Planned Gross FIT reduction

Posted on May 16, 2011 by The Elite Geek

The NSW Government is proposing to legislate a reduction to the feed in tariff from 60c per kWH to 40c per kWH. It’s reduction of one third of the rate that was legislated at the time we bought.

But what good is legislation if all it takes is a change in government and a submission to change it again?

Legislation doesn’t seem to be worth all the taxpayer dollars that goes into producing it when it’s so easily changed to the detriment of those who made investment decisions relying upon it.

NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell introduced legislation that would prevent parliament from being shut down prior to January 26 (as part of NSW Labor’s shut down during the power sell off). What good is that legislation if it can merely be changed retrospectively?

Our governments aren’t very honest, yet we are all forced to obey and live within the confines of their legislation, or be penalised severely for it. I just don’t see it as being very democratic, it’s far more like a dictatorship – and the party in control dictates how you will live your life.

We can’t place any trust in any of the current enacted legislation, it could all be changed retrospectively. We can’t change our votes retrospectively. We can’t opt to not have a government either (I’d like this option at the moment, the whole lot are useless).

It’s bad enough that the rate was slashed to 20c for newer participants last year – it still represented an option for investment in solar, but to stab those who invested with one third slashed from the expected return on investment, why would anyone ever trust anything this government legislates?

Barry O’Farrell’s election propaganda actually included the words “Our Contract with NSW” – and the minister for energy actually stated that there would be no changes to the current users – only new users.

Well, not only have they broken their contract with NSW, they’ve also broken their promise that they would not change the rate retrospectively.

There are people out there who have invested heavily under the legislated guarantee of 60c per kWH, invested with significant amounts of money, and those will never be paid off under the scheme.

Fair enough, they probably shouldn’t have tried to use it as a cash machine, but they did operate within the confines of the scheme as legislated. It is not their fault that the previous government could not put figures into a forward perspective.

The rates of electricity to buy are likely to raise 17%, the current peak time of use rate is actually 40c, it’ll be around 48c after July, meaning the power generated is actually sold at a lower value than that of what we can buy it for.

I’m not making changes to our setup yet – it still will pay itself off, just in a longer time frame with less of a return on the investment put into it. I will look forward to see what the Stage 2 of the Summit reveals in the way of future plans for the solar industry (no one would buy a solar system in their right minds at the moment – 6c per kWH would take far too long to generate a return, if it even did).

I have two ideas in mind though (aside from leaving it as is as long as the feed in tariff covers costs):

- Off Grid – this would save us significant amounts and at the same time have the negative result that we would need to cut back our consumption during winter significantly.

- Net Feed in – Depends on the rate paid, but if it’s higher than gross, then it makes sense to simply go over to a Net Feed and use the power in the house before sending it to the grid. One would assume the Net Feed In would allow us to also make changes to the system too (the current scheme disallows any changes to the system, including selling the house – you would then lose the solar rebate, another retrospective change!).

Even with the possibilities above, it’s still a very dishonest act by this government.

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Eggs. Home Made Foods.

Posted on May 11, 2011 by The Elite Geek

Eggs are finally arriving, we’ve had 6 of them from one chook, the other chickens seem to be slow or younger.

We planned to have extra chickens join the current ones over the weekend, since they aren’t laying, that’s not going to happen. We’ll have to wait a couple more days / weeks and see.

Temperatures have really chilled down here too – and it’s more than just noticeable. We had a large patch of rain move through and have had nothing but cold since. Winter looks to be very cold.

Which brings me to the next item – Home Made foods. We’ve started looking at differing foods we could make from scratch – purely out of interest for what is supposed to be a sustainable future, where less reliance is placed on a retail store for the supply of foods.

Bread is one of the key products that fits in the ‘milk, bread, sugar’types of foods – if you forget it, you’ll have to go get it. So, making our own will at least fit with the sustainable future goal, removing our dependence on oil, and retail to supply it.

We’ve tested a few recipes found on the internet – and they seem to vary greatly in what they require – so we took the simplest we could find: flour, salt, yeast, water and bread improver.

Bread Improver however contains something or other that isn’t ideal, so we replaced it after some research with Vitamin C tablets (ascorbic acid). This feeds the yeast to get the bread to rise.

So far results show it works good, and it warms the kitchen up too. The bread itself tastes alright – not the same as the store bread – but that might just be a good thing.

Next up won’t be milk (council laws prohibit cows on residential land), and it won’t be sugar – not enough land. So, pasta seems like something else worth trying from scratch.

The vegie gardens have slow progress – we’ve had a heap of beans but there isn’t a lot happening. We have a monster Cherry Tomato vine that is fruiting but taking a long time to ripen. Some seedlings which are slow progress. Shallots which we don’t use a lot of (and probably couldn’t kill em if we tried). Beans – which we’ve got maybe 3 handfuls off one plant. Some corn which is still growing.

The fruit trees are dormant at the moment. Apples are not moving much at all, Citrus are slow. Banana is moving but slowly and Paw Paw was just planted recently so is still too young.

If we give it a couple of weeks though, the seedlings should be more advanced and a few weeks after there fruiting, ready to be replaced yet again.

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Nearly out of debt

Posted on May 11, 2011 by The Elite Geek

Nah – we haven’t paid the house off, however, we have nearly finished paying off the credit card enough to claw back our interest free period.

It’s most satisfying that I can see we get to go back to the norms of paying down the house enough to get a redraw balance fat enough to fund an extension.

And then I look at what is going to threaten that and it can be seen that there are significant expenses coming in terms of rates.

Our neighbours with townhouses are looking at getting their driveway fixed – this has a likely expense being added for a fence to some scale. Ideally they’ll give us a bit of a break there, it’s not anything at all to do with us that the fence is falling over – their driveway is designed poorly and large trees and cars driving over rocks are the forces pushing it over.

The fence really should be replaced entirely at their cost! But we’ve also recognised the fence is being replaced instead of repaired (it’s broken in many areas), so I emailed earlier today to see if they would agree with a smaller contribution from us given that the fences act states negligence as an issue.

I hope my email wasn’t too harshly received, merely copy + paste of the law, some photos and a suggestion of what I’d like to have happen.

A gentle reminder also included that their retaining wall must be inside their boundary for our building is at the legal limits.

Nothing says ‘out of debt’like more bills – really. It becomes a mountain too – so you climb to the top of it, only to have another peak added.

I’ve also got other expenses related to licensing, and car repair issues  - we’ve got a leak through the windscreen seal, and more firewall rust. And I can easily see the interest free period on our credit card (which is really just a measure of our ability to pay for all our expenses on time) is going to disappear again.

You’d think from the rough description above that I might be somehow underpaid – but not the case, I get paid well – it’s simply we are carrying too much cost over run from our renovation – and seriously, next time there will be costs cut – so much was simply excess charges – and your not going to tell a builder that’s just finished a week’s worth of work that the bill is too high.

I only hope work gets a little more interesting instead of the boredom that it currently is in the nearer future.

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Chickens are free.

Posted on April 30, 2011 by The Elite Geek

Last weekend, we took the time to clip the wings of the chickens to give them some lawnmowing time.

You’d think the first place they’d rush is our garden beds, with the straw, green leaves, food to tear apart. Not so. The chickens (maybe that’s why), were too ‘chicken’to go near the garden beds and clean up the grass around the edges of them.

Instead, they sat around the trampoline, which is in front of their chook run, and ate grass from under it.

Fast forward one week, they are now happy to chase us to the back door, near the kitchen, where we can throw out broken pieces of bread for them to eat up.

I was secretly hoping we’d get lucky and have eggs from them over easter, but this has still yet to occur. I hope they get to laying eggs soon, we are ready for the next lot to go in, but want to make sure these will lay before interrupting their living quarters with 3 younger trespassers.

Recently, we’ve caught them perched on the axle of a boat trailer (which has a boat on top of it), sitting in our back yard – they are funny, yet stupid.

When we were ready to let them out, they’d go into the chook run, and run back and forth trying to find a way out to the one single bird who wasn’t so chicken to come out (they’d be stalking it, trying to get out with it).

Now they seem a lot more relaxed and happy to wonder around just like any family pet. We haven’t had them fly away either, but they do try and fly by running (yes, they get some speed, I reckon they’d give the kids a good run).

We will need to get some grain for them too (they are currently still on grower mix, but eat grass and food scraps as well). Oh, and they get a source of protein, caterpillars and snails found in the garden are happily fought over.

