t
o
n
y
a
n
g
'
s
 
w
e
b
l
o
g


i was up bed last night by 11pm, and was already awake by 8am this morning. it's nice to sleep early then wake up early for a change. of course the intense thunderstorms last night certainly didn't help. it was calm by the time i woke up but i knew it wouldn't last. when i left for belmont around 10am, once again i was caught in a little rain. i thought about ducking below an awning and waiting it out, but i was hoping the rain would stop and after a few minutes it finally did. the bigger storms wouldn't be until later this afternoon.

i checked on the progress of my lotuses. all of them have coin leaves, in various states of openness. the lone surviving lotus from my first batch of seeds - the oldest - now has 3 coins leaves with a 4th emerging underwater. the first coin leaf on that lotus has some bruise marks which has also affected the underside. i think it was damaged when it was uprooted, and i see can a crack in the leaf where water must've gotten inside. once there are 4 coins it will begin to develop its first aerial leaf. that's when i begin to adding fertilizing pond tablets. the second batch of lotuses are offset by 16 days from the first lotus. but these second batch are growing under ideal sunny conditions, so hopefully they can catch up.

more striped mallow flowers have blossomed on that single mallow plant on the western perennial bed by the side of the house. a few shasta daisies have opened up, the ones by the southern edge. those don't get as much as the daisies along the southeastern perennial bed, which are also very tall and haven't opened up yet. i knew the hanging potted yellow alyssum flowers were making seeds, but i've never taken a close look at those seeds, which resemble money plant seeds with their tiny round paper thin shell and seeds on the inside. i didn't take any care to collect the seeds and they're sort of overhanging the pot and falling onto the lawn below.

we made 26.08kWh, a lot more production than i expected given how cloudy and rainy it was today. around 3:45pm was when a batch of severe thunderstorms crossed into belmont and that was also the time when the solar panels registered nearly zero, i've never seen anything like that before. good news is we broke june 2018's production record, and we just need 12kWh more tomorrow to break may 2018's record as well. i feel like the solaredge app should give us achievement stickers when we reach significant milestones such a beating previous production records.

however, a thing that's been bothering me about our solar install the past few days is automatic energy reporting hasn't kicked in ever since we swapped out the inverter. the numbers for may wasn't reported, but that was because the inverter plus revenue grade meter was just replaced. united solar ended up reporting the numbers manually, and i was told the meter would automatically report the end of the following month. the end of june is now here, and so far nothing has happened with the reporting. it's not a big deal, and if it doesn't happen i'll just call united solar on monday so they can report it manually again. but i was hoping everything would be working smoothly, and i wouldn't have to be dealing with all this again.