Training kids to measure smart meters

This thought occurred to me on the way to work the other day, and might be one I develop a bit further in the future. 

In previous articles I wrote about how it was essential to measure one’s own home energy use during day time before going so far as to install a solar power system. Without a comprehensive knowledge of the details of your household power consumption, you really can’t make any intelligent decisions regarding solar power, and in fact, many installations completed without paying close attention to home energy use will fall a long way short of expectations.

The problem is, not everybody has time to go and stand outside the front of their smart meter each hour and record data for several weeks before they decide to install. People have lives, believe it or not, and recording the kWh currently consumed by your household each hour on the hour is not high on their list of priorities.

So, who would be good candidates to collect this data? Not the parents in the household – the children in the household. In fact, one could make a fun family project out of it. 

Need to keep the kids occupied during school holidays? Give them an exercise book and send them out to take readings off the smart meter. 

Of course, it may need some clever packaging to make it happen – but if kids could be convinced to collect this data on behalf of parents, it would then lend credibility to many households when making decisions about their renewable energy generation. 

Not to mention it would be a great way to teach your kids valuable skills in applied mathematics!

Why Kapiti is the perfect location for a sales office

I’ve thought about this many times… located directly on State Highway One, less than an hour from Wellington on the newly built expressway, and practically equidistant between Wellington and Palmerston North, Kapiti (and particularly Otaki) is the ideal location for your next sales office. 

Reach the Lower North Island
Being ideally located close to Wellington along the Kapiti Coast Expressway, Kapiti is an ideal springboard for your sales team to reach the entire Lower North Island in a matter of hours. 

Lower rent costs
Now I’m no expert, but from what I gather, commercial leases in Kapiti often go for two thirds of the cost of Wellington. In other words, it’s a great way to keep your expenses down while you establish.  

Abundant unskilled labour market
Not to knock the people of Kapiti, but there is a huge mix of people in this district (both skilled and unskilled) who are looking for jobs. Setting up your sales office here gives you access to trainable talent, who have often relocated here on account of the affordable housing and flexible lifestyle. So much so, that new listings on Seek or Trade Me often receive an abundance of applications. 

Access to affordable fuel
With Levin just up the road, you have access to some of the lowest fuel prices in the country, let alone the Lower North Island. Perfect for businesses who need to travel a long way to see clients. 

Claim Travel – National as a business expense
Now, I am no accountant, so take this one with a grain of salt. But from what I understand from discussions with accountants in the past, any travel greater than 50 kilometres from your office for business purposes has the potential to be considered a “Travel – National” expense. 

If you think through the implications for a moment, because such a large number of sales calls are likely to be in Palmerston North, Wellington or Wanganui, virtually all of your expenses relating to this travel (whether it’s coffee, accommodation, or entertainment) will be eligible for this expense coding. That, and you will be home in time for tea, if you want. 

Of course, you should always seek the advice of your accountant in regards to such matters. 

Is vegetarianism Pareto efficient?

This occurred to me the other day when I was chowing down on some sausage and black lentil soup.

Sausage and black lentil soup is a variation of the recipe for black lentil soup. In fact, there is only one difference, in that you add sausages to the soup.

The cost of black lentil soup, for two servings, is around $1.40. The cost of sausage and black lentil soup, for two serves, is around $4.90. The difference, of course, is due to the sausages, which add 250% to the cost of the soup.

The carbon emissions will differ depending on the type of meat in the sausage. It’s very likely, however, that the same sort of increase will be reflected in carbon emissions.

Not to mention you don’t have to raise an animal just for the sake of eating it.

Now I’m no vegetarian – not at the moment anyway. But this is driving the point home for me.

Vegetarians have been saying this for years, but I’m only just joining the dots. The question is, how to get this point across to the general public?

An Entrepreneur’s Diet

During the early days of a start up you want to make sure as much capital as possible is kept on the table. At the same time you want to make sure you have enough energy and nutrition to carry out a 14 hour work day.

My question is, what is the best way to do this? I’ve worked with entrepreneurs in the past who in the early days of their business subsisted off tins of beans. While I do think legumes hold the key, tinned beans alone won’t sustain you for long.

Is it possible to feed one person for a week on the equivalent budget of a tin of beans?


Black bean soup
4-5 healthy servings
Celery 90c
Carrots 50c
Onion 50c
1 cup Black lentils 80c
Water
Stock cubes 75c or real stock (free)
Salt and pepper

If you can make it go 5 meals you have a whopping recipe for 69c per serving.