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Worm Farm now seems productive

Posted on April 30, 2011 by The Elite Geek

We had originally established the worm farm based on a simple idea of two styrofoam boxes stuck together, and bedding based on garden soil, newspaper and straw.

The worms seemed to be OK with that, but after 6 months or so, I was expecting far more worms than we have. After fishing through what seemed like mountains of newspaper, the obvious occurred, they obviously were not breeding because of their home. They didn’t really seem happy in the previous setup.

They had little to keep them in a dark place, the bedding was garden soil. And the food seemed to be taking ages for them to eat away.

I had a look around on the net, and found that coir (coconut fibre) or peat make ideal worm farm bedding – strange, this wasn’t mentioned in the article we found on one of the NSW councils websites.

I figured it sounds good, Coir holds more moisture and is free draining, it’s a different colour so you can readily identify coir over worm castings, and inside the styrofoam box, it’ll be a wonderful insulator.

The first step was finding Coir or Peat that did not have any fertilisers in it (as it’s used for seeds typically). Worms need a fairly neutral pH level else they’ll get burnt. We found Bunnings and K-Mart sell it. Bunnings had some organic labelled stuff from their catalogue for $3 or so, and K-Mart (much closer than Bunnings for a brick), had a Coir-Peat brick from a company called “Brunnings” (nice name..) for $2.

I couldn’t easily ascertain if the product contained any foreign chemicals to that of the coconut fibre and peat mixture, after I emailed them asking for the MSDS, it turns out it’s 100% coconut fibre – straight out of Sri Lanka.

Perfect, the next step was setting up a temporary home after getting the coir-peat brick expanded. This was easy enough, one small brick, 4.5L of water, and the bucket is full with the moisture absorbing mix.

After that was cleaned out and draining clear, we then set up a temporary home for some candidate worms, we took out 10-20 worms and placed them in the coir-peat mix temporarily. Left them for 24 hours, to make sure they survived. They did.

The next tedious job was picking out from our months of mixed food, worm castings, soil and newspaper, the individual worms. What a time consuming job that was, tediously filtering through about 20L of material for worms. We bought a pack allegedly providing 1000 worms through a mixture of eggs and worms. Not the case when I’ve gone through and pulled each one out. There were heaps of smaller worms, some larger worms, but the total amount was far less than the 1000 (and considering there was supposed to be eggs, you’d think they’d have hatched already).

So we don’t have 1000 worms, it’s probably in the area of 500.

They’ve been in the new bedding and fed far more broken down food, lettuce flakes and apple flakes seem to be keeping them well, unlike the previous farm, there are worm that are definitely visible, they are all over the food (whereas previously it would be rare to see them eating food).

The newspaper is used on top of the farm, the worms still seem to try and eat that as well (I can find them inside it), but that’s not an issue, the newspaper cover is easily enough replaced – and it ensures they have a source of food.

I’ll have to figure out how long it’ll take for them to double in numbers – they control their own population according to space and food though, so it’s difficult to say if they’ll add more worms to the 50mm thick coir bedding that is currently there.

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A new tree addition

Posted on April 12, 2011 by The Elite Geek

After considering more what our desired trees will be, we went out over the weekend in search of some stone fruit trees and some kiwi fruit vines to bury the chicken house with (it’ll double as shade cover and provide fruit).

We had no luck on the stone fruit trees, the plum varieties on offer were in bad shape, and the kiwi fruit were both male at one nursery,  and the other nursery had sick looking kiwi fruit plants for $30 each (pass…).

We did find a “Lady Finger” banana tree, decided on that. Bananas are a little bit fussy when it comes to heat and cold (they love humidity). We’ll have to try and create that artificially in a micro-climate of sorts.

We’ll go looking for the stone fruit varieties in spring when there should be more of a variety.

Fruit trees at the nurseries we go to are typically grafted varieties – to get them in Dwarf form for example. This takes a good 2 or 3 years to confirm success, so we aren’t actually able to source them locally any younger than 3 years – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I was hoping to get the kiwi fruit in action due to the growing time (the shade requirement is more of a ‘now’thing). But with Winter coming up in a few months, perhaps the chickens will be thankful for all the sun they can get.

Adding the extra fruit trees poses a small issue as to where they’ll sit in the block – many of them love sun, so orienting them so they can get the best amount of sun, at the same time ensuring they don’t cause shade problems takes a bit of thought.

I also want to look into Aquaponics some more. My partner doesn’t seem to want to breed chickens for food (and the council won’t let us have a rooster anyway), so that leaves us with fish as an alternative (suprisingly, she will let me kill fish).

The worm farm is something of a poor performer – we added lettuce to it some weeks ago, and it’s slowly disintegrating. I want to take the old castings out, but in my last attempt at doing that, I removed so many before I gave up due to my impatience in separating worms from masses of castings.

The idea was to get them to migrate over to one side of the farm (by feeding ONLY that side), and then clear the other side out – but there were worms all through it.

This alone raises questions for me, like, if there are so many worms, then how come there is still lettuce in the top of the box after 2 weeks with no food! Something to look at later.

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A day in the garden

Posted on April 3, 2011 by The Elite Geek

Today, we spent much of the afternoon fixing up the odds that occur in the gardens.

First up was the front, the flowers we placed there last year are still going strong, but the weeds have found paths through the thick layer of mulch we placed there to suppress the weeds and grass.

Next, we cleaned out the shed – it’s not as bad as the storeroom out the back of it, but when you finish with something, be it the shovel, cow manure or straw bale, most of the time it’ll end up all bunched at the front of the shed.

Then we started tackling a large problem, we have a cherry tomato plant we placed in one of the garden beds and left it, it’s gone wild and has branches off everywhere.

I don’t normally want vines growing in the garden beds, for I’d prefer if they remained open and the vines sat in their own beds, but that wouldn’t make sense for this massive overgrown Cheery Tomato plant – so we knocked together a bit of 2×4, some stakes and some chook wire to form a trellis to hold it up.

The branches of the vine typically break if you try and train them through a trellis, so I took the long branches and cable tied them to the trellis. That should help see them grow – it’s got a lot of fruit on it, but it wasn’t going to be too fruitful struggling with itself.

The pea and bean plants now seem to be larger and growing more. The tree we transplanted seems to be recovering, and aside from a small isolated case, we have eliminated the Citrus Leaf Miner from our citrus trees.

The passionfruit are still showing their strength and are growing more and more each time I look at them, a new tendril, a new height reached.

Our strawberry patch remains interesting, though slow, there’s a heap of strawberries on the first plant, a heap, but they seem to be taking forever to get large and red. There are a heap of runners and more plants that spawned from that singular plant, so it might now be a good idea to look at snipping those off so it can put more energy into getting that fruit growing. The next growth on the strawberries should be even better – there’s a stack of plants, and likely to be more strawberries than the kids could ever eat.

The worm farm is slower than the strawberry patch too – we know there are large and small worms in there (some babies), but the lettuce that was added last week is taking them a long time to get through, the Hessian bag seems to be of more interest to them.

The chickens have well and truly settled in what will be 2 weeks in the chicken run. We have an issue with shade for them which will be addressed in one of many ways, my preferred is to plant out some more fruit trees to shade them in – but that has cost issues for now. Vines running over the entire run would be interesting, but I would have doubts as to how long the netting would last if it had vines growing all over it. Shade cloth might be the solution.

The weekend never seems long enough. Even if you look at the imaginary hour daylight savings adds and subtracts every 6 months.

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Funding our projects

Posted on April 2, 2011 by The Elite Geek

Finding funding for many of the changes I want to take going forward remains difficult.

The solar panels are paying for themselves, but we still need to pay the upfront charge which is restricting our ability to expand and add more garden beds, for the time between fruiting and seeding is an obstacle to be addressed (plus there is a desire for more vine based foods).

Then I want to incorporate shading for the chicken run, they would spend more time in the run if it was more shaded – the solution there is simple – add fruit trees around the outside of the run, which will shade it – this will require some fruit trees, so will wait until the panels are paid down.

It also doesn’t help with bills happening all at the same time, and the sheer amount of some of them – i.e. Rego – our car costs exactly $857.60 to merely have registered to place it on the road each year. Then shortly after that, $200 for Third Party Property Damage – a must, there are some expensive cars on the road, and plenty of stupid people driving them. Then shortly after that, $600 for House Insurance – a must for the house is worth many times that.

The debt is building and so much of what I would like to accomplish must wait to save on the painful credit card interest the bank will impose.

