Last Friday I received an email from my son in which he said: “… bit chilly here -9C (16F) overnight but we heard that some short-eared owls had turned up in a nature reserve near Minehead so have been down there the last few days, here are the pictures.”
He included the many photographs separately as well. If you want to see more then please go here plus I want to credit Alex Handover as the photographer.
Here they are:
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I have no doubt that many of you will find these very exciting!
From the 21st November until the 23rd Sunshine Solar installed a solar panel system. But we were then told to wait until Pacific Power had come to the house to put in a new electricity meter. Last Thursday, 1st December, Brent from Pacific Power called by and replaced our electricity meter. He replaced it with a bi-directional meter that when we were producing more power than we are consuming then the surplus would be ‘banked’ to be used at times when we required the surplus.
This was the result of us investing in a ground-mounted solar system.
We purchased the system from Solar Sunshine after doing a great deal of research. Indeed Brent said that they were a great company.
The other thing that we had no choice over was to install a ground-mounted system some 120 feet from the house. Because neither the house nor the roof face East and therefore are no use for solar. But as Brent pointed out last Thursday the ground-mounted system, despite being more expensive, was a good alternative to the roof system because new roof tiles were irrelevant.
The system consists of 30 individual panels capable of producing a maximum output of 65 amps at 240 volts; in other words 15,600 watts!
Yesterday, Cory and Brandon (sp?) came out to the system and checked that it was alright. Plus they gave us an digital application so we could see how much power we were generating, plus more, and they also took some photographs, that I offer you now.
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This last photograph was one taken by yours truly with Cory on the left and Brandon on the right with Jeannie in the middle.
Finally, the ‘app’ is going to be very useful.
Already it shows that last Saturday the array produced 29 kilowatts and then yesterday, the 4th December, the array produced 22.9 kilowatts and these were by no means sunlit days all the time. That brings the total for all 5 days in December, in other words since the system went live, to 91.1 kilowatts as of 15:27 PT on the 5th.
We are most pleased with the company and the installation.
I can’t put it better than the email that I received recently from Chris. Here it is:
Hi Paul
Happy Thanksgiving. Hopefully you had a far better one than the last time I celebrated with American friends when I lived in Indonesia. We ended up having to evacuate the house (including the deputy US ambassador) as the kitchen caught fire!
It’s been a bit of a journey writing the post as so many adventures with the dogs came back to me. In the end I focussed on the first one Princess and the latest Tinker. I hope it’s OK. Let me know if not, as I can always rewrite it. There are so many other dogs I could have mentioned which is the scary thing! Still, the copy is attached and I’m sending photos using WeTransfer.com. They’ll send you an email with a link to download the pics. It’s totally safe and free (It’s been a godsend for designing book covers as it stops emails getting clogged up). I’ve put far too many pics in there so please feel free to use the ones you like and discard others.
Thank you so much for letting me do this post. It’s been quite emotional, but put a huge smile on my face all week.
Today we focus exclusively on German Shepherds, again courtesy of a section on Unsplash.
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This last one looks so much like Pharaoh, the GSD that came with me in 2008 from Devon to Mexico when Jeannie and I wanted to be together. So my last photo is of Pharaoh.
My beloved Pharaoh. Born the 3rd June, 2003 – died 19th June, 2017.
And, apologies, if I have shown them before. There are so many and I have been through quite a large number of them. But in the round of things, so what if they have been repeated!
The photographs, as usual, from many people all shared with you courtesy of Unsplash.
Learning from Dogs 