Posts by Moz
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Hard News: After Len, in reply to izogi,
I never appreciated how well served New Zealand is with public libaries, at least in cities, until I shifted to Melbourne for a few years.
This. A lot. The magnificent Sydney Public Library rivals the Richmond Public Library for size and the Tapawera Community Library for service. I wish I was kidding. Where I live the libraries are not too bad by Australian standards, and are mostly different in the number of languages supported (book collections in at least five, other material in ten or more), which does unfortunately mean that there's less material in the languages I read. But I go along and use it, because the evil money worshipping cultists watch those numbers like vultures.
I wish Auckland the best of luck staring down the national government on this stuff, it sounds ugly. But I have to say that from Australia the Kiwi approach of a few large councils per city seems to work a lot better. Over here we have a lot of 30,000-50,000 size council areas, even in major cities. Sydney has 38 councils and that really doesn't work.
I am a big fan of someone saying "how many councils should we have? Or alternatively, how big should a council be? and working forward from that. Albeit the Nationals seem to have started from "we need more control over Auckland" which is bullshit and we all know it. Sydney has "we must destroy Clover Moore" as a parallel, if you want to really see something nasty (by NZ standards, if you want actually nasty we also have gulags)
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Access: How many agencies does it take…, in reply to linger,
Surely for water heating you'd choose a solar heat exchanger rather than converting solar into electricity first?
Sometimes. For us in Sydney it's cheaper and easier to buy extra PV than go to the hassle and expense of either a heat pump system or "simple" heat exchanger. The problem with heat exchangers is that you have to run plumbing up onto the roof and service it there, and often you need a pump too. Extra holes in the roof are never a good thing, and putting a couple of hundred kilos of water up there is not great, and pumps.... pumps are unreliable and noisy.
Purely from a cost point of view, we use about 2-3kWh/day each for hot water heating using a cheap resistive hot water tank. In Sydney there are very few days when we get less than 3kWh for each kW of panels on the roof, so we need about 1kW of PV each for hot water. With a smaller, better insulated tank I expect it would be under 2kWh each. The hot water heater is under $1000. That's a bit over $1000 each for 20 years of hot water.
Going from that cheap water heater to a heat pump one is about $2000, but it only quarters the amount of electricity required and the warranty is 10 years not 20. So we need $750 less PV per person... and there are only two of us.
If we went with evacuated tubes (heat exchangers) it's more complex, because we have to move the hot water cylinder, punch extra holes in the roof and again, the warranty is only 10 years. I'm using warranty as a measure of expected service life, so I'm mentally budgeting that we'll need to buy twice as many of them if the warranty is half as long.
One minor factor is that we can't use the extra hot water from the heat exchanger, but we can put the extra electricity back into the grid. I prefer to do that rather than waste it, even though it costs us money to do that (we pay $1/day for the grid connection and get 5c/kWh, so we need to sell 20kWh of electricity every single day just to cover the cost of the connection. Or we could buy a $10,000 battery system (about 30 years of grid connection charge) and not have the connection.
The grid question is complex because our granny flat uses the connection from the house, but if we want to feed more than 5kW of PV back into the grid we need to pay $2500 for an independent grid connection for the granny flat. So effectively the current connection is "free", but feeding power in costs money. We will probably have a 5kW inverter in the granny flat for that reason (but might still have 6kW of panels, so we get more power in the winter)
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Access: How many agencies does it take…, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
All up, our solar power system in our Bus cost about $2000 dollars. AND...in our situation....provides a much better quality of life within our very restricted income. Speaking of contingency plans, our Bus is ours.
Yep, that's a good solution for you. But it doesn't really generalise except in the "self-contained solar systems can be relatively affordable". I've looked at building a housebus, and you really do have to change what you expect from "where I live". A pool, or even a pool table, is right out :)
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Access: How many agencies does it take…, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
What if we all had solar panels on the roof or our own wind turbine in the garden?
It would cost much, much more than $120?Whole different question :)
That is really a "who pays" question, in Australia for a while the upfront payment for renewable energy certificates was enough to cover the cost of many PV systems. Basically, you could sell the carbon credits to pay for the system. And a lot of people did, because a PV system now is worth more than paying carbon tax later. Or not, if you follow Australian political shenanigans.
New Zealand could do something similar, and come up with a way to have the people with money pay for a distributed generation system located on poor people's houses. It might end up cheaper than building new power stations and upgrading the grid. Or not. But until you do the research, you don't know. In Australia Beyond Zero Emissions did a study that found that it was cheaper to expand the power system using wind and PV than coal. Then the government commissioned a study to demolish that nonsense, which found that BZE were right. So they commissioned another study... anyway, moving right along.
