Diary of a Mad Scientist

I love my new home. I didnt post a good story yet about the whole drama of me and a ‘home’- in a nutshell, I was floating without a house for a full year, because of going out to work at the Foothills job after getting back from the Appleseed tour, and boy was I ready to move back in somewhere at the end of the job- it was damn painful to be disabled and couch surfing at the same time, or to be disabled and camping on a couch in a back room at the jobsite.

Right now I"m taking out my years’ worth of housing transience frustrations on creating my ‘dream kitchen’, making hellacious food whenever I feel like it, and enjoying being able to pass out on my extra-thick down comforter whenever the hell I feel like it. Laalalalalalaaaaa!!!! (is that the opposite of ‘waaah?’ I hear?)

I live in a two-building ‘green renovation’ in a seedy part of Oakland sandwiched between the highway and the BART tracks. The house is awesome. The neighborhood is interesting.

We had a shootout outside my windows last night. And a few days ago there was a little earthquake in the middle of the night, a big loud ‘BANG’ as the earth shifted and released and woke us from sound sleep, and my roommate’s first thought was ‘oh no, another car hit the house!’.

The downstairs corner is severely armored with structural steel after a car plowed through a wall a few years ago as the driver lost control escaping police. I think people are scared about moving in here, but the area is actually really neighborly, most of the people on our immediate several blocks are nice quiet families who’ve been here forever and are very attached to their neighborhood and history here (and I can see why). The roomate who owns our house has managed to do a good job of managing the ‘white freaks move into a nonwhite neighborhood’ thing, and is friends with everybody (ie he didn’t evict the tenants who lived downstairs when he bought it, and I think that earned him a good amount of respect from longtime residents concerned about gentrification).

The prostitutes and whomever sparked the shooting the other night generally tend to be further down the street in both directions (so are the other biodieselers and others who are offgrid in various ways, for that matter- there’s a fair amount of fuel being brewed in this end of the ghetto).

I guess my worst problem with the neighborhood is that there’s a gigantic white-painted church outside my windows and the glare off the church walls makes my room painfully bright in the morning. Things could be worse!

And we’re installing solar PV and hot water shortly. We’re going offgrid, shopping for our first battery bank. I’ve wanted to do this for, oh, 12 years or something.

There’s already a solar hot air system here, lots of creative skylights for daylighting some darker spots of the house, and a bit of PV here and there for various things. I already have a few unbreakable PV panels and some other gear, and also want to put them to use doing a second, portable system that would also power my ‘take your bedroom off the grid’ enclave before the main system is complete. I hope to put it to work running the printers that print the Biodiesel Homebrew Guide. I also hope to haul the personal mini-system along in my future dream teaching tour vehicle. The dream vehicle is going to have to be a brand new Sprinter that I’ll have to afford somehow, no use looking for anything else in an older truck since, since Dodge finally imported the exact vehicle I’d been wanting for years, I guess I"ll have to figure out how to buy one. I’m hoping that tour will happen again next summer, so that’s the deadline for me to come up with my $30K for it. That’s all a lot of ‘hopes’. Luckily they’re starting to come into being.

I got a good start on the house PV stuff- out at the SEE energy fair in NC, I picked up what one vendor was calling the ‘pile of inverters’ - a lot deal of 5 used Trace SW series inverters, some good, some with problems. These are the same SW 5548’s that we have on the Machine Shop generator-fired system. At the Machine Shop we’ve already committed electronic ‘crimes against nature’ on these exact units- in the process of making them do what they’re not designed for (that’s a whole nother blog story someday). One of the 5548’s I bought puts out 130V instead of 120V, which isnt’ too difficult to deal with, and that’s what’s going on the house system.

At SEE fair time I think I only had enough savings to equal the cost of the pile of inverters (they weren’t very much) and had just left one of my jobs, so I was chewing my nails trying to figure out whether it was a good idea to blow my miniscule life savings on 900 pounds of copper laying on the floor on the wrong side of the country. I decided to go for it, and as I was flying back from SEE, the hurricane pounded the Southeast and gas prices went up, which suddenly increased demand for my biodiesel consultation/book sales services, which made the life savings come right back, thankfully. No, you cant’ buy one of my inverters.

Energy nerds are such a funny thing. I’d been working towards this process of going offgrid in the city for such a long time. I got bit by the solar bug while living in NYC at an urban homestead in the mid 90’s, and did all my research and reading without anyone else around who did anything with the stuff. A few years later it was such an epiphany moment when I went out to an Earth First Rendezvous in Colorado, and Ed from Solar Energy International was in the parking lot with his solar RV and a gigantic collection of solar cookers and other gadgets. I spent a lot of the gathering sitting at his feet with a huge gang of solar energy nerd kids- it felt so strange and wonderful to have peers my own age in this pursuit for the first time. This reminds me of what I see people go through who’ve been working on biodiesel in their own backyard and researching it and becoming obsessed, and who finally get to be at a biodiesel event and cant’ stop talking about ‘Biodiesel And What It Means To Me’, because for once there are OTHERS who might understand the obsession.

At the Oakland eco-house we’ve got one or two people who are smitten with the solar geekiness. I came home a few weeks ago and my roommate was spending Saturday night with few beers watching the Home Power Guerilla Solar DVD by himself. I love this place. Another roommate is organizing the Solar Home Tour (which we’re on). This morning, I came out of my room in my lingerie trying to stumble a straight line towards the nearest caffeine, and a couple of voices in the office said ‘hey Mark- come over here and take a look at these specifications and see if you can make sense of them’. So of course I did even though I couldn’t really talk yet, I HAD to come and look at ’specifications’. You know you’re an energy nerd when ’specifications’ are more exciting than your caffeine even though you aren’t awake enough to talk yet….

It turns out there are a few other urban offgrid enclaves doing equally silly stuff with electrons as the Machine Shop. There’s another artist studio right on the Berkeley/Emeryville border that’s got a large offgrid system. The guys with the questions about the ’specifications’ are stuck in a situation with the utility similar to what the Machine Shop has gone through- they’ve been denied service and are going it offgrid instead. They’ve got a biodiesel processor in a container and have been fueling a Detroit Diesel- fired genny with homebrew. It’s a rough, rough way to generate significant amounts of power, though- dont’ try this at home, kids, we’re quite happy to have the ‘biodiesel taco truck’ turn up and fuel the Machine Shop by accident rather than making our own when a fuel-hog such as a genny needs to depend on us cranking out large amounts of fuel…

Mark