i'm sick. what started as just a cough and some body aches a few days ago has become a running nose and sneezing affair as well. with my reclusive lifestyle, there's been winters where i never gotten sick. not sure where i contracted the virus, but maybe my immune system was weakened already from keeping my house so cold all the time and the exertion from the shoveling. all i can do now is rest and hope my body can quickly recover. normally i don't take any drugs unless it's really bad; we're not at that point yet, it's still manageable. i just want to quarantine myself so i don't spread my germs to anybody else.
i'd planned on taking the bike out today to get some groceries, but i've decided to postpone that until tomorrow (if at all) since it'll be warmer by 15 degrees at least. i have plenty of food in the house, from leftover pizza to frozen and canned foods.
i had a leftover caprese sandwich for lunch. i wanted to eat something warm but was too lazy to cook anything so i just ate the sandwich cold. i thought about heating it up on the toaster oven but i didn't want to shrivel the tomato slices. i did however brew some tea.
i called comcast to cancel my grand uncle's cable subscription (but still keeping in the internet). he's currently paying $130/month, but with just internet i can reduce it to $75/month. the account is under my mother's name but i gave them my name on my first call and the guy wouldn't allow me to make any changes even though i've made changes in the past. i then called again and just said i was my mother and didn't have any problems, the only confirmation they asked was for the account number and address. i've cancelled cable services before so i knew what was in store: they couldn't just simply cancel it, but had to give a whole sales pitch why it's better to have multiple services and options to lower my bill. my agent even put me on hold to ask his supervisor about any deals, but i could see it was a marketing strategy. i was a patient mood today and played along, even though it was a complete waste of time. all the deals they offered was still more expensive than just go with internet alone, and the deals would eventually expire, and we'd end up paying more again. my agent finally did get around to cancelling cable service. all that's left now is returning the equipment.
the bank wrote back, the loan officer said she had an opening friday morning. my parents had an argument because my mother said it'd be better on monday since the cafe is closed on that day. but they ended up deciding on friday 10am. this is a kindness for lucas since he won't have to wait until next week to get the final payment for the solar installation. the sooner they close, the sooner they can reduce their loan amount through the 30% payout from the mass solar loan program. i wrote lucas to let him know the good news.
when the sun finally set, the total solar production for today was a whopping 29.25 kWh. yesterday i projected we'd reach 20 kWh, but i didn't think we would not only break it but missed 30 kWh by just 750 Wh.
i exported the data in csv format from the online monitoring website so i could play around with numbers. i compared today's production with the one from a week ago. weather wise it was very much the same conditions: cold and sunny and a deep blue sky. on that day we produced 4.06 kWh of power. we actually made more yesterday (5.68 kWh) but the data is spotty since we shut down the system a few times. it's not a fair comparison between last wednesday and today. there was only 6 panels fully exposed (though they were the panels in the best spot to get the maximum sunshine, the foam roof rake attachment wouldn't arrive until the next day during the snowstorm), compared to 24 total. with all panels active, we generated more than 7x the electricity compared to last wednesday.
today's graph is nearly smooth compared to last week, but there were still some bumps, i'm guessing maybe small patches of melting snow falling onto the panels. another interesting pattern is around 1:30pm there's a drop on both graphs. that's because with the low sun angle, it actually goes behind a very large oak tree that belongs to neighbors several houses away. the production keeps dropping until 2:30pm, when the sun seems to have moved far enough away to begin shining on the panels again though with diminishing returns.
even though we didn't reach 6 kW today, i think it's just a matter of time. every day the sun's angle gets higher (today's highest elevation was 25.76°) and the length of daylight increases. the absolute theoretical maximum amount of electricity we can produce in an hour is 80.4 kWh, a figure that's impossible to reach but one that we'll look forward to seeing if we can come close come summertime.
i blew my nose so much today that there was a pile of dirty tissue in the trash bin and my nose and upper lips rubbed raw. whenever i sneezed i would also cough at the same time, which i've never experienced before, but it's loud and violent. for dinner i heated up 2 leftover slices of pizza. i'm trying to get some early sleep to speed up my recovery.
as i side note, i got a chance to play around with chart.js to make some fancy responsive charts. i'm hoping to improve my data visualization game.