I haven’t bothered to mention council rates and water – rates alone cost us $487 every 3 months. I’d hate to see what Sydney siders pay in rates considering the extortionate prices they pay for property. Water is very cheap – too cheap such that it doesn’t give any desire for rain or grey water from a financial point of view.

The true cost of living in a society which values it’s environment is not cheap (the cheap comes from the damage to the surrounding environment, through either cheap labour sourced overseas, or through unsustainable practices).

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An Electric Car

Posted on April 2, 2011 by The Elite Geek

The concept behind moving from a petrol driven engine to an electric car is amazingly simple (when you remove all the safety aspects):

- Pull out the current petrol engine.
- Source an electric motor, lithium batteries, thick cabling, motor controller, and charge controller.
- Remove fuel tank, fuel lines.
- Create battery bank storage where fuel tank was.
- Run cabling to engine bay, installing motor and charge controllers.
- Fit electric motor to transmission after having custom plate made to mate the motor to the transmission.

Drive.

That’s the key items that are needed to do a basic conversion – ignoring the motor mount for the electric motor, the work involved in getting the motor controller working, and so forth.

There are plenty of the conversions out on the internet that I’ve looked at and pondered the logistics involved in starting our own conversion.

There are many factors at play that simply make it not worth while – the batteries are good for 3 years typically, they cost around $2000 for a decent range (around 100k). After this, they need to be replaced.

That alone is a reason enough to think twice about it.

You need to find a good body, not one with rust, one that will clean up nice and be pleasant to drive, the older models of vehicles are typically easier than newer models. Weight must be a key consideration.

There are plenty of alternatives to an electric car – such as reducing fuel consumption in the current car by making it more efficient, or, getting a bike with a kid carrier on the back to allow transport to school, shopping and so forth, or convert the current car to LPG.

I thought of these but haven’t yet convinced myself of either of them – the bike sounds good, but it is a longer transport method than the car, meaning what the car can accomplish in around 5 minutes, the bike would take longer. Time is something that would need to be considered if it were me doing the riding.

Converting the car to LPG is something I’m not liking, for it seems to be bad for the internals of the engine, but the fuel itself is far more viable and sustainable than the ethanol crap that is being forced upon us (and typical governments never consider that it actually requires more energy to produce ethanol than that is taken out of it.. dumb and stupid).

Making the current car more efficient – I’ve been reading ecomodder.com for a short while now, and the amount of changes some of them have pulled off are sheer amazing. Admittedly many of them are focussed at long range driving – most of our trips are very short trips – right up the alley of an electric car – if it weren’t for it’s wasteful batteries, it’d be perfect.

A bike with kid carrier seems like the best compromise – except it is limited, for if we all want to go out, we need the car, if we are going medium range (think Bunnings, or Gosford – i.e. 20ks), then we’ll need the car. But most of the trips would be satisfied, with the bike – excepting it’s time component for I need to be able to get back to work reasonably quickly – impossible on a bike I think. I’m yet to consider average travel time so maybe it needs more thought. I’m not seeing it yet.

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Chickens are in!

Posted on March 27, 2011 by The Elite Geek

We had finished the setup of the chook house during the week, and then set out to get some chickens.

The plan is to start with just a few and see how they work out with respect to feed and the room they have to move in, then expand that to 7, and again to 10 to maximise eggs.

The breeds we had looked at where Australorp, and Isabrown. The place we bought from (a rural / farm supplies store reasonably close), had several Australorps, 2 Isabrown, and several cross breed Australorp / Isabrown varieties.

So we got 1 Australorp, 2 Isabrown, and 1 Crossbreed. Unfortunately, 1 of the Isabrown chickens had something wrong, it was sleeping in the pen when we arrived but after approaching, it was a lot more lively.

We took it, and found it just lazed around all day the next day, so we took it back and the store believed it (in their words), “to be screwed” – OK. They swapped it for another Australorp / Isabrown cross breed.

Now we have the 4 of them and 5 days in they seem to be happy. I originally intended to make a feeder and drinker for them, but settled for buying one instead – they would need food and water immediately, and the weekend was still 3 days away at that time.

Initially they were fighting with each other, the remaining Isabrown was pecking at the Australorp. We introduced the cross breed the next day and they were both ready to tear each other apart initially. It was amusing. They do now seem to be getting along, probably after realising a last man standing death match would only mean one would be left standing.

The Oven wasn’t completely secure at the start either, the back of chook house having a gap between the fence, where the sick bird had tried to escape. A piece of 2×4 later and it’s all good.

It was most interesting to hear the store owner has 45 birds on his farm, so we took his advice without a shred of doubt – feed them grower mix for 4 weeks, then change em over to grain and they’ll produce great eggs.

They appear to love basil, lettuce and apple cores.

This gives us a possible problem in that they might end up taking all the food otherwise destined for the worm farm, but we should be able to find a way around that as the worms won’t need a heck of a lot and the chickens will always have grain.

It’ll be very interesting when they get some freedom from the cage in a few weeks, the kids will almost certainly give them more exercise then they desire. We’ll have to clip their wings though.

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The Oven is nearing completion

Posted on March 20, 2011 by The Elite Geek

I’ve spent a lot of time lately on the car that I’ve left the chook house – “The Oven” – alone sort of.

A few weeks ago, we bought drill bits capable of boring large holes into the stump and removed the large roots that were already a hazard to the kids.

The remaining stump is simply too large to do much about now aside from a stump grinder, which is far too expensive for the amount that needs to be chipped.

The wet weather has hampered progress this weekend with our efforts confined to areas of dry, which has been the few hours of an afternoon.

We managed to get the stakes in the ground for the fence, and fit out the fake floor, and give it a door, and block off one window.

The Oven is made by converting an old cubby house/ dog house that was already here and weighs too much to move. The beauty of it being there is it’s cost benefit – the house needs to be reasonably weatherproof, and this place is. It’s comfortable, as it’s got a whirlybird!

It’s reasonably dry, and doesn’t flood (we’ve had a large downpour last night to tonight, and the interior is barely damp!).

Throughout the week (assuming dry weather), I hope to:
- Finish fencing the 3m x 4.5m chook run, and place the bird netting roofing on top.
- Sort out the remaining issues with the second window, and sort out weatherproofing for winter.
- Sort out food and water for the chickens and confirm availability.
- Drain the water tanks and dry them, then patch the drain holes so that they no longer leak.
- Repot our Mandarin tree so it stops flooding out (seems it’s not draining water, so we got some rocks to put in the bottom of it’s bin).

And I’ll hopefully have seen the holes placed in the tree stump that will rot it naturally when the chickens get on top of it and crap all over it encouraging the natural break down behaviour.

A lot more ideas continue to come to mind with our goals of being self sufficient, or failing that, continue on with more of a sustainable future.

The front and driveway areas aren’t yet ruled out as being targets for expansion of fruit trees, I’d like to add more fruit trees to the collection.

I’d like to eventually find a way around the back so that we have the chook house surrounded by Fruit Trees, thus providing them the necessary shade, and us fruit.

Vines are a good idea for the chook house, as they’ll give something for them to peck at too.

It’s Sunday night, which can only mean one thing – Monday is coming up. And I bet it’s a stinking hot day too.

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Passion Fruit Moves to New Home

Posted on February 20, 2011 by The Elite Geek

I was contemplating making Strawberry planters which make the most of the space given to them, by placing the plants in a vertical position, growing out of pipe – the online one uses PVC pipe – we looked for alternatives, came up with some not so good ones, from fibreglass to bamboo, and decided.. they seem to be OK in the small bed we have.

So, the strawberries will continue their runners that try and invade the grass in the current bed. We started with 2 plants, it’s in excess of 12 that have simply formed from runners.

The passion fruit plants shared the same smaller garden bed, and the tendrils that came off it were growing over the very small, poorly planned trellis that was in place for the cherry tomatoes. They were starting to tendril the over grown grass – possibly a good outcome for it, until the lawn gets mowed.

So this weekend, we moved them to the back fence and built them a trellis 5m long – this will allow them to expand over that distance, and in around 18 months they should be bearing a lot of fruit.

I’m looking forward to passion fruit, it’s got a great taste to it, and can be used to make a lot of different juices and foods the kids will suck down in a nano second. They are typically fast moving plants too – we’ve had ours mostly dormant until recently, when they moved out of the garden and on to the grass, it was this that made me move on to the new trellis.

