One Year of Solar Panels

(Note: This post is a departure from the regularly-scheduled content of this blog.)

Today marks the one year mark of having our solar panels up and running, so I thought I'd post a quick update. (Technically, it's the one-year mark of having the monitor up and running, the solar panels were actually working for almost a week before that.)

After a full-year we've generated 6074 kWh of electricity and consumed 6371 kWh, so we've used 297 kWh more than we've produced. One of our two inverters broke last August so we were down one set of panels for about three weeks (you can see that reflected in the second graph below) until the new one came in and they could replace it. Based on how much we were generating in the months around that breakdown, my estimate is that if it hadn't broken it probably would've generated pretty close to that 297 kWh necessary for us to break even over the course of the year.

Once we got to April we pretty much stopped paying for electricity (it's still about $7 a month to be connected, though), except for August when we lost the inverter. With the shorter days we have currently we'll likely have some net kWh usage in January through March (so a small electric bill), and then go into positive territory for the rest of the year until December or so. Not too bad.

AHS Faculty Dance 2011

Today was the day for the annual Faculty Dance (the 80's again this year). Here's a link to last year's, which includes links to previous' years.

Looking for Some Help from Ireland

Lauren Lee, a fabulous Language Arts teacher at my high school, is looking for some help from someone in Ireland:

I'm hoping to begin another collaborative adventure as I start James Joyce's The Dubliners with my junior-senior college preparatory course. In a perfect world, I would love to collaborate with a class in Ireland who is also engaged in the same text but, realizing that might be an unachievable aspiration, my hope is to connect with someone who is from Dublin and is familiar with the text. The city of Dublin is such a prominent character in Joyce's works and I would love the students to get the perspective of someone who knows both the city and the text and might be willing to Skype into my class. Any takers?

If you're interested, leave Lauren a comment on her blog or contact me.