor in the mail about a week later.  It worked out of the box.  The bad news is that the quality was noticably worse than a traditional phone line.  When I called about getting the password to the phone adaptor they sent so that I could change my “Display Name” (linked to Caller-ID), I was told no-way.  I asked if THEY could change my caller-ID name, and they said no-way.  I picked up my own adaptor for $30, and used the settings provided on their website to set it up, but now outbound Caller-ID doesn’t work at all.  After several other phone calls, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth about the quality of their service, let alone their customer support.  So this week, I canceled their service, and mailed back their adaptor.

Now I’m trying VOIPo.  They have good reviews on DSL Reports, and people in other forums seem to think their service is pretty good.  Since I now have my own adaptor, I told them not to bother sending me theirs.  So far, the call quality has been good, and the service has been great (they answer the phone, and reply to email).

So far I haven’t transferred either of my two regular numbers, I’m just setting up “new” accounts to test out their service.

Anybody have any suggestions for other VoIP products?

This article entitled “Ad targeting based on ISP tracking now in doubt” is one of those technologies that should never have existed in the first place.  The company partners up with ISP’s and, in exchange for a cut of the revenue, gets access to the users’ data stream, along with the oppertunity to inject their ads when they can.

I don’t have any problem with ad-supported services.  What I have a problem with is ad-supported services that aren’t free, or where the user doesn’t have any reason to believe the service is, or could be, ad-supported, or any way to opt out of the ads.  It’s like purchasing a brand new video game, only to find out that, in addition to taking your money for buying the game, they also force you to watch ads before you can play.

It should suprise nobody that a company like this isn’t faring so well now that large ISP’s are coming under scruteny from the FCC.

This is an important development, because it means Comcast saw the writing on the wall, both in backlash from its customer base (which translates directly into lost customers), as well as the impending reprimand (or worse) from the FCC. Apparently, net neutrality (wikipedia) still exists, which is extremly good news for the consumer. In short, it means that if you buy an internet connection from Comcast, they will no longer restrict what protocols you can use with it, but will instead concentrate only on throttling your total bandwidth usage (which is what every other ISP in the world does).

The original article asks the same basic question:  Why do we put up with availability of 99.9% (which they say (I didn’t do the math to check it) translates to about 3 and a half days a year) , or even 99% out of our cellular, internet, and other “new technology” communication services, when we have demanded 99.999% (5 minutes per year) availability from our traditional phone service?

The answer is right there in the article…  Traditional phone service is regulated as a monopoly utility by the Federal Communications Commission and the Public Utilities Commission, just like the power and gas utilities; cellular and internet services are not.  This regulation was put in place for a very good reason:  prior to 1986 (and lets face it, even today in much of the US), there was only one place to get traditional phone service: the phone company.  So, being a monopoly, they could have just taken customers’ money and delivered shoddy service (see the old Saturday Night Live episode, “We don’t care, we’re the phone company), so the government stepped in and said “You must deliver service availability of 99.999%, or face fines.”  New technologies like cellular and internet, which are rapidly turning old-school telephones into museum pieces, have no such regulations.  They can do whatever they want, within reason (Net Nutrality and other issues aside).

Because these new services are competition based, instead of monopolies, they don’t need to be regulated by the government.  If a particular service provider is providing bad service, the market will make sure they aren’t a service provider for very long (customers will find another carrier).  If you don’t believe me, look at what’s happening to Sprint-Nextel.

So if a particular cellular carrier wants to advertise the fewest dropped calls, well, that’s fine with me, as long as they can back up their claims.  It a free-market economy, in which competition drives prices, the companies will do whatever they have to do to keep customers happy.  Put another way, if customers don’t mind the occasional dropped call, the service will never have availability of five-nines, and that’s fine with me.