Routine Maintenance... nothing to see here.

Routine Maintenance... nothing to see here.

What part of "do not have a choice" do I not understand? How about the subject of the 'choice' you are denied. Now that you have clarified that you don't have a choice about how the electric company pays you, or how solar works, I'll reiterate, you still DO have a choice about how to use the power you generate. Making better use of that choice would serve you well, but you seem intent on claiming it's all out of your control (and that you're forced 'at gunpoint' to sell all your production cheap and buy it back expensive rather than find a way to use it directly). I'm intent on making the best use of the choices available to me (and I bet to you) in order to make intelligent choices about my energy, choices that have saved me thousands to date, and should save me tens of thousands in the long run, and save uncounted tons of CO2 from being produced. You have instead invested in a system that now serves your needs terribly, and now want to tell others how solar is not economically viable or green, both of which are absolutely backwards from my experience and research.

You were not kidnapped, you walked into that guys home and put his gun to your own head. I wonder if you've even investigated 'net metering' in your area, it could make your system work for even you.

OK, so energy cost VS energy produced is ALL you want to compare. Then you MUST include all energy costs to be reasonable, including the energy cost of cleanup of coal waste failures (that right there already totally tips any scale against coal, it can't come close to making the energy that cleanup takes), the energy used in upkeep of coal waste storage for centuries, the energy costs of habitat destruction/reconstruction by coal mining itself, the mining itself, transportation of the coal, power plant operation (construction, upgrading, and maintenance), and the cost of mitigating the 20-40 times the amount of CO2 pollution, health issues, loss of sunlight (solar dimming is real), etc. The list of energy costs goes on and on for coal, while the list for the energy cost of solar panel production and use in some cases is damn near zero (where it's made with leftover chip wafers in solar powered factories it barely takes any extra energy at all, but I do understand that most aren't made that way now).

Double return VS coal, because you get twice as many KWH per dollar with solar PV, or better.

Again with the 'spend more energy to produce one KWH of PV than with coal', show me some data. Everything I can find shows you're 100% wrong if you look at the lifespan of panels which become energy neutral in well under 3 years on average (some much sooner) and last 20-30 years, while coal continues to need more energy to produce more (filthy) energy. Perhaps in the extremely short term you have a point about cost/production, but any time period over 3 years puts PV ahead of coal in energy costs/energy produced, and in their 20-30 year lifetime they do much better.

Coal made power is NOT cheaper than solar made power. If it was, I would not save money with a solar system. I have already saved money with solar VS buying the same amount of coal produced power, therefore solar PV is cheaper than coal. Period. If it wasn't, our electric companies would not be 'farming solar' here as fast as possible, they would be building more coal plants.

Some people support coal because they have been misinformed about alternatives. That's why I have continued our discussion here, because your information is wrong based on my personal experience and research, and I fear you might convince someone to not even look into solar enough to see how wrong you are, how much money they could save (if they do it properly), and how much pollution they could not create.

Um...I DO grow my own vegetables in my backyard too. It's cheaper, and I get far better produce with zero carbon footprint. Another statement you've made that I take personal exception with. It's not a HUGE effort, but is some effort, but the returns are great and totally worth it. I think many people stopped subsistence farming because they're lazy, overworked, and/or live without any place to farm. I've been doing it since I was 12 and ate my first self grown corn, and I've never had reason to question that decision. I've read about people spending $50 to grow $5 in tomatoes...I'm not one of them. I spend $50 on manure to grow >$1000 in produce yearly, and have enough to give >1/2 of it away.

Not a single one of your examples are 'more viable' than PV in every situation, and private owned home solar doesn't take public dollars away from public power projects. I looked into wind-it's way more expensive for the same generation power along with numerous other issues, nuke-also far more expensive with other long term major issues, solar thermal-hardly working as hoped yet in the few, hyper expensive plants in existence, wave-not yet but fingers crossed, hydro-DISTEROUS for the environment and short lived. (You left out geothermal, which is excellent where it's possible.)
Also, most of your examples are not viable for residential use (what we're talking about here), as you said are more expensive (so are bad economic choices), and/or have other serious ecological issues that PV does not.

