On St. Croix, Senators Hold Emergency Meeting to Address Fuel Costs.

Asking Hovensa (the oil refinery on St. Croix) for cheaper fuel costs is the wrong answer. That will just increase our reliance on a non-sustainable fuel source and postpone our search for alternatives.

I applaud their move to lower government energy costs by 20% by installing solar and wind power. However, if this is a good idea for government, why isn't it a good idea for the power plant to do in a larger form (e.g. a wind farm)?

If the government installs wind and solar power in excess of what they use, they will effectively be creating a distributed power plant that would reduce fuel consumption by the power plant. The panacea here would have the grid-tied power producers creating the bulk of our energy used from renewable sources and the power company providing power through traditional means to cover the excess load.

One of the things I love about St. Croix is that it's really easy to get access to owners of local companies. For retail stores, the owners often work in the store, and they get to know you when you shop there often. It's great to be able to build up relationships like that.

Indeed, I recently got an email from Mike Meluskey, co-owner of Broadband VI. He was concerned about the intermittent problems I was seeing with his service that I posted about on my blog. He and I have been emailing back and forth to try to solve the issue; it seems to be something that's only affecting me and not the rest of his customers.

I'm very pleased with their customer service and their service in general (aside from the present issues), so I really hope we can figure out the problem. Thanks, Mike.

Congratulations to Senator Obama on winning the Democratic Nomination!

Residents of the Virgin Islands can't vote for president, so I've been supporting his campaign financially instead. I hope the few readers of my blog will join me to make a difference.

Let's bring to the presidency someone who pledges to bring our boys and girls home from the ill-conceived Iraq war, encourage research into alternative fuels and improve auto fuel economy, ignore corporate lobbyists that don't represent the needs of most Americans, and to make us safer by bringing some sanity to our foreign relations.

Though I don't share all his views, he's the only candidate who seems honestly committed to thinking through and talking about what really matters to Americans rather than attacking the other candidates or lofting colorful balloons (like suspending the federal gas tax).

Interesting article regarding net metering lawsuit on St. Croix. Net metering allows you to sell electricity back to the grid when you produce an excess through solar panels or other means. (Solar panels produce more power during the day when usage at your house is typically lower, so this allows you to "bank" the power produced, lowering your total bill.) WAPA allows this, but apparently you have to sign a waiver that you are responsible for any damage caused to the grid. This seems a bit circumspect, though I'm not sure what other states require for this privilege.

After many months of hard work, we're pleased to announce that Pocket Tunes is now available for Windows Mobile phones and PDAs. Visit our website for more information or read the press release.

A big public thanks to all the employees at NormSoft who made this release possible!

The Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority (our power company) is seeking a 40% increase in power costs come July. We are already paying $0.33/kWh for residential areas, much higher than most areas of the US (3-4 times higher than many areas).

From what I've heard, the high rates are caused in part by people stealing electricity. Many residents will routinely unhook their meters, only to re-connect them the day before someone comes out to read the meters. WAPA has been cracking down on this lately, and most of the boxes now have tamper-evident clasps and are read automatically from the office. In addition, they burn oil at the power plant, so they are highly affected by increasing oil prices. And they seem resistant to alternative energy ideas for some reason. It seems like a wind farm would be an obvious natural source of energy on an island where we have fairly constant 10mph+ trade winds all year round.

This rate hike will make alternative energy much more viable, of course, so we may have to reconsider solar power in a much shorter timeframe.

In preparation for this, I decided to spend part of my weekend figuring out where we use all of our electricity. Our bill runs around $800/month, so surely there must be something we can cut back on. I measured the energy usage of everything in our house that consume electricity. I use a few different methods to do this.

First, I purchased a Kill-A-Watt power meter and plugged various items into it. It displays instantaneous usage in Watts and total usage in kWh over any period of time.

1. For devices that are plugged in and operate all day long at the same power levels (e.g. routers, telephones, etc.), I simply took a Wattage reading and added it to the spreadhseet.
   
2. For devices that are off or idle most of the time but come to life for periods of activity (e.g. washing machine, microwave,
   computer, etc. - most things that are plugged in), I took a Wattage reading when the device is off (many devices consume a small amount of power even when they are off!) and then when it was operating. I then estimate approximately how many hours per day those devices were operating.
   