Pumpkin lentil soup
4-5 servingsPumpkin $2
Onion 50c
Celery 90c
Carrot 50c
Yellow Lentils 80c
Stock cubes 75c or real stock (free)

Not a huge fan of pumpkin soup but I’ll eat it if I have to. Not going to lie, this type of diet requires some sacrifices. $1.09 per serving without bread.

I could go on forever, but these are two example recipes that cost less than a $1.20 can of beans.

So the key to a successful enterprise diet, it seems, is having a lot of pre-made stock & legumes up the wazoo.

Needless to say the entrepreneur’s diet is a legume-centric vegetarian diet. The same as baked beans.

If I assume 21 meals in the week, such a diet should get me through at about $19-20 per week and can mostly be made in my slow cooker.

The real challenge with the entrepreneur’s diet would be staying on the diet until the business makes a profit – but boy, would that give you motivation to make a profit.

Reducing the mass of vehicles on the road might contribute to a climate change win

This little epiphany occurred to me when I was reconsidering some of the past work I had done on ebikes. Ebikes are incredibly eco-efficient when compared to petrol cars and even electric vehicles, not just because they utilise electric power as well as pedal-assist, BUT ALSO because the vehicle itself has a far lower mass than virtually all motor cars. In fact, I calculated in a previous blog article that an electric bike is roughly 21 times more eco-efficient than a Nissan Leaf. 

Currently, most climate change goals focus on switching petrol cars to the electric fleet. An equally valid goal might be to reduce the overall mass of motor vehicles on the road by a certain date. 

But if you think about it, what really does the damage when a car drives is not the fuel type that a vehicle consumes, but the amount of mass of that vehicle. The greater the mass, the more energy required to motor the vehicle. 

Putting incentives in place to get people to switch down from large gas guzzlers to smaller, more eco-efficient vehicles, even if those vehicles still run on petrol, could in some ways be very effective and another way (on top of the switch to renewable energy vehicles) that one could compound the reduction in carbon emissions from more efficient vehicle use. 

Switching to an ebike has reduced my carbon emissions from travel by around 900 kilograms last year. It has also saved me a pretty penny in fuel expenses. 

The point is that there are vectors to reducing carbon emissions through motor vehicle use that are not currently being considered and that ought to be forefront of people’s minds. 

Did CRC improve my ebike battery efficiency by 35%?

I noticed this on my way in to work this morning. December was a very busy month for me, and with the ebike having heavy use, I nonetheless had very little time to give it the TLC it deserved. In particular, I fed it no CRC across about 7 weeks and at the end of it the ebike was squeaking like a baby mouse.

My standard trip into work during this period consumed around 35% of the battery charge. This would leave me enough charge to get home and enough to pop down to the shops if I needed to.

Last night I applied CRC for the first time in a while. The result this morning was that the bike rode incredibly freely, with far less squeak, and in addition to that, only took me a 26% charge to get to work!

That is an improvement in battery efficiency (for the same ride, on the same settings) of just under 35%.

While this won’t make much practical difference in how I use the bike, the implications are massive.

It means I could go an extra 10 kms to and from with a well maintained bike for each recharge.

It also means that problems I attribute to the battery may in fact just be not enough oil on the chains.

I’ve always applied CRC in the past more as a chore, rather than something that could actually help me. I didn’t realise that by failing to apply CRC I was making my bike ride a third harder!

But now with ebike batteries, these sorts of minor things are much easier to quantify.

Understanding how solar works conceptually, so you can explain it better

Solar power has changed our household. It was not necessarily the wisest investment, and had I known all that there was to know before I installed it I probably wouldn’t have installed it. But even so, it has completely changed how we understand and use power within our own household, and in addition to the power the panels have provided, it has led us to reconsider our use on many appliances to make more efficient use of the power supplied.

Solar power does not generate a consistent amount of power every day. The worst days will be when it is rainy or overcast the whole day through. On these days, even our 1.5 kWh system might only generate 1 kWh of total power – barely saving us 25 cents.

On brighter days, it may generate ten times this amount. The problem is, during the brightest of days, we have very little need of daytime energy.
We are with an energy provider who offers us a very good rate overall, but who does not allow us to sell surplus energy back to the grid. This means we must find creative ways to use the surplus. One of the best ways I’ve found of using up surplus solar energy is to make evening meals using a slow cooker that you leave running during the daytime. This can easily consume 1.8 kWh of your surplus, and take that energy off the grid for the requirement of cooking an evening meal – a process that is far more efficient, as evening meals regularly use 2 to 3 kWh to cook during peak hours when solar supply is not available.