Money is the only reason to stick with coal or nuclear, and that's only because the companies that use it get away with not paying for most of the true long term costs, and even with that it's now FAR more expensive to buy that coal/nuke power than it is to make your own with PV, leaving NO real reason to stick with coal or nuclear....so what are you talking about?

The inference being that I have a choice..? =) We don't in Aus.

But you're missing the point, X >= 1 feed in tariffs are being subsidised by other users on the grid. You upload your power regardless of demand peaks (so you could be sending power when it really isn't required). Electricity companies are not going to massively drop production of regular power as it takes a considerable amount of time to spool up/down baseload production, and they are still going to switch on high cost gas turbines during peak load just in case a big old cloud blocks out the sun for an hour or so and solar production falls in a heap...

And peak usage times are usually ~8-9am (schools and business start up, switch computers and air con on etc) before solar production really kicks in, and later in the afternoon when it get's hotter, people are getting ready for dinner. If you have significant daylight savings time shifts, then you can certainly get better production when peak demand in the early evening is occurring. If the panels are facing west rather than east or north (because that's where you maximise production and make the most money... =)

As for "the idea that it might take more energy to produce a panel than it will produce itself is ridiculous", I didn't say that it did, just that it's return on that energy invested is comparatively poor. You coal analogy is patently wrong though. Depending on which source you go to, coal is anywhere from 30:1 to 50:1 for EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). It's cheap to obtain, burn and dispose of the waste, despite being toxic/radioactive.

eg. http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

When you talk about solar PV and the energy required to make it, you're not just talking about the production line, you're talking mining the silicon, purifying, the wasted wafers which aren't up to snuff, the cost of the workers and the power that goes in to building, transporting etc, lifetime maintenance, loss of production over time and disposal. The above link puts PV at the low 1.5-3:1 which is well beneath the roughly 7:1 required to sustain our modern society (and does not cover the massive increases in energy demand and consumption from developing countries). And as the author of the article notes, these are unbuffered values. If you add buffering to load shift, the sums get even worse.

"Put simply, if solar PV is such a bad deal, how are they saving me so much money even without any rebates?"

I didn't say solar was a bad deal, I said it's a poor way to reduce carbon pollution. If the electricity company you are connected to is willing to pay high feed in tariffs to you and you save cash, that's great, but that doesn't automagically (intentional typo mean that solar PV is making any sort of serious inroads in to reducing carbon pollution.

If we're going to fix man made climate change, we need to be prepared to pay a far higher cost and worry less about our hip pockets. Nuke might not be economically viable without causing jumps in bills, but in terms of the energy output it provides over it's life time, it is one of the highest returns in energy for the energy invested in building it, paired with very low carbon emissions.

Obviously, the figures on EROEI depend on which article you read, as it's a very complex number to work out (and will always be an approximation), but it's fairly commonly acknowledged by people who do not have a vested interest in solar PV (vs low carbon power sources in general) that PV is a feel good technology that doesn't actually do a hell of a lot in terms of carbon reduction.

As a person who has had a solar system on their home for 9-10 years, let me say you are WAY off.
First, my system paid for itself in savings in under 8 years, and I missed out on a lot of rebates available today. My system should have another 10 years before I need to do major maintenance, by which time there will almost certainly be cheaper, better units to replace mine. In short, my system will save me from paying for around 10-11 years of energy costs, or to put it another way, 1/2 of my energy cost for a 20 year period.
I absolutely hate reading people talk about how bad solar is, and how it's not economically viable, when I know they are 100% wrong on those points from personal experience, not from anecdote and third hand miss-'information'.

Second, on top of the savings, I also saved thousands of dollars on lost groceries because my refrigerator doesn't stop working when the power goes out, which happens here around 1 week per year on average. My lights never go out, unlike my neighbors.

Option #3: the country might become destablised enough to halt construction/maintenance entirely and the site will be left to rot, more or less, like the nuclear arsenals/reactors of some nations.

Also keep in mind, this is how we deal with nuclear waste in a stable, wealthy and highly industrialised nation. "Just toss it over there" is the mantra during good times. Times are not good in Ukraine...