3. For devices that fit the previous criteria but are difficult to estimate usage (e.g. water cooler, wine cooler, washing machine, etc.), I measured one cycle if possible (e.g. wash one batch of clothes). For continuous things like the water cooler, I plugged them into the Kill-A-Watt meter for a day and measured how many kWh they used.
   
4. Lights are easy. Just read the Wattage numbers on them and multiply by the number of lights. With compact flourescent (CF) bulbs, be sure to read the actual Wattage and not the effective Wattage. For example, our driveway lights are 7W bulbs, but they replace incandescent bulbs of 35W and produce the same amount of visible light (incandescents waste a lot of power by producing light that's not visible to human eyes and by producing light over a broad spectrum).
   
5. Ceiling fans are also easy. I found a chart online that gives 52" fans as using 90W and 36" fans as 55W.
   
6. For some appliances that weren't easy to get to the plug, I looked up their rating at EnergyStar's website.
   
7. For hard-wired appliances that had power ratings on them, I used those. Some were listed in Watts, but others were listed in as horse-power or Amps. A horse power is 746 Watts, so that's easy. (Our water pump is 1/2 HP, for example.) To convert Amps to Watts, you simply multiply by the Voltage. So you have to know if the appliance is on a 120V or 240V circuit. For example, our 17.7amp air conditioner on a 240V circuit uses 4.2kW at peak power. (This is a very powerful and efficient Mitsubishi mini-split air conditioner.)
   
8. To further confirm the energy usage a few key appliances like our pool pumps and air conditioners, I took a meter reading. To do this, I turned off as much electricity as I could in the house, especially anything that might come on intermittently and ruin my measurement. This required that I turn off the circuit to the refrigerator and turn off all A/C. I then measured how long it took for the power meter (installed by the power company at the edge of our property) to make one full rotation. One rotation is 0.01kWh or 10Wh. The baseline measurement with everything off was 54.39s/10Wh. Since one hour equals 3600 seconds, we can cancel out seconds and get: 54.39/36000W. Take the reciprocal to get: 662W. That's our instantaneous power usage with all the large power-consumers turned off. I then repeated this calculation with the appliance in question turned on to come up with a total instantaneous Wattage. Subtract the baseline Wattage to get the power that the appliance is using.
   

Conclusions

First, I found that we are doing a lot of things efficiently, already. For example, we use a solar hot water heater with a solar-powered pump. So our hot water is effectively free. The sun heats the hot water to excess of 160 degrees, seriously minimizing the amount of supplemental heating the clothes washer or dish washer need to supply. Second, we use propane for cooking and clothes drying. It is much cheaper to produce heat from propane than electricity, even at mainland US rates.

In addition, we've recently upgraded some appliances to very energy efficient models. We upgraded our washer and dryer to Whirpool Duet high efficiency ones. I did a batch of laundry in both and calculated 0.08kWh to wash and 0.22kWh to dry. Even if we do 4 loads per week, it only costs $0.56/mo to wash and $1.24/mo to dry a medium-sized load (including the constant 1W that each appliance uses while inactive). It helps a lot that water and heated water are free due to our rain-collecting cistern and solar hot water. We also upgraded our old Sub-Zero refrigerator to a more efficient Kenmore side-by-side.

There were also some surprises. While I knew that compact flourescent lights saved power, I didn't realize how much power incandescent lights used! For example, in our bathroom, we have a set of 12 40W lights over the mirror. When on, that's 480W, twice as much as my computer! Even if we just use them 2 hours per day when getting ready in the morning, that's $7/month just for those lights. If we forget to turn them off, they cost $4/day or $120/month just for one set of lights!

In addition, our pool pump uses much more power than I suspected. Here's the full breakdown:

• Air conditioning and fans: $306
  
• Computer Equipment: $154
  
• Television Equipment: $35
  
• Lights: $91 (including 9 low-power Sodium security lights that run 12hr/day on a light-sensitive switch)
  
• Appliances: $29
  
• Pool pumps: $182
  
• Other: $3
  

I was also interested in how much power we were wasting on devices that stay on all the time or use power when "off". It was not as bad as I thought. So here is the breakdown looking at that:

• Devices that are off: $9
  
• Devices that are idle or always-on: $36
  
• Devices that are on or being used: $755
  

Now the post office is returning mail to me that I sent BEFORE the rates went up. This is ridiculous.

For my weekend project, I moved three palm trees from one corner of our courtyard to another. Check out my Flickr photostream for pictures. Damn those trees were heavy.

