A few things

I got my 300 watt grid-tie inverter last night. Plugged it in through a Kill-A-Watt and hooked it to a jumper pack battery to test it. It held at 0 watts for a few seconds, then jumped to about 8 watts, then ramped up to a max of about 80 watts. This is fine, it ramps up until it's getting peak power out of its power source and not only was the battery not fully charged, it was just clipped on with jumper leads. I did not put metering on the DC line to find out how efficient it is.

In other news, I'm giving up and going back to Google for mail, RSS, calendar and everything else. Without the huge help that having the integration of all that provides, I found that I was missing a LOT of stuff. Also I was doing a lot more work to try to keep a copy of my mail accessible everywhere, and things ran a lot more slowly.

Also, since I was self-hosting my mail on Dreamhost, every time anyone in the IP block over at Dreamhost decided to do some spamming, my domain wound up on an RBL. Significant numbers of people were not able to get my emails. Moving back to GMail should deal with that.

I still don't particularly like the cloud and the tracking that happens there, and I really don't like GMail's "new look" (does anyone?) but I'll find a way to live with the latter, and I run Ghostery and Adblock which helps a bit with the former.

DIY solar panels - A no-go

I've shopped for all the parts, and the bottom line is, unless you have a source of tempered glass for free, it's cheaper to buy completed Chinese solar panels than it is to buy just the parts to make your own.

If anyone in SE Michigan or Chicago is interested in 230 watt Chinese-built solar panels for $250 plus shipping, let me know. Freight on them is $110 for either 1 or 2 units, and more would only add a little. So it would be great to split the cost multiple ways. If someone else wanted one unit, each would cost $305. I may even decide to get two myself, dropping the price even lower.

Eventually I may decide to go for on the order of 1000 or even 2000 watts worth of panels, but since that would be quite conspicuous, I'd probably only do that if I could go full blown and get all the tax credits and DTE credits and all.