Just quoting this bit. Sure, there's 'privileges' that high-traffic members deserve. I don't believe helping with routine maintenance stuff that helps the site's overall quality without creating any real risk should be in that category.

I also don't believe the ability to downvote a comment or a video should be a privilege that requires a tremendous amount of membership time to earn either. I can understand getting past probation (which in itself is a bit of work) before opening that option up. But it's likely that anyone getting past that barrier is not your 11-year-old foul-mouthed teabagging anarchist-wannabe Call of Duty player who has apparently slept with your mother.

When it comes to voting, shouldn't everyone have the same voice?

I hate aquariums (maintenance, non-interactive pets, etc), but I'd gladly have one full of these little guys.

How long until humans scoop these poor little bastards out of their natural environment and start breeding them for pets?

This kind of attitude is depressing. It's none of your business what someone does in their spare time when no one else is affected by it. There are functioning alcoholics turning up for work pissed, flying planes, driving buses, teaching children. But no, let's go after the guy who sits in his bedroom playing music with a joint. Let's prevent him from having a life, even if he is self medicating a mental illness. It serves him right - if he's got an illness, he shouldn't be using naturally occurring medicine like our ancestors have for thousands upon thousands of years, no! He should be paying hundreds of pounds to a big pharma company for a pill that they invented a few years ago.

The premise behind drugs testing people is based on many things i disagree with:
1) the spectacular failure of the war of drugs - not only has drug use increased in the timeframe, but it has ruined probably millions of lives, needlessly turning ordinary, hard working people into criminals for no good reason other than "we like this plant, but we don't like this plant, and now neither may you"
2) the origin of the war on drugs - which iirc from a well sourced and produced video on here recently was instigated by a vindictive racist who wanted to go criminalise things that were seen as "black people" pastimes
3) the bias of the war on drugs - where drugs associated with the poor and underprivileged are relentlessly pursued to the detriment of functioning happy families across the world, but drugs associated with rich white folk such as those boardroom jockeys who snort coke in the office bathroom, nah, give them an easy time
4) the american prison business - which demands a steady supply of low cost, low maintenance, low rights workers who have no choice in the matter
5) the spreading of disinformation through formal education/popular media, and lack of actual knowledge or experience of drugs - which has led to a generation of people who now firmly believe that the moment you inhale a particle of THC (or "inject 1 marijuana" to the uninitiated), your brain turns into a fried egg, and you immediately begin stealing, cheating, and peddling dangerous items to children

Some of the brightest and best humans were influenced and inspired by drugs. If i wrote a list of people that i had the greatest respect for and who i considered to have made a positive influence on the world, half of them would almost certainly be drugs users; and i mean scientists, writers and artists. Your philosophy is a detriment to society, but thankfully as the decades pass, there are less and less with that philosophy. I loathe being blunt, but there is nothing worse than someone who feels the need to dictate to others what they should and shouldn't do on the basis of what they personally do or don't approve of.

We might get about 90 years on this planet with a bit of luck - why the hell do the minority spend so much time trying to dictate to the majority what they do with that time? And why do the majority let them? What sort of control fetish is it that inclines people to want to do that?

This guy's life has been fucking ruined by your adopted philosophy towards drugs, and you offer to help him as long as he bends to your will? How magnanimous of you to stoop to gutter level to help a mere drug-addled cretin... I think he'd tell you to stick your job, he's overqualified to work under you.

Hell yeah. Good on him, but when he said "he happened to hit real estate at the right time", he definitely wasn't kidding. Buying the plane would be pricey enough, but the refurbishment and maintenance have got to be north of $1mil.

Friend of mine gave me a plant the other week. Wierd little thing, just a corm and nothing else. No maintenance at all. Today, while I was at work, it blossomed.

Now I know that it's a voodoo lily. And that it smells like a dozen rotting carcasses. Seriously, my entire fucking apartment smells like Zombieland.

When I called her about it, she was laughing her ass off...

