I took a look at solar power for residential use this year. The last time I did the analysis was in 2004 and the payback was over 15 years, best case. It is now down to 12 years best case. After a lot of research I went with Puget Sound Solar for my estimates. They are the most honest and have a nice presentation on the Internet. They also had a number of installations on the East Side of Seattle for me to consider.

Also I looked at wind turbines, but if you mount the turbine on your roof, any gust of wind over 25 miles an hour will shake the whole house. Running the turbine on a tower is a very costly solution with the need to climb the towers yearly for maintenance. And there is apparently a lot of noise associated with wind turbines.

The solar power option I was looking at was a photovoltaic system:

• Solar electric, or photovoltaic (PV) systems, collect electricity from photovoltaic panels and send it to an inverter and into your house electric panel. 
• PV systems require little or no maintenance (just keep the panels free of dust, and leaves.) 
• For each 1,000 watts of PV you can get up to 1,200 kWh of electricity produced per year.  To see what this means, check your electric bill to see how many kWh of electricity you use.
• Your electric meter spins backward when your home isn't using the energy generated, giving you retail credit for power produced.
• 1000 watts of PV takes up about 65 to 90 square feet of space.
• PV systems cost between $6.00 to $10.00 per watt installed.
• A 1,000 watt PV system typically costs around $9,000 installed.
• A 2,000  watt system costs around $14,000 installed.
• A 3,000 watt system costs about $20,000 installed.
• The State of Washington will pay you a minimum of 15 cents for every kilowatt hour that your system produces until July 2,020.
• There is currently no sales tax on grid-connected photovoltaic systems.
• The Internal Revenue Service will give you a tax credit of 30% of system cost.
• Commercial customers can get fast depreciation of most of the balance of the cost, 50% in the first year!

For those nay-sayers who think that we don’t get enough sun, I think if you did the research you would be surprised. Although we don’t have the sun of say, Death Valley, we have enough to harness depending upon the efficiency of the collection device.

My plan was to shy away from the battery part of the program, rather choosing to sell any overages to Puget power to offset my usage. That eliminated the space required to store that batteries, cost of buying and maintaining them, and off gassing.

Even with the significant tax savings from county, state and federal and the selling to the grid through Puget Power, my payback was going to be very long. Here is a chart one of the eastside home owners gave me charting his pay back schedule. (Click on the chart to enlarge.)

The home owner wrote: The installation was professional, he worked with me to give a good price and I have had zero problems with the system since the day it was installed.  Net power product at this point is around 30 megawatt hours.  Even with the incentives, it’s still a LONG ROI to break even (see attached spreadsheet for system performance and costs/income).  Since the system was put in more than five years ago the cost basis and some of the incentives will have changed.  I’m glad I did it – I’m looking at putting in a hot water solar system in addition which also has a much shorter ROI (few years).

Me: Wow, very illuminating and close to what Sean was telling me at Puget Sound Solar. It's better than it was ten years ago, but not good enough to invest in if you use the accounting standard that recommends investment if you start getting a return over the costs in seven years or less. Even with the 30% fed rebate on the cost of the system and the other incentives adding up to 50% off initial costs, it's still not ready for prime time.

Home owner: From a pure monetary perspective this is true – but I knew this going in and considered the investment in encouraging solar production in the Northwest and the net energy savings to be worthwhile the relative cost.  The flip side is any solar plan should be accompanied with a conservation plan also (CFL lights, turning things off etc).

So I’ll relook in another five years. This looks promising though.  :o)

It was announced this week that we are moving to another building on the same campus we are currently working at. So I grabbed my cell phone and took some pictures. The first picture is of the park north of our buildings. This is the view I will be giving up for a view of the side of an office building:

I’ve also included a picture of my desk and the door to my office. Yes, that is a Saxophone calendar above my desk. We were in the Marvel theme’d building. I’ll have to change my ‘privacy’ poster to something else for this move. Maybe I’ll move back to the film noir theme.

You get used to a space after spending time there. Let’s see we will have been in this building for around 18 months. Moving is just one of the things you get used to when working at Microsoft. In 18 years I’ve moved over 20 times. Some times it just seemed everyone was moving one office over. But team change, re-orgs happen, and life moves on. And I do have a great job with many, many friends, and very cool projects and products.

Sometimes there is beauty in unexpected places. Musical Transformations is but one example of this. Click on the picture above for the blog.

Painter of robots Brian Despain’s new paintings can be viewed tonight, November 13, at Seattle's Roq La Rue Gallery. Above, "The Prodigal Son" (oil on panel, 15" x 19").Also showing is John Brophy, whose paintings mixes up iconography from various cultures and religions in a bowl of consumer culture.

“Brian Despain works with imaginary yet recognizable modern landscapes, but populates his world with seemingly self aware and melancholy robots in a seemingly endless quest for the numinous. His work blends the natural world with technology and usually has a slightly morbid slant. Archetype-loaded imagery such as skulls, gears, fish, and birds provide the forefront for a seemingly arcane number system the artist employs in all his work. His rich and somber color palettes of post apocalyptic ochres, deep blues, and steel greys belie and hidden warmth and dark humor within his work. This show will feature 8 new paintings.”

Read more…

Today is the birthday of the inventor of this instrument. Can you name him?

Here are some clues:

“His childhood was tragic. Hardly able to stand, Antoine-Joseph fell from a height of three floors, seriously bumping his head against a stone: he was believed dead. At the age of three, he swallowed a bowl of vitriolized water, and then a pin. Later, he was seriously burned in a gunpowder explosion; he fell onto a cast iron frying pan and burned himself on one side. Three times he escaped poisoning and asphyxiation in his bedroom, where varnished items were lying about during the night. Another time, he was hit on the head by a cobblestone; he fell into a river and was saved by the skin of his teeth..

"He's a child condemned to misfortune; he won't live," his mother said. In the district, they called him the ghost".

These initial serious incidents were, alas, but the prelude to an eventful existence such as only a few have known. In 1858, he was miraculously saved from a cancer of the lip by a black doctor who knew the properties of certain Indian plants. What would the future have been but for this intervention?” - Albert Rémy

He was the inventor of many instrument improvements as well as the inventor of what was to become a very popular instrument world-wide.

Okay, looking at this picture, which one is blonde? If you can’t pass this test, I’m not talkin’ to you anymore.  ;o)

Well, what say yea puzzle meisters?

Last week the local drug dealer aka vintage instrument seller stopped by my desk a work with a little ‘something’ for me to look at. It was a gorgeous Conn F-mezzo soprano sax from the late 1920’s. Darn the temptation, but this time I went for it.

I immediately made an offer on the instrument, some what lower than what he was asking. Knowing full well that he could sell if for more, we haggled and he gave in about halfway between our best prices. Heck, I have purchased more than a couple of instruments from Matt. I then pinged Merlin who was penning ‘Santa Baby’ as a quartet for me to ask if he could include a sop replacement copy for the f-mezzo.

For those of you wanting to know more about the Conn f-mezzo soprano saxes start here. You can also view a truly well-preserved copy of an original Conn full page ad for this instrument.

Playing this I found the intonation to be very good except on the palm keys. Suzy noted the key heights were way off and something that one of my fav techs could handle rather quickly. When she held the key down to a normal key height, the intonation was immediately better. So after a minor annoyance to take it to a tech we will see how it sounds in ensemble with the rest of the sax quartet. Even more interesting will be how many people will notice it is something special. I’d be surprised if 1 person out of a thousand would think it was something other than an alto sax.