The Zucchini plant that was outgrowing the garden bed it was in and starting to shoot on to the grass. It was pretty much at the end of it’s fruiting life though, having just one small Zucchini left – out it is.

Our Tomatoes are at the end of their fruiting cycle too, we lost a lot to some invasive pest that would eat some of it, and run away, the fruit would rot and be useless. But, we still did get around 10 edible from them.

I’m still yet to fix the second water tank, the first off the granny flat delivers good results, currently about 750L in it. The tank off the shed seems to have a few issues – the pipes are round, the diverter is rectangular. We did glue on using Araldite some couplings to take it from rectangle to 90mm, but upon close testing today, found it was leaking behind the glue.

This then made me think – why bother with overflow if there is no overflow to begin with. So, we went to Bunnings – and tried to match up some fittings, something like 90mm to 40mm and then get some tubing and clamp that onto it, allowing all water to flow to the tank, from which, overflow could be sent to stormwater (or redirected to another tank, then onto storm water, and so on).

Unfortunately, in the fittings they had, the smallest we could get to was 32mm, and the largest tubing they had was 25mm.

So, I got thinking some more tonight, there’s no fitting we can get ready made for this. It’ll have to be something we make – and the solution is ridiculously simple. Take a 90mm cap, drill an 20mm hole in it. Get a 20mm screw type conduit fitting, place some glue around the edging of the fitting, screw it in, cut the excess thread from the inside.

Get 20mm tubing, and a clamp, clamp it on to the conduit fitting, and that should let the good water flow!

Overflow would be managed as above, either to another tank (we are on a gentle slope, so it’s good enough to add more tanks), or back to storm water by making the same situation again – and attaching that to the overflow of the tank.

We are also looking at waste water – unsurprisingly, we waste so much water that should be happily reused, the toilet for example, couldn’t care if it was flushed with laundry water, dish water, or shower water – yet drinking water is used.

In our renovation, water will be highly focused on – the toilets won’t have any choice but used water – if we use no water, then the toilet simply can’t be flushed.

Laundry should have only waste water and rain water available – there are very good systems out there that store water, and treat it bringing it to near drinking quality. This water will be fit for washing the clothes, and the rain water is more than capable of rinsing them.

By using water twice, three times, or more, there is much more value obtained from it – the requirement for a massive rain water tank diminishes – because you aren’t wasting the drops falling from the sky!

It’d be nice to manage black water on site as well – but that has ‘sh*t happens’written all over it – I have this vision of it backing up, requiring manual maintenance, and I just don’t wish to be knee deep in it, so I think the sewage connection will need to stay.

For the moment, buckets collect the laundry water for toilet flushing, and the shower water for clothes washing. Tonight, it’s taken 60L from the town supply, through the shower, into the washing machine, and we’ve captured 20L for toilet flushing. 60L for showers, 60L for washing, 20L for toilet, we just saved 80L of water – it cost us $2.31 for the buckets – not quiet competing with town water prices yet – over the life time of the buckets tho – inside 1 year, we’ll have saved 12000L, and we pay $1.90 something per 1000 –  $22.80!

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Future of Food

Posted on February 12, 2011 by The Elite Geek

I was watching The Future of Food on SBS, this was an interesting documentary on exactly what I’ve thought were unsustainable farming practices.

It was a good watch, noting just how much grain is used to produce 100g of beef (it was a pathetically large amount). It was also interesting to note the fishing expeditions into poorer nations were depriving them of fish.

It then went over to India, where a few families have been deprived of community garden room as the government wants to grow plants suitable only for biofuel (they previously were farming their own food – but on government land).

Further into India where Wheat is grown, and they have a water crisis, ground water contains more salt the deeper they dig, and they’ve taken on debt way beyond their means to get water for their crops which is bearly usable anyway.

The documentary was a good watch, but I found it to rehash much of what is already known, food production relies on Oil, the output is proportional to land size available, the yield a result of water quality and farming procedure.

They did touch on the fact that as the world’s population continue to grows, more farming land is needed to continue consumption of grains, vegetables and fruit in quantities it is today.

They even managed to include the “Climate Change” buzzword as a possible cause of a future food crisis.

They touched on how prices will increase because of shortages of land, oil, water and food (as the demand for food grows).

What they did not touch on is how the impact on use of ‘mass’farming techniques deployed widely today, are impacting the yields of tomorrow. A farmer who poisons his crops to control pests is in many respects reducing his future yield as many of the pesticides used remain in the soil for years on end.

The soil is in effect destroyed, and needs repair by use of fertiliser to artificially bring the soil to it’s food growing quality, the trouble with anything that is artificial is it’s never, ever, a full reproduction of the original. The fertilisers won’t ever be able to restore the original soil to it’s condition.

So, the farmer faces a reduction in yield, minor as it may be, it is a reduction.

With yield reducing, and demand increasing, it’s very easy to see that food prices will rise ever higher. That is, unless more yield is magically produced from the same amount of land, or demand is reduced.

The solution will be in releasing more farming land of course, for with more land, you will be able to produce more food, and with more food you’ll satisfy more demand thereby keeping prices in line with.. well, oil price increases for our farming practices require it.

Now, this demand trend continues to rise with population increases and population density, for people need fuel, and fuel for humans comes from food.

We have a finite amount of land that needs to be used for many purposes, housing, commercial, industrial and farming.

The current farming practice cannot be sustained – it is unsustainable. Water quality will continue to reduce in India and they cannot take on more debt when they’ve already taken on unsustainable levels, Land is finite – adding more for farming will not solve the issue.

Food needs a new source – one which reduces the consumption of finite resources to produce and transport.

Removing pesticide and fertiliser usage is a good idea too.

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Rain Rain Go Away

Posted on February 12, 2011 by The Elite Geek

Items on the list of things to take care of involve the garden out the back – I need to move our passionfruit to the back fence, the small garden bed they are in was never supposed to be permanent, they are taking off with shoots and these need to be on a trellis.

It was all planned to be moved this weekend, but there is rain, so that’s not happening today.

Then, I need to get the car ready for rego, which is simply getting it up on the ramps and checking for rust, leaks and making sure it’s running fine. It makes sense to get it a full fluid change too, so I’ve got everything ready, but Thursday my back and neck begin to act up (an ongoing issue), leaving me thinking it won’t get better. I was going to do it anyway – a little pain is nothing to worry about.

But, the rain, I’d have to have everything getting wet whilst changing out the fluids and that’s just not a good idea. So the car is going to have to wait til either during the week or next weekend (when it is actually due for rego).

I’ve also got to get the back wheel off and figure out what’s the noise that’s happening under compression of the back wheels – someone I spoke with today suggested the shocks or springs. Needs to be looked at, I should have looked at it after the incident but it’s just not been too much of an issue (just a noise really).

Then today I think about the brake lights and figure we could probably fix them (the bottom set work, just not the top). The spoiler light has been disabled too (just like the ABS system – what is it with our brake setup..).

I can’t do anything about our Chicken situation either (the people we visited today have really good growing tomatoes and I think the chook leavings are really what is responsible, they didn’t feed them up – but they do have a pest issue with tomatoes just like we did).

The rainwater tanks aren’t performing too well either, which makes things worse as I should have fixed the tank behind the shed months ago (it’s just not filling up for some reason).

Rain Rain, Go Away. My weekend.

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Data capture works well

Posted on February 6, 2011 by The Elite Geek

I rebuilt the initial circuit I had used for the ALDL port on the car to a far more simpler design – this had solved the issue of Idle RPM showing up as several thousand. The data is spot on now!

Today, I got some information on how many questions I could ask in 1 second, this is needed so that I don’t overlap seconds of information – I read online that the OBD-II cars (ours is not one), are generally providing information in the area of 7 – 12 updates each second (this limits how many items you can query, 7 updates a second could be 7 speed updates, or 7 RPM requests, or 3 RPM, 3 Speed).

I found 100 requests takes 1618ms to complete, 1618ms divide 100 gives 16.1ms each request, and 1000 (ms = 1 second), divide by 16.1 = 62 requests each second. A lot of data.

My intention is to have function modes, e.g. we don’t want to ask for stored error codes every second, neither will I care what the air temperature is, but RPM, Injector pulses will matter.

So, if I break it up into different function modes – “error scanning mode”, “fuel monitoring”, “performance monitoring” – etc, these will mean the requests per second will likely be very few, we don’t want to be making excessive workload for the ECU either!