I have solar now, so I'll answer.
Today, if you want battery power at home for storage of solar, wind, even micro hydro generated power, you have one real choice....lead acid batteries.
Pros (compared to lead acid)-At best, lead acids are large, unsightly, need an enclosure, need a charger, have a 1000 cycle life span, need maintenance, can't be frozen or allowed to get too hot, use acid, are expensive to dispose of, and are more expensive than this (better?) technology by almost a factor of 4. I recently replaced my battery bank of just over 1KWH for around $1200-$1400, while he's advertising 10KWH for $3500!
Cons-likely lots of 'rare earth minerals' needed, which cause massive pollution where they're refined (China), unknown rate of failure/fire, other unknown problems, and anti-renewable energy people's heads exploding trying to come up with new reasons that renewable energy sucks.

WTF? Soros "Funded" the Ferguson and Baltimore riots? That's such an asinine assertion. You don't fund riots, they're free.
Downvote the insinuation that the civil unrest is a scripted liberal fraud. How ridiculous.

Also...Why does the National Guard Humvee have a headlight out? Who's doing maintenance over there?

@newtboy, I wonder about foulbrood in this sort of hive. Are you then out the full thing or can it be disenfected since it's plastic? Hive maintenance would still be a thing , people still need to pull the frames on occasion. It won't stop mites. Nosema and other fungai will probably be a bigger issue with this design. Foulbrood and other problems will still be around, as will colony collapse disorder.

Also where are the brood kept since splitting the frame like this seems like it'd kill the brood (okay that one is answered in the KS page and you still have a brood box that you have to supply on your own).

How well does it actually work? Is this all just clever editing and done at peak honey flow season? How well does it work in the fall? Why is Bush shown talking about it, but he himself doesn't mention it on his site? Sure he's selling his own hives and the like, but I'd think if he gave them an actual try I'd think he'd say something, competition or not. It looks

I worry that too many inexperienced people who don't research or care, will try this and perhaps make many bee pests and diseases worse as they won't research things out properly. They'll just buy this and think that's nearly all there is too beekeeping and infect other hives due to their sloppy methods.

@newtboy
Granted the advice isn't applicable to all situations, take the details of Digitalfiend's case for example, hence I didn't comment on that case (I had no advice, and I did consider it for a while. "Teach your dog not to play" wasn't a notion I was willing to back).
In light of the new info provided I state a disclaimer, the preparation you can do is limited by your circumstances.
Seems you've done well enough, and the occurrences for concern have locational limitations with positively influential perpetrators.
If I had had that, I wouldn't have gotten my 2nd awesome happy dog.

We weren't experienced trainers, however we did have an advantage and took the opportunity to start the training the day we got him as a pup, oppose to having got him later in his life.

As for the level of training, he came when called if he wanted, he stopped barking when he wanted, and he tried eating my cat, because he wanted.
With exception to my teasing kitty, he didn't eat without a command and he was incredibly road smart, as these 2 things were necessary for his survival and the maintenance of his high quality of life.

@robbersdog49
Yes there's assumptions, as I don't know newtboy or the respective living conditions and hardships (but my knowledge has marginally increased today).
Any assumptions of normalcy brought forth from a lack of advised uncommon details, is merely reviewing the situation as it has been described. Would you argue that I should have imagined some unstated details and responded to those?

We all make upwards of 100,000's of assumptions a day. The seat your sitting in, did you check it for poisonous spiders before sitting? why not? Is it because there wasn't any last time and you had no reason to suspect otherwise?
Our brains are smarter than we commonly realise and they use cheat sheets (commonly manifested as assumptions) to get us through every moment of our lives.
Holding humans to their likelihood driven assumptions is a frail thing as it's often met with "oh, i didn't know".

Victim blaming? No, not quite.
Fact: you have a greater chance of controlling your pets, then you do strangers.
The point is little more than to focus on the area's that you can more greatly and reliably influence. To simplify it, it's to aim for the greatest reward with minimal resource (in this case, effort).

The rest of your comment is idealistic. You get no argument from me as I agree, and no realistically debatable point has been made. We don't live in a utopia and those whom acknowledge this while aiming for something, stand a better chance of gaining a modicum of their interests.

"it would be good if people were good". Yes. Would. If. One day