Jamie Thingelstad

Over this past weekend I applied some bird protection to our house. We live in an area with a lot of birds, and we have large parts of our house where we have a lot of windows. On top of that, I like to feed birds and with the landscaping work that we’ve done over the last three years we’ve seen a marked increase in the number of songbirds that frequent our yard.

However, we’ve also seen a huge increase in “bird strikes”. Almost everyday birds would hit our windows, and sometimes the hit would be fatal. I searched for a while to find a solution to this problem and finally found Window Alert.

I’ve applied these decals to the major windows where we were having problems and so far it’s been great. No hits that we’ve heard since then. They don’t ruin the view – and while you can see them they are not annoying. They work by reflecting ultraviolet light which birds can see, but we cannot. If you have a problem with “bird strikes” you should give these a try.

I’m mad.

I’m a big supporter of alternative energy. For the last 3 years I’ve voluntarily paid a surcharge to Xcel Energy to fund the purchase of wind power equal to the amount of electricity I consume. This program is called Windsource. I pay $2.00 per 100 kWh of electricity, and I buy 16 units of this to account for our total electrical consumption. Every month I tack on $32 to my electricity bill and have been happy in the knowledge that our entire house is powered by renewable energy.

In addition to the WindSource program that I just mentioned, Xcel also collects a “curtailment payment” from all customers to fund wind-generated electricity. This is not an optional payment. If you are a customer, you are paying it. Then the Star Tribune broke this article on June 1st, Public Paid for idled wind farms.

It turns out that in 2004 Xcel paid wind farms to idle their turbines because Xcel could not transfer the power. Xcel doesn’t have the transmission lines to accept the power. By the way, they aren’t doing much about it either as you can read in the article.

When I signed up for WindSource I asked the person “How can I insure that my money is going to wind power?”. Turns out there really isn’t a good solution for the individual consumer. Relying on the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission seems like the only real option, but they may be part of the problem.

Xcel Energy customers should be mad. We should be mad for being sold a bill of goods that wasn’t true. And we should also be mad because Xcel isn’t being a responsible corporation.

See also: KARE11 Article, WCCO, Minutes of MnPUC (page 2)

It likely isn’t going to come as a surprise to anyone that the people who are currently finishing an installation of solar heat were at the opening showing of An Inconvenient Truth last night. I heard about this movie a few weeks ago and I’ve been eager to see it since.

Let me cut straight to the point: You really need to see this movie. Did you get that? I mean it. Go see this movie. I don’t care if you are republican or democrat, liberal or conservative, green or blue. Just go see it.

Calling An Inconvenient Truth a movie seems a little wrong, it’s really more like going to see a presentation. And you understand why fairly quickly. Al Gore has been giving this presentation on global warming for a long time, but one person can only be in so many places. The movie is a great way to get the message out to millions of people, and it is done very well.

I like to think that even skeptics of global warming will leave the theatre with a new perspective. I’m not going to try to summarize it here as I just wouldn’t do as good of a job. Go check it out – soon!

I left work late on Tuesday. I thought I would try to get home a little earlier and hopped into the MnPASS lane and hit the pedal. As I came out of downtown I was greeted by a cop holding a radar detector. He vigorously encouraged me to pull over and receive my due.

He clocked me doing 71 in a 55. Eek.

He had some generosity in his heart though. While there was no way I was going to get off without a ticket, he cited me for Unacceptable Acceleration instead of a full on speeding ticket.

That’s the first time I’ve been pulled over by a cop in probably 10 years.

Slow down.

In the last couple of weeks we’ve had a lot of progress with our solar project. The work on the roof and in the attic is essentially done now. This leaves the compicated plumbing work in the utility room the remaining items. This Wednesday the contractor is supposed to be out with the whole team to turn the system up.

In the last weeks we’ve pulled out the existing two gas water heaters and inserted a new Takagi TK-2 tankless hot water heater. Right now that is providing all of the hot water since the solar system isn’t up and running yet. I’ve been happy with it (it is the square unit on the wall in the picture).

I’ll post a detailed write-up once the system is up and running. Many of you have asked me about the project and I’ve certainly learned a lot having it done. One big lesson learned is added alternative energy and high-efficiency energy to an existing house is not trivial!

My home network has been pathetic for the last few months. While doing our solar project and other work in the utility room I had to make some quick cable moves. The unfortunate downside of this was that for over 3 months my gigabit network has been nada, since I’ve got a 100 mbit link in between it and everything that matters.

I decided I’ve had enough of this and decided to redo the network – right this time. I’m not done, but this weekend I got most of the physical work hung.

I put a 2’ rack on the right and have all the network switches where I want them. I still have to move the ethernet runs in the house from the other side of the utility room to this side and put them in the patch panel. This will be a pain as it involves rewiring. And once that is all done, I’m going to setup a proper secure home network with color zones for protection. I expect this project will be a month or more before I finish it completely. I’ll tell more when I do, and put a picture up of the pretty wiring.

This last weekend I finally said “uncle” and took my T-Rex to Hobby Warehouse in Richfield to get some help from the experts there and get my helicopter flying. There was a guy there, Rudy, who was awesome. He’s been flying RC helicopters for 12 years and has a T-Rex as well. He spent about 2 hours on my machine and got it working great!

The picture above is the helicopter I have. The picture doesn’t have the electronics on it, just the base frame and mechanical parts. After two hours with the pros it was going and I headed home to try on my own. The first encounter was not very successful – I never got off the ground but also didn’t have any major crashes.

The next day, Sunday, I took it to my father-in-laws for Easter. He’s been obsessed with heli’s as well. He emptied the garage so I we could play without the wind. After about a minute I took a hard landing and broke the base plate where the battery was connected. After we rigged a clothes hangar so I could strap the battery on we were flying again. After a while I got to the point where I could fly outside with a decent amount of wind. Until I had a decent crash at the end.

I ended up with a hard crash and a slew of parts needed. I broke the gears in two of my servos (Hitec HS-65HB), bent the tail, cracked the bottom plate, shredded the canopy. I got parts and spent last night fixing.

Tonight I went out and I was flying great! Hovering like a pro, things were really in control, until the very end. I was running low on battery and I came down too hard. The blades came down too far and one of the blades sheared right through my new carbon tail! Ouch!

The damage looks worse than from the weekend, but it’s all in the tail. I’m still in the phase where every trip off the ground with the heli is followed by a trip to the hobby shop. I’ll have to replace the tail, stabilizer bars and a couple other things. I should be flying again this weekend.

After much consideration and a meeting with our contractor I’ve decided to change the location and configuration of our solar array. I posted previously about our solar project and mentioned I had concerns about how the panel array looked.

We are going to change from the eight 4 x 6.5 foot panels that we have now to five 4 x 8 foot panels instead. The panels will be relocated to the front roof of the house, to the left of the skylights when facing the front of the house. We’ll be dropping our panel footage from 208 to 160 square feet in the process, but will still get a lot of heat collection.

The new location will make the panels only visible from the front of the house, and will not disturb the outline of the house as they will be completely on the roof face.

This will result in a 4 week delay to the project to get the new panels, but considering this is something that will be in place for years I want it to be right.