|
| Greg's diary |
| recent entries |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Wednesday, 30 July 2025 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 30 July 2025 |
| Top of page | ||
| next day | ||
| last day |
|
Goodbye Elantra
|
Topic: history, language, general, opinion | Link here |
Off this morning for my Elantra's last journey. I've had it for nearly 12 years, and it has served me well. But it howled all the way to Ballarat. Not pain, of course, just the wheel bearing that was the last straw to break its back.
Somehow it's sad. The car is still functional, but before long it will just be a pile of metal. And last week Yvonne took it for some reason, and filled up the tank! I got $200 for it, and lost $60 on the petrol in the tank.
How do I deregister it? I should get another good $100 back for the rego, but the VicRoads web site beat me. Chris had given me the number plates, and he told me that I should send in photos of them. But there was nothing on the site that reflected that. Call their help line. Ah, says Ajay, he would send a video to my phone. To my phone, not my “landline”. Nowadays a “phone” is a “smart phone”. The video (from YouTube) shows things relatively well. You need to select “Other”, not “written off”. And it seems that “written off” implies an accident. And I have to send photos of the destroyed plates. So, goodbye RUO 901:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
A few statistics: I got the car on 11 September 2013, 4340 days or 11.89 years ago. It had 150,975 km on the clock when I got it and 186,832 when I left it today, a total of 35,857 km or an average of 3,016 km per year.
|
The new car
|
Topic: general | Link here |
The new car, the Toyota Yaris, looks different. A number of things confused me, and I spent a good 5 minutes RTFMing before I drove off with the handbrake on. But apart from that everything went smoothly. It has a display of instantaneous and average fuel consumption. The first jumps around so much as to be almost useless. I saw consumptions of between 0.0 and 47 l/100 km, and even during normal driving it changed by several litres from reading to reading. The average stayed constant at 7 l/100 km, probably needing resetting to do anything useful.
But it's here.
|
Congratulations! Explaining BSD just got its first reader
|
Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
A new message from Academia.edu today: “Congratulations! "Explaining BSD" got its first reader”.
And about time, too, after over 22 years. Will I get the second one before I die?
|
Here is your one-time code
|
Topic: technology, general, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
Accessing ABC's on-demand videos isn't ever easy. I was unable to display the “No Return: Australia's Missing Billions” programme on my normal web browser: I got the message
Video Player Error Sorry, there has been a problem playing back this video in your browser. This error has been logged with our technical team for investigation. Please check our list of recommended web browsers . Error Code: 102630
OK, they don't like firefox? Try with Chromium. Log in, please. And because they're so “secure”, they sent me an email:
Here is your one-time code
Copy this code to verify your ABC account.
The code expires in 10 minutes.
Thanks,
Your ABC Account team
And that's all. I suppose the HTML version makes more sense, but in the text version the number was only in the Subject: line.
And of course that didn't work either. It did work on distress, the Microsoft box, so I think what they're really saying is “we don't like your operating system”. A good thing that there are workarounds.
| Thursday, 31 July 2025 | Dereel | Images for 31 July 2025 |
| Top of page | ||
| previous day |
|
Driving the new car
|
Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne chose her new car three days ago, but she has never driven it. Today was the day. One of the problems is that she will have to park it on the left side of the garage: the battery for the PV system is at the end of the parking spot, and the Commodore won't fit there. It gets parked very close to the wall, and she's concerned that she might damage it getting it in or out.
OK, put it outside for her and let her transfer her belongings. In the process, more statistics. The log book has entries for both Commodores, the VT from 8 February 2000 (56,626 km) to 23 September 2013 (265,902 km), a total of 4976 days and 209,276 km, making both duration and distance the longest we have ever had. The VZ had done 143,464 km when we got it on the same day, and as of today it has done a total of 266,144 km, a total of 4329 days and 118,600 km.
And we're not done with understanding the car, particularly the radio. It has an SD Card with some data from Toyota on it. I've tried putting in one of my MP3 cards, but there's nothing obvious on the menu to tell me how to play it. And I still can't find out how to turn the thing off. Yes, there's a ⏼ symbol there, but it's just on the frame, and touching it does nothing useful. More RTFM time.
|
The Smith's farm again
|
Topic: photography, general | Link here |
Test driving Yvonne's new car gave me an opportunity to go to the Smith's farm in Mount Mercer and take a couple of photos that Bev had requested, notably of the approach:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
Does that look good? How about a panorama of the property?
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Nothing overly exciting,
|
More PV quotes
|
Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
Call from Angelo, apparently from Rebate Assistance Victoria, to discuss installing additional PV capacity. It didn't go well.
In principle it was along the same lines as my discussion in April. In fact, once again the name Yasmin crops up: she sent me an SMS which I didn't find until after the event. Why are mobile phone communications so popular, and why are they so disconnected with traditional Internet services?
In any case, Angelo agreed that I could use more battery storage. He didn't mention direct pricing, just what I would pay per month or per quarter: $174/$522 for a 15 kW (as he put it) battery, and $201/$603 for a 30 kWh battery. Clearly the 30 kWh battery is the way to go.
But that was all! And he claimed that then my electricity bill would drop to 0! No way.
What's wrong with this? He hasn't mentioned a way to charge the battery. He has my electricity bill:
| Date | Price | Solar feedin | ||
| $ | (kWh) | |||
| September 2024 | 922.34 | 139 | ||
| December 2024 | 454.66 | 936 | ||
| March 2025 | 337.98 | 1013 | ||
| May 2025 | 465.89 | 510 | ||
| Total | 2169.87 | 2598 |
A 30 kWh battery needs about 25 kWh per day, or 9,125 kWh per year, to be useful. We're generating less than 30% of that, and that's irregular. I'd need at least another 10 kW of PV panels to keep the thing charged on most days. OK, we can do a 10.3 kW system for $369 per month or $1107 per quarter. Why do people think in such short terms? In any case, “this will cost you nothing”. Here the reality, based on the last year:
| Electricity bill | -$2167.87 | |
| Battery | $2412 | |
| PV array | $4428 | |
| Total | $4762 |
That's not exactly “nothing”, round $400 per month. And it makes a number of assumptions, in particular that the extra 10 kW of panels can charge the battery every day. That's patently incorrect. Here my generation for the past week:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
With another 10.3 kW of PV panels, the generation would increase from 84 to 163 kWh. On 25 July I would have had another 3 kWh, less than 10% of the battery capacity, and on 31 July I would have had 23 kWh (clearly the feed-in would go to the battery instead). So even with the additional panels, Angelo's claim of “0 electricity bill” is untenable.
And then there's this question of “feed-in tariff”. He claims that it's going up to 27¢ per day. But I recently received a letter from Red Energy telling me that it was dropping from 4.5¢ per kWh to 1.0¢ as of tomorrow. He didn't believe me. It wasn't until we had finished the call that it occurred to me that he had his terms mixed up, and he was talking about the normal supply tariff, which indeed is increasing from 27.038¢ to 28.985¢. It wasn't in his interest to sell me expensive feed-in tariffs: at that rate I don't need additional batteries.
And how do we install the thing? I'm assuming that his pricing included a second inverter, but how do they coexist?
So, sadly: once again an offer that I can refuse.
| This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have a horror of reverse chronological documents, so all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days, but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry a day or two after I write it. | Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a “blog”, and there is deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise I'll assume that it's OK to do so. |
| Greg's home page | This month | Greg's photos | Greg's links |
| RSS 2.0 |
|