I couldn’t get the speed data from the ECU, I’ve seen reports a 1998 model or higher is where this is available from ECU, I could get it from the ABS ECU though.

Now, where did the relays for the ABS system go – our car doesn’t have them, and I didn’t take them out.

So, the next option to get speed information (the original idea here wasn’t ever fuel economy monitoring, merely, data logging of speed, brakes, and perhaps video). To get speed,  I can count the pulses that are output – this is available, nice and handy on pin 11 of the ALDL connector in my car.

Unfortunately, it’s now Sunday night, so I can’t test how many pulses make up one km, so that’ll have to be something I do another day – maybe tomorrow.

I’m still waiting on an LCD display for it too, taking it’s sweet time to get here, so the laptop has to come along for the ride.

The other idea to have was – I came across some RF transmitters some time ago for a Hot Water monitoring setup (still not completed, must be by winter!) – the RF transmitters can be used to send the collected data wirelessly to my server at home when we are at home (by using some sort of heartbeat method when stopped).

This would work good, but I need to get some more wireless transmitters. Unfortunately, one of the two I got found itself attached to 12V DC in the car when I first started this project – loose 12V pin caught the chip on the module.

I then considered where the LCD display for it could sit. Below the CD player would be pretty cramped, and not be easily visible for purposes of monitoring whilst moving. So, I could run the cable (I’ll have to make this too), from the ALDL port, using sticky clips to hold the cable out of the way, to just in front of the drivers speaker – this would make it easily visible, not distract, and the cable clips would ensure the cable stays out of the way.

I also need to think about what to enclose the lot in. Perspex maybe..

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Car Data Logging

Posted on January 29, 2011 by The Elite Geek

In a previous post, “A new idea“, I was contemplating the benefits of logging various information from the car.

I’ve since done some checks to see what would be possible, and after many hours of smacking my head, and bringing back results from Google from 2003, I’ve been able to put a circuit together that successfully communicates with the ECU.

Today, we successfully asked it for Engine Speed and Battery Voltage levels and received legible answers almost all the time (there was the odd Idle at 6000RPM, unexplained).

With this new leap, I will put together the rest of the information I can gather (I’m now also interested in the O2 sensor information, a good measure of vehicle performance / fuel efficiency).

I’m lucky in many ways here, the engine in our Hyundai Sonata is a Mitsubishi 4G63, which is one of the DSM “Diamond Star Motors” motor, which has wide amounts of information on ECU hacks (yes, hacks, changing rev limiter values, fuel cutoff removal, fuel map changes).

I’m not looking that far just yet, merely to gather data relating to speed, brakes, and then engine performance data, and finally DTC fault codes for fault tracking purposes.

If you asked me last year what I was doing with the car, I’d have said getting rid of it inside of 3 months. I don’t think I will now. I think the kids need more time to destroy it’s interior with dried milk product, chocolate, ice cream, shoes, and the like damaging the interior fabric. The exterior has a few marks now too – oh, and there is also the Bunnings carpark incident with the dent in the rear side.

It’s worth too much now!

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The Status Quo Trap?

Posted on January 11, 2011 by The Elite Geek

I’ve been thinking lately about well, the future, and what that holds.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a working crystal ball (and I don’t know anyone with one), however, it is always going to be something to consider – where are we going to be in a few years time.

At the moment, I hope to have finished paying down sufficient amounts of the mortgage to a state where we can add the necessary third bedroom, and finish off what would be the long term plan for our house.

The planning always changes though – always. The granny flat out the back could easily be extended to, and we’d have that as a second living area – something an architect contact I have insisted was a necessity.

Back to the topic though, the random thought that was the subject “The Status Quo Trap” – I don’t know if I do or do not want to be doing the same thing, day in, day out until we reach some desired objective (mortgage paid off).

The trap would be where one would be caught up in the ‘norm’that they find themselves unable to adapt should the future force a change. I think I would liken this to some of the people I’ve met in my younger years.

Thinking on that for a minute, I do realise humans are indeed adaptable to the changing world – basic survival instincts and the like.

Perhaps the trap is simply the outcome of having the same set circumstances for so long, that they accept that as normal.

This can be seen perhaps more so in my mother, more than anyone, who readily adapted so much to receiving government disability payments, she thinks they are a basic right. And then gets that for my brother and sister – who are certainly able.  She’s been on government payments so long, that any suggestion that there could be better is just unrealistic.

But I think back to my younger years, and well, I never saw kids at a younger age, I did somehow envision paying cash for property *yes, cash – my own money – but that was never going to happen!

Maybe that’s where the expression “Live life one day at a time” comes from – take each challenge that presents itself. And perhaps don’t aim to ‘better’the present.

This has ties to sustainability too. If the situation we have at the moment, i.e. the ‘status quo’, is not ‘made better’, our world, regardless how it is perceived, is continually being abused and won’t ever recover.

The trouble with the ‘status quo’is, because everything works, there’s no incentive to make it better, even if X has Y flaws.

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A new idea…

Posted on January 5, 2011 by The Elite Geek

I’ve just thought of something useful for once.

Purposing an arduino to maintain logs of speed, brake pedal (on / off), camera facing front, camera facing rear with 150 degree (or higher) viewing angle.

What this can be used for is two fold.

We see a lot of stupid things locally, it’s likely emphasised with the Sydney and Queenslanders on holidays here, we see no indicators changing lanes, tailgating, mobile phone usage…

It’d make for a good YouTube channel I think.

The other purpose is reviewing driving, i.e. recently I had stopped at a stop sign, and started to proceed after stopping and looking. My partner in her usual ‘stop, stop, stop’manner, said Stop. As I was taking off.

I noted a car pulling out and turning, so I can’t know how I missed that – reviewing the video would have helped.

There was also another carpark incident last year, where we proceeded and someone hit the drivers side rear – I still have no real idea how that happened, I did and still do suspect someone parking illegally, which meant I still proceeded without having a deep enough look – but only video footage would show that clearly.

The other purpose, in the event an accident happened, for example, someone rear ending us, we’d have their plate on camera, and the state of their head (on the phone for example), recorded.

Two SD cards recording the data means one copy to the police, one for my own purposes.

The setup, couldn’t cost a great deal with 170 degree wide angle cameras on ebay going for about 15 a peice. I’d mount one at the dash, facing forward, and one at the rear, facing well, backward.

The data from the speedometer is accessible via the dash, and brake via the brake lights, which are tied up to the brake pedals. The indicators can be also checked from the lights on the indicator panel, and using unity buffers, can ensure they don’t interfere with their operation whilst gathering the necessary data (no different to a multimeter).

The car stereo can provide the necessary on / off functionality so it’s only on when it should be, off otherwise (i.e. parked).

I might even add a GPS chip in too, to log location from satelitte.

Needs a bit more thought before diving into it, but it sounds like it’d be useful.

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Checking and fixing belt tension

Posted on January 4, 2011 by The Elite Geek

After I changed the alternator belt some time back, a squeal had redeveloped.

This was likely due to the tension backing off after it had worn in, so a short while ago, I tried to fix it by tightening it further, but unfortunately, guessing the tension was a hit and miss effort.

I got it to a point where there was a squeal for a few minutes at start up, and this would disappear during driving, so stuck with that.

The support bolt for the alternator also had sheered edges on it, so I got a replacement over the weekend.

Today, I got it up on the ramps, got two thin pieces of timber, placed one across the belt, supported on the pulleys, making sure there were no sharp edges to damage the belt of course.

Then, I took the second piece with it’s smooth edge, and pushed against the belt until it wasn’t moving – this was intersected with the piece I had running across the belt, so that I could see how far the belt would deflect with the small piece pushing against the belt.

Then, I carefully held both pieces together, and got a ruler and measured the spot – it was at 16mm – therefore too loose.

So I tried tightening it as I did previously, by trying to pull the alternator down whilst tightening the bolt – but this would only give me 15 – 16mm.

The workshop manual for my Hyundai 1997 Sonata found free (after registering) here. This stated 6mm deflection for new belts, and 12mm for older belts, with adjustment required after a new belt has worn in.

I removed the air intake assembly, this allowed my partner to push some force from above down on it, whilst I tightened up the bolt underneath.

I then checked tension – 12mm! Perfect.

Put the air intake assembly back on, made sure both bolts were tight, and then started up – sweet, silence, no squeal perfect.

Took it for a run up the street (incase it squealed under load) – no squeal!

Perfect! Very happy with the result, I should have got the ruler and timber pieces out sooner.