A second problem is that if there are batteries involved they need more maintenance than a simple PV system. But without batteries a lot of things simply won't run off most PV systems because they need more power to start than to run (anything with a motor), and if there's not enough power to start bad things can happen. Fridges are probably the easy one to understand - most people have a fridge, most fridges use less than 500W while running... but at least three times their running power to start up. So if your PV system can't deliver 1500W to the fridge... the motor won't start properly, it'll just sit there stalled and trying to start until it burns out.
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24v DC, 1.25A(FG), 3.75A (sys)
I'm going to guess that it has two modes of operation, and somehow FG is one and sys is the other. But even 3.75A at 24V is only 90W, so a modern lithium battery should be able to power it for a while. If you have an e-bike an adapter would be probably $100 and you should get at least 3 hours out of it (it depends on the exact power consumption).
But this is real geeky stuff, you would likely find it easier to buy something like this photography tool for $AU500 and accept that you only get a couple of hours out of it. I just found that online, and by coincidence vaguely know the owner, but I've never really looked at this stuff before today so that's not a "buy this one" recommendation (OTOH, I live in Sydney so if you wanted me to deal with that shop I'd be happy to)
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Access: How many agencies does it take…, in reply to Oliver Thompson,
How they'll prioritise reliability of service, electrical backups etc. compared to least cost per patient is another question.
I really suspect (having worked with a variety of medical devices) that the portable UPS is actually a better solution in almost all cases, just because it's flexible. Rather than one battery per device you have one battery per ward and a pile somewhere for customers (or whatever they call patients these days). It also means that the workshop/outsourced contractor has fewer different types of devices to deal with.
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Access: How many agencies does it take…, in reply to linger,
the starting points should be: (i) when evaluating and choosing equipment to order, seeking interconvertibility of battery packs and power trains across a wide range of medical equipment; and then (ii) using central purchasing for a Pharmac-style economy of scale
That's not usually how it works, though. As with cellphone chargers, it takes regulatory intervention to force a standard. Otherwise every manufacturer goes with what suits them best. And battery compatibility is a long way down the list of features, because far more people are killed by bad user interface, unreliability, difficulty of service or "we need five but can only afford three" than will be killed by "does not work during power cuts".
Sometimes the simple answer is to look at the back of the device and say "look, it runs off 12V/1A" and wire a battery into it. Which is trivial if you're an electrical engineer, but for the average person... DO NOT EVEN TRY THAT.
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Access: How many agencies does it take…, in reply to Angela Hart,
I do keep thinking "this is not $100 for a generator overnight, this is $4500 to keep someone out of hospital for a night", and somewhere there should be $1000 for a portable UPS... the payback period is 1/4 of the first time it's used. But I suspect the gap between "I found it on Amazon" and "medical equipment" is large.
. I don't know anyone who could lend us one, they're usually needed to make sure those servers etc keep right on serving, no matter what.
Yeah, but eventually those things get thrown out. The new server needs a bigger one or it's out of warranty or whatever. Sure, it can't power a 2000W server for an hour any more, but your 200W medical device will be fine for several hours.
But I was suggesting a portable UPS, not the computer-style installed ones. It's basically a briefcase full of batteries, and I'm somewhat surprised that they're not standard equipment for hospitals (in the sense that they'd obviously be useful but hospitals probably don't have the budget). I can see that being the sort of thing a Lions club might donate to the disability services people for times like this.
There's been a revolution in the last few years, those things used to have lead-acid batteries so weighed a lot and didn't have much capacity. They use lithium batteries now and are much more useful.
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This stuff never ends, does it? And OMG, dealing with Paula Bennett doesn't strike me as the solution to anything. In IT we have a cliche that goes "I had a problem. So I decided to use regular expressions. Now I have two problems". Paula seems the sort to be like that. "I rang her office, and now the media are hounding me".
But also, this is where a pet geek is handy. Every home should have one :)
Depending on just how much power is required I would have suggested borrowing a portable UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) as used for computers and important medical equipment. Ahem. Those are more expensive than a generator, but smaller and quieter, as well as easier to use. I'm kinda surprised that the hospital and/or power company don't have those ready to go for people like you. It may even be that they do, but you never managed to find one of the 8 people who know about it it.
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Hard News: A Stand for Quaxing, in reply to BenWilson,
that is technically a tricycle, with all the amazing performance characteristics that entails.
I wonder whether it leans, though. That would be sensible, especially because bikes back then were often not very strong. Otherwise the stability would be negligible.