So to make better use of solar, you need to make sure that you have not only the supply, but also the household demand. Planning your solar use effectively is like a game that can literally save your household thousands of dollars over a few years.

I would not recommend solar for just any household. One of the first things you must do is assess your own household consumption. There is no real automated way to do this, so it requires a lot of planning and recording. You cannot glean these sorts of insights from your energy bill.

That means standing at your smart meter and recording power consumption levels on the hour, day after day if need be, and across multiple seasons if you want a really accurate forecast. Getting a real time picture of how much energy you use during daylight hours will improve the viability of your solar installation. Half of solar is in the planning.

This is an important step. One of the worst mistakes you can make environmentally is to buy more than you need.

Were an app or piece of software available that could parse your power consumption data and do the maths for you, this would greatly improve the efficiency of solar power installations worldwide. An upfront understanding of how and when your household actually uses power is critical to planning.

Solar is something that can be optimised through planning.

Sculpting home energy use to suit solar panels, or sculpting solar panel use to suit home energy needs?

One thing I just keep going back to is the optimal usage of solar panels, once installed, and the question this raises about how far one should tailor one’s energy consumption to suit the renewable energy that is now available.

The usage of solar panels is almost a question or architecture and urban planning. Knowing that one will receive a certain amount of (somewhat) predictable renewable energy supply means that one can plan obsessively over how to get a bit more squeeze out of the lemon, so to speak.

Solar panels are a very poorly understood asset. Their value is all too often overstated, and yet there are many opportunities for their deployment where they would deliver exceptional returns.

The question for me is, do I allow solar panels to dictate my usage of energy, particularly in summer when we have an abundance of it, or do I instead prioritise the (sometimes whimsical) use of energy in my household, and just use the panels as a mop to catch the consumption?

A better understanding of solar panels could potentially save me thousands. Yet I struggle sometimes in summer to come up with ways to use the power. 

I also struggle to adjust my habits quite as far as I should. I know I could make better use of my slow cooker, for instance. But with spare time across the holidays it’s actually more fun to chuck something on the frying pan.
This year I’m going to learn at least 15 new recipes. At least 10 of them will be slow cooker recipes. I could perhaps go so far as to invite a few more people over for a feed.

I also want to concentrate a bit more on legumes as a source of nutrition, and find ways to make better use of the stock I make.
It’s a fun little exercise, and cents are on the line.

Free marketing avenues for Kapiti non-profits

It’s amazing to me how much free marketing is available to non-profits. Before I started working for a radio station in Kapiti, I had simply no idea just how much attention a non-profit organisation or event could get with virtually no marketing budget. 

Below are some ideas of what is available locally in Kapiti:

Radio Community Notices


Community notices play on radio stations all across Kapiti. With Mediaworks, the same community notice can play across all seven local stations, at no charge, provided that the event is non-profit or otherwise meets the station criteria. This means potentially tens of thousands of listeners for no cost. In addition to Mediaworks, there is also NZME, not to mention the local station Beach FM. It’s worth getting in touch with these stations prior to any local event. 

Newspaper 


A similar set up is available through local newspapers in Kapiti. Many local news outlets offer a free notice in their pages to non-profit organisations and events. The circulation on these papers is often very wide, and the local notices will be read by a large number of readers.


Local Facebook Pages


There are a number of town and regional Facebook pages that are free to post on, and sometimes encourage promotion not just for non-profits but also for businesses. A little bit of buzz on these pages can generate a lot of traffic. In Kapiti, for instance, there is the Kapiti Coast Page, and in Otaki we also have the Sunny Otaki page. Both of these pages are free to post on and will allow promotion (at the time of writing) for non-profit events.


Radio Facebook Pages


Radio stations are often looking for local content and will sometimes plug a non-profit event or promotion. Often the local stations have thousands of likes and the post will be seen by several hundred people at least. Contact the content organiser for the media outlet to see if you can get a post on their page. 


I wrote this article because I’ve seen a number of events take place throughout the year that seemed to me to be under-promoted. Meanwhile there are radio stations and local media outlets actively scouring for content, who often would be very happy to talk with you. These are just a few ways in which you can boost attendance for a local non-profit event by hundreds of people with less than an hour of actual work involved. 

What is the ROI of a rice cooker (solar powered) with calculators

So my solar powered slow cooker diet is going well, with loads and loads of stress free and delicious food experiments under way, utilising great local organic Kapiti produce. I wanted to take a further step in the sustainability direction, so I bought myself a rice cooker to work along with the solar panels.
Continue reading “What is the ROI of a rice cooker (solar powered) with calculators”