Once I got an 18" trench dug around the tree, I used 3/4" and 3/8" drill bits to drill a bunch of holes into the dirt between the tree and the concrete walkway (there wasn't enough room to dig anything). This loosened up the dirt enough to free the tree, and it fell over quite easily. Then I had to lift the tree out of the hole and onto a hand truck and move it to the other side of the courtyard. I would guess the trees with the root ball weighed easily 200-300 lbs. The thorns on the palm fronds didn't help.

Digging the new hole was relatively easy. Propping up the trees while I backfilled it was not. I probably should have gotten a friend to help, but I managed on my own. I'll have to support the trees with concrete blocks and mounds of dirt for a few weeks probably, until the new roots take hold. They are in the ground pretty solid, but the trees are tending to lean slightly. In addition, I'll need to water them every day to promote root growth and keep them from drying out with their reduced root structure.

Broadband VI's Internet service has gotten increasingly unreliable lately. I'm getting disconnected several times a day, and I sometimes have to reset the router because I can't connect to our company's VPN. Right now the whole island of St. Croix is offline. (I'm online through my Sprint broadband connection, which works really well but is too high latency for VOIP or gaming, so I don't use it regularly.)

I'm headed to the phone company, Innovative, tomorrow to sign up for their $39.95/month DSL package (1Mbps) so I have a backup connection.

Solar PV generation costs coming down in the next few years, and new solar technology almost as cheap as wind power: http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/tech_talk/2008/05/photovoltaic_moores_law_on_tra.html

The US Post Office is a pain in the ass. All my mail that I dropped off in the mailbox Sunday just got returned to me because the new rate went into effect Monday, and I owed 1c. How much money did they lose returning that mail to me and re-delivering it?

It boggles my mind that they don't just raise the rate 5c instead of raising it 1c every damned year. The Forever stamps are nice, if our post office would ever have them in stock.

We've been considering installing solar PV panels on our roof. One of my main concerns about PV has been whether or not the cells actually generated more energy than they cost to make. Based on the prices to the consumer, it seemed to me that installing PV panels was akin to importing energy from somewhere it is cheaper.

In other words, we are paying nearly $0.33/kWh for power here. It will take around 10 years for a PV installation to pay for itself, including installation fees, shipping, the inverters, and other stuff necessary for install. The lifetime of a PV panel is about 20 years. So it seems like that would be akin to taking energy from somewhere where it costs $0.165/kWh and importing it to St. Croix. (20 years x $0.165/kWh = 10 years x $0.33/kWh)

However, according to http://www.ecotopia.com/apollo2/pvlever.htm , PV panels should produce much more energy (on the order of 9-17 times) than they take to create. That's good news, but it doesn't explain why the cost is not 1/17 to 1/9 of what I'm paying for electricity.

My assumption is that this difference is accounted for in overhead, profits, distribution, shipping, middlemen, installation, and other costs not included in the raw cost for creating the panels.

Though we may consider a PV installation, I think our next step is to try to reduce our energy usage. Air conditioning is ridiculously expensive here, and a lot of that is due to our poorly-insulated house (it was designed before a/c with an open-air design, so it's not well-suited to air-conditioning).

I may also wait a few years to see what happens with PV panels and concentrated solar generators. Wind power would be great here, but our home owners' association would probably frown on it. The local laws prevent homeowners' associations from restricting the installation of solar and wind power (except to suggest alternative installation locations that would not dramatically affect energy produced), but our C&R prevent installing anything to obstruct another lot's view, and I don't want to test the boundaries of those rules...

Broadband VI gave us a fixed IP address, and since then we haven't lost our connection (been about 2 days).

Well it seems the speed comes at a price... Couldn't connect to our VPN. I called customer service, and to make a long story short, I had to set our wireless router into bridge mode and use the DHCP built into their device instead of using our router.

All is fairly good now, but they don't seem to like TCP connections that last more than 30-60 minutes and routinely disconnect them. This affects ssh sessions, game playing, and other stuff, making it very frustrating to use.

Broadband's customer service seems really good though, so I will let them know about these problems tomorrow and see what they say...

Our new ISP, Broadband VI, still hadn't updated our network speed as of yesterday. In addition, the network was getting flakier and flakier. We would regularly have outages of an hour or more every day or two, and the uplink bandwidth was degrading to as low as 20kbps.