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pH fixed – crops formed

Posted on January 1, 2011 by The Elite Geek

Back in November, I was doubting the success of our vegie garden, the plants seemed to be growing, but no food was to be seen – we had plenty of healthy plants with no food.

The cabbage was attacked by the White Cabbage Butterfly, and the caterpillars ate several of them too far back such that they did not recover.

One lone soldier remained, and put out a lot of growth, but this continued to be eaten through inadequate action on controlling the problem – the cabbage still has new growth, but still eaten by caterpillars.

The tomato vines have tomatoes growing on them, a lot, as I expected. However, the tomatoes have thus far been eaten by something, we’ve lost 2 I think, that went red, and had been eaten.

There’s still a heap of fruit out there, but if there’s no action taken on whatever is eating them, there will undoubtedly be more eaten tomatoes. The problem is we don’t even know what is eating them.

Then we have the Zucchini plant – there was 5 or so to start with, but they got crowded by one very dominant plant – and that’s the one that remains – we’ve had several Zucchini’s from it and it’s a realisation of just how big those can become. Picture a store brought pineapple, it’s got roughly the same diameter as one. It’s huge.

The cucumber plants have got 4 cucumbers on them, and they seem to be behaving. Our lettuce plants is also showing new growth and they look a lot better.

The carrots are showing orange tops, but they don’t seem to have grown long, the problem seems to be they were not thinned out, as should be done, when they are seeded close together this causes them to twist, and that prevents ‘normal’size carrots. Baby carrots, but none the less carrots – and a lesson learnt, thin them out next time around. We have two watermelons popping up – but that’s the crop I could care less about.

The fruit trees have some fruit on them at their very early age, and the lemon tree, whilst has no fruit is shooting up more growth.

We’ve also had our first strawberry, but the crops are thin because it’s got ‘runners’from it, which form new plants, this allows for more strawberry plants, and next time around we’ll cut off the runners to allow the plants to fruit better – we now have 7 strawberry plants after only buying just two.

The fix to the problems was to do with pH, the soil was always testing at 7.5, one night I was cruising through a book we borrowed from the library and noted most of the fruiting plants had pH levels in the 5 to 6 range – so we went and got some ‘sulfur’. which reduces pH.

We haven’t yet tested the pH again yet – will do so today after we remove the carrots and get some more Zucchini’s, fix up the cabbage so the caterpillars can’t eat them, and give the tomato vines a bit more support by adding another stake.

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How to rot a tree stump?

Posted on December 5, 2010 by The Elite Geek

After having our tree chopped down, I wanted to get rid of the stump, but paying nearly $600 for that isn’t an option right now, so I hunted out alternatives.

Nitrogen and water are the best from what options we do have (soaking in kerosene being a very close second). So, we have the cow manure (very rich in nitrogen), and we have water – about 1500L of it in the rainwater tanks.

Today, I drilled out numerous holes in the stump and the larger roots, more of a random layout than the planned ‘cubing’of peices to make attacking with an axe manageable, but oh well.

After drilling the holes, I soaked the area with water to make it a near swamp, once done, cow manure was applied liberally to the stump and root surrounds. Once complete, more water was added.

A tarp applied to the top of the area, and some of the tree branches and some rocks used to weigh it down, hold it in place.

When the sun comes up tomorrow and hits that, it should have a good amount of rotting going on in the stump, and late afternoon, add more water to keep the swamp a ‘swamp’, and the stump should suffer from a lot of rot in some sort of time frame (I want weeks instead of months).

Will have to keep at it to get the desired level land though!

Our chickens (“Schnitzel, Roast, Roll and Satay”) are going to have to wait some more, the stump is in the way of the planned chicken run.

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Don’t screw with the alternator

Posted on December 5, 2010 by The Elite Geek

What a pain in the arse waste of time that was.

I had set to go about replacing the remaining 3 mounts, and the alternator, and power steering belts today.

I began with the engine mount, it seemed to be the worst to do, as well, it would get in the way changing over the power steering belt, so I could knock that off at the same time.

Car on ramps, jack holding weight of engine, off comes engine mount (a bit of force needed).

Undo the support bolt on alternator, knock it forward, V belt comes off crankshaft, and alternator. Looks in good condition, put it aside for emergencies.

Remove the power steering pump support bolt – whoops, we need to remove the plastic air intake moulding for that, struggle with the clip and awkward positioning, but the plastic moves.  Next, remove power steering support bolt, stop – need to remove the two bolts holding it, into the other end. So, I place the socket on, start twisting it off, and the bolt snaps off. Fantastic. Next bolt, set ratchet to spin in right direction (sigh), undo bolt just enough, knock pump forward, belt is off! Hooray.

Put new power steering belt on, ensure it fits in grooves correctly, and push some full weight down on the pump to apply tension to belt. Great, do up the support bolt and pump bolt (the other was already done on account of the head of it snapping off).

Install new alternator belt, make sure it fits snugly, and apply enough force that the belt resists a bit of human hand force. Tighten up. Great.

Install new engine mount, tighten up bolts, jack up just a tad to line it up better, repeat and drop / raise enough, and the mount goes on. Great!

Reinstall air intake moulding (what a crap of a job it is). Crank car over, watch for belts snapping. Belts don’t snap. Nice. Car makes exceedingly loud squeals. Not so nice.

Remove alternator support bolt slightly, knock it forward, pull back down on it, do it up again. Still squeals.

Ahh @#$# it, time for some lunch I think. Down goes hood, away goes socket set, jack, and ramps.

Have lunch, sit and think about it some more, back out to the car – car up on ramps, alternator bolt released a little, tension readjusted, tighten up bolt. Crank over, still squeals. Try and identify which one squeals, so I turn the steering wheel hard left and hard right, the sound changes slightly, but persists.

Readjust power steering belt, remove the air intake moulding again (what a crap job that is, a struggle to move it out of the way for a single bolt). Move the pump back, and then full force down on it, bolt back in, reinstall air intake, try and see for squeal. It remains. Maybe we have too much force – remove power steering tension altogether perhaps. Remove plastic moulding for air intake. Set belt with as little tension as possible (so it could slip off or be chewed at if it wanted to), reinstall air intake plastic moulding – it’s getting easier this time, just don’t do up the bolt on it!

Turn it over, it still squeals. Rinse and repeat, and alternate between power steering belt and alternator,  to try and find cause. Not found.

Get ready to give up, then I noticed a bolt at the top, which controls the tension – something I earlier last week thought about not changing, as I wanted to leave same tension on. The bolt was loose, strange, I must have taken that off a little before and not noted it.

Anyway, undo it a little more, and push down on alternator, tighten bolt up – viola, the car works without squeals.

Take it for a drive up and down the road, to test the engine mount isn’t going to collapse, check the belts don’t slip under a usual work load – they don’t. Alls well again.

I could have saved so much time if I did just tighten that bolt, a lot of time. Hours. What a pain.

Next weekend, I might have time to do the transmission mount, but that means removing the air intake and air filter, a right pain. They really couldn’t have wedged that in the car any more than they have – seriously wedged in. Taking out just the air filter, requires some serious twisting and bending of hoses. And that’s just getting the old one out.

The worst part of the ‘fixes’isn’t actually the errors in the work, that’s easy, the worst part is the concrete, it’s not nice on the back.

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A Christmas Present!

Posted on December 4, 2010 by The Elite Geek

Initially, I had an idea to make a RC Chopper for our oldest to fly around, it wouldn’t take a lot, as I have wireless receivers and an Arduino from our Solar Hot Water monitoring setup that I’m now rethinking as I can’t seem to get it’s power under control (the batteries last 3 – 4 days now).

Then, an MSN message came on Friday.

“Do you think you can make something?” (seriously, what kind of message is that to send me.. of course I can make something).

So I ignore it, continue working, and after work, the idea is demonstrated to me in detail – make a custom play ‘kitchen’for the kids.

I ummed and pondered about it, responded that several regulations that are there to protect kids toys would get in the way, considered the ‘screw the regulations’type response, and said OK anyway.

The Kitchen for the kids to play with will make for some fun, the kitchen will contain a stove top, wall oven, fridge, freezer, microwave, pantry – everything including the kitchen sink.

It’ll get made with some MDF cut to size, and painted up with some small tubs of paint, given the chance to dry in the shed, and both kids will be more than overjoyed come christmas morning!

Maybe I need to rethink the design on this some more, chuck in some LED lights for the cooktop, and a small piezo buzzer for the microwave to give off the hum they make with switches built into the hinges, to make it seem more lifelike.

