Thursday, November 20, 2008

Wind = Hot Water

No....this little critter didn't come walking by to sell me a vacuum cleaner - just a relic from the archives. My dad brought this home as a present for me from a business trip to South America in the early 70's. What a way for a reptile to end its' life and spend eternity.
Just as I was finishing up the trim at Chuck's "Fancy House of Poop"...it got really windy. Gusty all afternoon and into the evening. Good news is, my hot water coil diversion load is working! The charge controller is sending the excess energy from my wind turbines to my make shift hot water heater....checked it this afternoon and the water is WARM.
Got my train ticket to Houston delivered by FedEx at 4PM. I'm heading that way on Thanksgiving day to visit my old high school buddy Peter Hill and his family - it's an overnight train so I booked a "roomette". He is driving me to Austin on Saturday and helping me load a UHaul with the last of my stuff in storage there.

Too windy to work outside so I did some think'n about the swamp cooler article I have to write for Make Magazine. It will be published next spring. Did manage to accomplish one more task on the list - wired up my desktop computer and loaded software for my weather station ( it only runs on XP, hence the desktop). I am now ready to download info from my weather station...readings at 15 minute intervals for indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, and rainfall....for the past 200+ days!

1 comment:

TexasMan said...

John, please let us all know in which issue of "Make Magazine" it will appear. I am really interested in it.