I called last night to let them know, and this morning a tech came out and switched us over to their other network, replacing the radio receiver. Now I am getting burst speeds of 3Mbps down and 1Mbps up! Glad to finally have state-side Internet speeds again. So far, I'm very happy with the service.

The only downside is we are behind two private networks via NAT. I used to have a security camera that I could look at while away from home as well as a remote login on my Linux box that I could access while traveling. In order to make those work now, I will need to set up a reflector on a public server somewhere. That seems like an acceptable price to pay for the better speed, but it's a bit of an inconvenience.

Of course the real test of the ISP is to see how often they have outages. That's something I'll just have to wait and see.

Clinton's and McCain's recent accusations of "elitism" against Obama seem like a bit of psychological projection of their own personality. They so fear being called elitist themselves that they jump eagerly on any chance to apply the name to their competitor.

Of the three candidates, Obama is most in touch with reality. Anyone who listens to the original recording in question will see how hard he works to empathize with Americans and understand what issues and concerns they are facing. Perhaps his description was politically incorrect, but no one can truly relate to all Americans; we are a hugely disparate gang. We need someone as President who can show the ability to empathize with anyone and work to understand their situation. That's what makes a President who's loved by his constituents and is great at foreign relations.

I added three new St. Croix restaurant reviews on Yelp:

Lalita Juice Bar and Raw Food

Salud Bistro

Smokin' Butts Bar-b-que

Enjoy!

Woo hoo! Just got an email from my ISP on St. Croix (Ackley Communications) saying that they are merging with Broadband VI and increasing our wireless DSL speed from 384kbps to 1Mbps (synchronous). They are also combining their two 155MBps links to the mainland for redundancy purposes.

One of my friends also works for Choice Communications. They provide a great Internet service here as well, especially if you need near line-of-sight. Last I checked, their pricing is higher than Ackley / Broadband VI for the same speed, so I will stick with Ackley / Broadband VI for now.

Looks like St. Croix is finally moving into the 21st century for Internet connectivity. It can only get better.

Motricity May Slash As Many As 200 Employees

The good stuff is in the comments about Ryan Wuerch, Motricity's CEO.

Some random product reviews

Mozy backup software for Mac or PC

A couple of months ago, I installed Mozy (www.mozy.com) on my Mac to do online backups. The key features that attracted me:

• Encrypted storage, and they don't have access to the encryption key! If I forget my password, I'm toast, but there is no way for them to dig into my private data.
  
• They keep 30 days of incremental backups, and you can restore to any point within the past 30 days. So if you accidentally delete a file, you can still retrieve it within 30 days.
  
• Really good incremental backups. Not only does it only upload the files that have changed, it also only uploads the portions of the files that have changed. So if you download a single email to your 100MB Inbox file, it only backs up that new email, not the entire 100MB file.
  

So far I've been very impressed. The Mac beta occasionally crashes, but it automatically restarts itself and resumes from where it left off. It also takes forever to initially backup your computer, but it's worth the wait.

Garmin Mobile XT on Palm Centro

I tried TomTom's mobile GPS, and it was absolutely terrible. I couldn't get it working on my 700p or 700w, despite the fact that those devices are listed on the box as compatible. (I'm a Palm developer, so if I can't get it working, there's no chance most people could.) So I returned that device and purchased the Garmin model instead, after playing with one at this year's CES. In the meantime, I upgraded to the Palm Centro (which I also love, by the way).

I love the Garmin Mobile XT! Setup was very easy, and it works great. The device itself is small (about the size of the Centro), so it will be easy to travel with. It has a clip on it that fits perfectly on any sun visor, and it comes with a car charger so you don't have to worry about running out of juice (though it also has a good battery).

The positives are: easy-to-use user interface. It supports downloading of traffic information, which is included for free (no monthly fee). The voice prompts make it easy to use without looking at the screen. The screen automatically turns off on your Palm to save power, and the voice prompts continue. You can switch to other applications while navigating, and the voice prompts continue.

The only downsides are that the maps are slightly out-of-date. It was missing an exit here in Tennessee that was built within the past year, and it didn't have one of the new restaurants at that exit. Also, the application occasionally resets spontaneously. This has happened a few times at key points during the navigation, so I have almost missed exits due to it. Luckily this is uncommon; I have been using it regularly for 6 weeks and only seen his happen 3 times. Still, I hope they fix it.