Speaking of making things, there was a toy ad on TV today, showing a kid cutting up some sort of foam / fake wood. What is with that? Get the kid some parental supervision, non structural pine off cuts, a saw, some nails, a hammer and build with REAL wood!

The Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, and fake wood shall remain on the display stands, we’ve got board games and some other toys for the oldest, blocks and some dolls for the youngest, and the Kitchen for them both!

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The tree has gone!

Posted on December 4, 2010 by The Elite Geek

Our massive fig tree has come down, it was a giant – the tree crew came and got at it with the chainsaws last Tuesday, taking it down limb by limb, and now the space out the back is impressive.

The roots should start rotting down, and that will cause some of the concrete affected by the roots to settle and so might need some work later.

The stump is another issue though, I had asked what it’d take to get the stump, roots and all gone (level the land so to speak), and the price was near $600. It’s not a bad price, the roots and stump are massive, but it’s money we don’t have, so I started to look at alternatives!

There is a few that work, nature has a great way of getting rid of tree stumps, nitrogen. Nitrogen and water on the stump and roots will rot / eat them away such that you get the mattock out and smack em around a bit and they should break up easily.

So, after finding that, I came up with a plan, some cow manure (our fruit trees could use a feed too!), and water, and several deep drilled holes across the stump and roots, and keep a medium tarp over it for several days.

Keep the stump and roots wet, reapply cow manure as the old breaks down, and the stump should rot right out.

Once down far enough, attack with any manner of objects (axe, mattock, drill, hacksaw, hammer, car), and then see if the result is acceptable. Repeat weekly until desired result is achieved.

We are still to go and get the natives planted, we had thought about this carefully prior to even applying for the removal through council. Locally, we have a species of Grevillea which is rare (it’s listed on the threatened species list). We had intended that if we removed that tree, we would plant two of the “Grevillea Shiressii” trees. I had actually expected to find this on the list they gave us upon approval.

Not so. They had several Gum and Eucalypt trees, Lilly Pilly, and a few others, but nothing that would be as suitable as 2 – 3m tall tree in the front yard, which would produce privacy for the front windows.

So, we came up with a different plan, we’d plant out Lilly Pilly and NSW Christmas Bush in alternate plantings across the fencing, and then the two trees could go in the middle of the two sections of front yard anyway.

That leaves the back area – what do we do with that? Well, we’ll put some chicken fencing up, put a few chickens in the far end of that area, and the front area will be for the kids play area, the free space made by the trampoline being relocated will see our fruit trees in a better area, and further expansion made possible.

The chickens aren’t high priority though, Christmas is in the way, with the car needing some work on it, and the present we are making for the kids this year too, there won’t be any time for the chickens to move in until after the new year I expect – the time it takes the stump to rot out is unknown as well – made worse by the fact I haven’t even started.

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Front Engine Mount

Posted on December 4, 2010 by The Elite Geek

I thought it’d be a tad easier than it turned out to be, the biggest issue was trying to get a socket that would go over the bolt, onto the nut, on the front mount.

The bolt carries the weight of the engine onto the mounting, and the mount places that weight on the frame, the rubber in the middle stops vibrations from the engine rattling the crap out of the frame, and our old mount had a big rip in it, allowing the engine to bounce around inside the mount.

So, the new mount has reduced that ‘bouncing’around significantly, however, the last mount wasn’t old at all, wouldn’t be more than 18 months or so – far too soon for the mount to fail.

The report from the mechanics suggested that the others being soft were responsible for it’s premature failure (they could have perhaps suggested replacing the other 3 at the time the front was done before).

Anyway, the new front mount is in, I took it for a test run, the mount remained in place (phew).

The process of replacing the mount was a matter of jacking up the engine using a trolley jack, with the car sitting on car ramps to allow enough room under it. The jack was to support the weight of the engine so the mount could be removed! My bigger concern was whether the new jack (rated to 2000KG), would hold up to the job, it did well.

Tomorrow, the plan (assuming ‘rain’actually means ‘very small drizzle’) is to replace the engine, transmission and rear mountings, so that they are all relatively the same age, and shouldn’t experience another failure.

I didn’t need to do all 4 though, because theoretically, if I got 18 months out of the other, and the car is used for another 5 years, I would still be better off just replacing the front. But I’ve become a little more passionate about it (heh, we’d nicknamed it ‘rattles’beforehand).

The rust issues are all addressed, with exception the bonnet, which I sorted today, but still need to clean up the ‘blobs’of rust converter that set on top, and then polish it up.

I had an idea of respraying it, but I have some concerns as to the quality of my finish as opposed to a professional finish. I’ve seen amatuer resprays, where the car looks like it has a matte finish, think, VN Commodore, respray, no badging, crappy spray job makes them look stolen.

The power steering and alternator belts are being done since the Engine mount is in the way of them, and so whilst the suitable oppourtunity exists, we’ll have fixed the minor cracking in the belt. The alternator belt is fine, but replacing it has the benefit – I won’t need to do it later.

I’d love to fit the interior out with 2 x 7″ LCD screens on the back, a foldaway screen in the front, a car PC under the front passenger seat – run movies out to the kids at the back, GPS to the front! It could be done, but the expense isn’t justified for what little short driving we do.

The other idea I had was converting it to an electric, but the batteries and work involved again outweighs the benefit because the batteries would be worth more than the car. Conversions roughly cost $10000+. Batteries last about 5 years.

The other item was front ‘fog’lights, we have the ability at the bumper for them, but I can’t track the lights down easy enough in my searches – the left side found a post in a railway carpark and cracked.

I fixed a screech in the backdoor hinge today too, it’s amazing the results WD40 (well, the super cheap equivalent) can provide!

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The fence, the tree.

Posted on November 23, 2010 by The Elite Geek

The fence on one side might be replaced in the coming weeks / months as the owners of the townhouses look to fix their driveway (it’s eroding on the slope).

The tree at the back, the one we wish to have removed for a few other reasons, will be an issue with the planned retaining wall and 6ft fence. So we are hopeful of seeing the approval notification in the coming days, and then arranging for the tree to come down.

The space then made will be used for the chicken house, the trampoline and swing set will move that side, and the remaining free space for better placement of trees and vines.

The plan for the front yard (largely neglected since we had the house recladded back in April), will have two trees (hopefully we can work in them with the replanting of natives requirement we will almost certainly be required to do). The intended trees would have to work in well to give us some privacy at windows height. The front gardens are getting redone, I’ll plant out some colours there, and am waiting on some LEDs to arrive from eBay so we can rig up the garden lights with a Christmas theme (and revert back when Christmas is over).

The vegetable garden is showing some growth – the kids have harvested and ate 3 cherry tomatoes so far. The vine was a little cramped in the shorter, 2x1m garden we built for them, so I moved that to a trellis to the side, which should increase yield and give them some more entertainment from that plant.

The Zucchini plant is a dominant one, in our 3x1m bed, it’s taking up a good large portion of it – around 1m x 1m, it’s leaves covering it’s neighbouring plants. We can’t plant them that close ever again.

The fruit trees are still holding their ‘buds’with the one lonely apple showing much more growth and a more apple like shape, with a granny smith colour (it’s a “Jonathan” apple – so will go red).

Our potato ‘bins’(yes, literally planted in two 60L rubbish bins), are massive, with one bursting out of the bin, and it’s neighbour not far behind.

Our carrots are unreal – nothing like what a carrot from the fruit shop is – they’ve got the green growth at the top, that’s huge!

Our strawberry plant has two runners forming on it, so we’ll have even more strawberry plants to add to the current two.

Lettuce is dismal, it might be recovering but it looks poor. Cabbage has shown signs of recovery after the caterpillar attacks. Sunflowers are massive, some really look ready to flower..

Expanding our ‘farm’is something we might end up doing, the Zucchini are massive, we don’t have Pumpkin (not that we use it tho..).

The next batch of seedlings have been planted today, and there are just 4 weeks until the current plants should show their true ‘colours’(as in, yield, harvest of the full lot is due by end of December).

The lemon of the lemon trees looks nothing like the one we bought. It’s got much better growth on it, than what it had when we bought it, but it’s been that way for a while now. I think Citrus (or is it trees in general).. don’t show much signs of growth on a regular basis – not as often as the sunflowers that’s for sure – those flowers are massive.

