i wrote lucas this morning, asking if it was possible that an electrician could come out this week and fix the broken revenue grade meter. he replied a short time later, forwarded to his project managers as well, that the repair probably wouldn't happen this week, but "hopefully soon." that doesn't make me very confident, and "hopefully soon" might not even mean next week. but what lucas didn't know was i already had a fix. i called solaredge and got one of the technicians to turn temporarily disconnect the revenue grade meter from the layout, which was somehow affecting the numbers. as soon as that was done, all the data returned, including numbers from the yesterday and today. now there's no rush for the electrician to come by.

not that it mattered too much today, a very cloudy and cold day that also snowed for a few hours in the late afternoon into the early evening. to think: it was just 75°F yesterday. the production was just 5.86kWh, after 5 consecutive 25kWh+ days.

i went to the basement and replaced all the 60W incandescent bulbs, of which half the lights were still using. it wasn't a big priority in the past, but that was before paul started camping out in the basement every day, sorting through his boxes of personal effects and photos. i replaced them with old compact fluorescents, which themselves were replaced when i upgraded to LED's bulbs. a CFL bulb uses 14W; an LED bulb (60W equivalent 800 lumens) just 8.8W (though LED bulbs i bought last time used 9.5W). eventually i'll replace all the basement bulbs with LED's. it's only a few watts difference, but LED bulbs have also other advantages, like turning bright immediately.

i wasn't very hungry and didn't have lunch until 2pm, where i ate a yogurt. afterwards i had a bowl of salad and some hot tea. i went out briefly, to bring in the trash cans, and to star market for some snacks, where there was a sale on popcorners. i also got some garlic, as the ones i have at home have all dried up.

i have another new project: building an arduino-based ESP8266 wifi water sensor that can alert me via e-mail or text if there's a leak in the house. it can also be done with a raspberry pi but it'd be a waste of a good micro computer, more efficient to use a simpler board. i went online in search of parts (ESP8266 and water sensor).

later in the evening i finally got around to creating a sitemap file for google search to crawl through. i thought i needed to make an XML file but sitemaps can also just be a list of links, which i managed to generate with some php coding. another thing i learned was sitemap files need to be 60K or less, and the one that i created (links to blog posts dating back to 2001) was nearly 300K. i was going to break it apart into smaller files, but i discovered that sitemaps can be compressed (via gzip). the final sitemap.txt.gz was just 17K. hopefully future searches of my blog via google will be more accurate because i created a sitemap.

for dinner i finished the other half of the vodka sauce rigatoni. i had a carb overdose and couldn't finish the final few bites, saving them for tomorrow for lunch.

in the evening i watched the women's figure skating final, a battle between russians medvedeva and zagitova. i was rooting for medvedeva, who at just 18 years old was the more seasoned older skater compared to 15 year old zagitova, who seemed to be faster and stronger and totally fearless. it's the age old battle between youth and experience, and in the end youth won out when zagitova took the gold.

i spent the day agonizing whether or not i should upgrade my router (tp-link TL-WR841ND). i set an alert on camelcamelcamel to let me know when the asus RT-ACRH13 was on sale and i got a notice this morning that the price was down to $50 ($70 retail). i've been impressed with the asusWRT admin software and corresponding apps, and this particular router had a USB 3.0 port that i could use as a NAS. however, unlike the RT-AC68U, this router didn't have a firmware that could be flashed with a custom firmware. in the end, i couldn't justify buying a router touting 400Mbps/867Mbps speeds when my comcast internet service is only 30Mbps at best. my tp-link router isn't that old: i bought it back in november 2014 (from newegg) after upgrading from a purple linksys WRT54g with DD-WRT. sure, occasionally it drops the wifi and needs to be manually reset, but it doesn't happen that often enough to be annoying (yet). when that day comes, i'll definitely be in the market for a new asus router.