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Rust, mounts, oil leaks, and belts

Posted on November 23, 2010 by The Elite Geek

I’m fairly sure that is pretty much all that we could have wrong with our car at the moment.

The rust I hit on the head mostly last weekend – Rust converter after cleaning it up, and let it dry out. Now it needs touch up paint, but we should not fail rego in February again.

The other issues we found with the car recently (I had it serviced back in September after some twit in a Bunnings car park decided to not watch where he was travelling), the front engine mount has broken again – this was replaced last time due to the engine bouncing around when changing gears apparently. They didn’t think at the time to replace the others “they are soft”..

Then we have the spark plug cover leaking oil, it’s a slow leak, but none the less, a leak. They cleaned it up back in September, and we found it leaking again, I showed them as I asked this week, for a quote on the mounts, and they claim a hairline crack. I had a look at it this afternoon, and found one of the bolts in the cover has come undone – this wasn’t the case when I asked back in September.

The other issue is the idiots didn’t think that when they were replacing the timing belt, which involves ripping practically all the accessories out (i.e. alternator, air compressor, etc), to replace the belt on the power steering at that time too. It’s a $9 belt – would have saved some labour if they did it then. “Hey, the belt is $9, the labour later will be $100 – do you want us to do the belt now?”….

And it’s more evident now that the only person who will look after (if looking after is what we could call it), the car.

It’s got paint damage from various issues, such as, the first day I got my license, in a carpark we got the side mirror scratched slightly.

Then a few weeks later, someone wasn’t watching as they were reversing and got our car (it’s ‘look over your shoulder, not out your mirror’) – the back door had a scratch, painted up OK.

Then we have the other incident where some #@$* at Toys R Us some time ago took her mini van, and hit our car on the way out – Typical Hit and Run.

Then, we have the Bunnings incident where I was proceeding through a carpark intersection and the old fart got my rear.

The car suffers from a leak, I got under it on the weekend, and it’s got oil all over the place.

The quotes for just the mounts were $800 and $700 from two different mechanics. I priced up the mounts, I can get them retail at $484.

So, the plan at the moment – short of replacing it (Money only goes so far, and having debt at high levels we have, with more spending planned is ‘fail’), is to fix the key issues.

So I’ll get a jack, I’ll get the engine supported, I’ll rip out the old mounts, put the new ones in, then I’ll replace the power steering and alternator belt (since for 1997, the car still has that touch of ‘crammed’in design common in newer cars apparently).

With that done, I’ll then clean up the bottom of the car and monitor for what ever is leaking, and screw down the spark plug cover.

With the rust then painted over, the car should run pretty decent, until something else gives in! Then it’ll go for a road worthy in February – and fail again?

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NSW Solar Rip Off

Posted on November 4, 2010 by The Elite Geek

It occurred to me today, whilst I was working out the average price per kilowatt hour.

That is, I took the total cost for the day, divided by the amount of power consumed, to get the ‘cents per kilowatt hour’in real terms (as the rate you pay doesn’t take into account the availability charge they impose).

As I look right now, $1.89 is the dollar value for power consumed so far today (with the availability charge prorata as well), $1.89 divided by 7.8kWH consumed gives us a cents per kilowatt figure of 24.23c per kilowatt hour.

The NSW Government’s new solar bonus scheme is 20c per kilowatt hour, meaning they can take power from a solar producing permises at 20c, and sell it at approximately 25c to someone else. That’s got to be legislated theft!

After I thought about that, I thought more – there are others out there who don’t give much care to their power consumption, using up to 15-20kWH a day.

So, I took the ‘worst’case figures, 15kWH and then the average rate for a time of use customer – 16.9c per kilowatt hour, then added the 53c ‘availability charge’, that gives a figure of 20.5c per kilowatt hour – still higher than the amount they pay you for power your system generates (and that 20.5c figure is produced using the ‘average rate’– it’ll be higher than that as not every bit can be used in the ‘cheaper’periods).

The rate under the normal (i.e. non time of use) is 22c per kilowatt hour.

With this in mind, I’ve concluded that it’ll be time to vote out NSW Labor at the next polls. They’ve obviously put little thought into the scheme, and the move totally ruins any investment in solar power as you still will end up paying, and as power rates will rise, you only get worse off.

What were they thinking with 20c per kilowatt hour? It’s not giving any worthwhile return on the investment. 66c a kilowatt hour is decent, but if they saw cost overruns, 45c would still be a workable price to pay for the cleaner energy.

I remain disappointed, that those elected by the majority are incredibly stupid.

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CBA’s rate hike

Posted on November 3, 2010 by The Elite Geek

We are with CBA, and so therefore ‘impacted’by the recent decision to increase rates by 0.45%.

The news isn’t welcome news, we’ve taken on a bit of debt to accomplish much of the changes this year. However, in a free market, you can simply ‘up and leave’. And I maintain that view.

If one doesn’t like the rate they are paying with their bank, go find a better deal, and then go for it, or if going for it isn’t desired, go to the bank and see if they want you as a customer (then you’ll know your true worth).

If we really did pay off this mortgage inside of 8 years, the bank would make a nice $60k off us – for next to no work. Not a bad deal. However, if we take 30 years to pay it off (what the contract says), they would make in excess of $255000 from us (just about 90% of the original loan) – an incredible outcome for them.

A sustainable solution to the loan is not to regulate banks. They’ll harp on about increased costs due to regulation (hey, that sounds familiar!) – or that regulation disrupts the free market, interferes with competition.

Unregulated markets work, they must, the laws of supply and demand self regulate the market. If you regulate the interest rates applicable, you end up with issues in supply and demand (not enough money to loan due to low rate of return, or too much demand, therefore too much money on loan).

The rates will go higher eventually, but I’m reluctant to fix the rate as the impact of that means the rate when it does drop, will cause us to lose out (and we have limits on redraw balances under that scenario, forcing us to have a higher balance).

We’ll manage, but if push comes to shove, we’ll need to chase out the best deal we can from other banks, and bargain with CBA for a better deal. They impose charges to break the contract, and then you have fees payable to refinance – so moving away from them isn’t likely to happen.

We had considered moving away from them before, when we were looking at the renovations to increase the loan, however, it became apparent a personal loan was more useful and represented our intentions better – so CBA caved in and gave us the loan.

Thinking back on it, I never really thought I would take on debt, I was never ever a fan of it – never had a credit card until we decided to buy a few things online – and that was all small.

So is debt sustainable? Probably not, it can be used to do great things, but the great things you can do with debt lose that achievement feeling you would otherwise get if you saved up for that very long time, and bought it!

The real reason we aren’t in a deep hole is because we have what is called ‘self control’. We don’t necessarily need $9000 owing on the credit card, it’s entirely within our control to simply put it away. The second reason is the tight cost management employed through my finance tracking setup that monitors every aspect of spending. This system ensures that jumps in prices are easily caught on and kept in control.

Without that system, we’d have to wait for the statement, and then review it, and even that wouldn’t categorise the spending, and show aggregate grouped figures – so it would grow out of control. I didn’t even put it together for that reason – the real reason I put it together was so we could find any transactions we didn’t recognise (with anything that was common / regular / normal, automatically categorised).

Debt is good, it is, if you don’t bite off more than you can chew.

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Pest Free!

Posted on November 3, 2010 by The Elite Geek

We managed to sort out the issue with the caterpillars – garlic spray.

A mixture of vegetable oil, garlic and water did the trick nicely, the caterpillars don’t like it one bit, so that should save the cabbage, tomatoes, and lettuce from the feasting.

The next issue dealt with yesterday was the rainwater tank performance problem – as I suspected, it was the hose fitting used that had one of those ‘auto’stop valves used to cut off water flow when the fitting is taken out. I didn’t check, we lost what appears to have been about 750L because of it. The other tank showed that it overflowed, one corner of the collapsible tank had water overflowing out the zip on it.

We then spent some time shifting about 25% of the overfull tank to the not so full tank to allow for what was supposed to be rain last night, it didn’t happen – but it’s supposed to happen tonight and tomorrow (unfortunately, during the day).

Today, we spent some time moving over some Marigolds, a companion flower for tomato plants. Our Zucchini plants are flowering, and growing – they seem to be a massive plant – our 3 x 1 beds would be better off if they only had 3 in them – the downside to that is nothing else would comfortably grow in that space! It might be the case we look at alternative plants to Zucchini which allow for more plants, Zucchini isn’t a bad plant, because it seems you’ll get about 10 off each plant, but the space they take up might be better with carrots for example.

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