So, WTF have I been up to in the past 18 months? I started a hackerspace and went crazy! You can find me both physically and electronically at thinkhaus.org. It’s an awesome place, and I’ve put several metric shittons of work into it along with many of my friends. We’ve just moved into a new space that has windows! And a nice area to hang out in! Yay! So maybe now I can relax and have my life back? Ah, not bloody likely.

I also have a twitter: @discontinuity

Almost on Sunday. Sorry about the crappy colouring job. It’s late o’clock hereabouts.

I wanted to share some pictures of my garden. It’s doing pretty well after my initial failure: I went away for the weekend and left the seedlings in their little box on the south facing windowsill. It got so warm and sunny that they baked. Poor seedlings. I started again, and here are my results so far:

There are peas growing up the windows. We’ve had our first few peas this week:

Here’s the three sisters experiment, box 1. It’s not doing too badly, though the first time only two seeds germinated. There are two more little corn plants growing, but they’re getting overshadowed by the beans.

Box #2 isn’t doing as well. The corn is trying to grow sideways…

Well, We’ll see how it goes.

I went to Toronto this weekend, so I wasn’t able to complete today’s panel. Hopefully it’ll be done tomorrow, but until then, here’s a draft of what I have so far.

My friend Veronika has tons of amazing stories of her travels. One of my favourites is a story of her adventure walking home late at night in Vilnius. She’s given me permission to turn this story into a comic over the next couple months.

I’ll post new comics every Sunday evening. Since this is my first attempt at making comics, I expect that it’ll be a bit rough around the edges, and you probably won’t get more than one frame a week. I’m excited about the first panel though! It took all afternoon, but I’m proud of it. Here it is:

Now all I need is a tablet that works under Linux. Oh, and some more drawing skill Ah well, the path tool in the Gimp is a lovely thing.

Here was my response to him:

Succinctly, I would really strongly recommend installing solar instead of wind, at least in this location. Here’s why:

1) The Ontario Power Authority has just (last week) released new feed in tariff prices. The useful info for you is that they are proposing paying $0.802/kwh for rooftop solar. That is crazy good, especially compared to small wind for which you might get $0.144/kwh if you’re lucky (they haven’t defined “community” wind).

This is part of the green energy act, which hasn’t passed yet, but word on the street is that Smitherman would like to be signing contracts in June. It seems likely to go through largely unmodified.

You might want to do net metering, or just do it to offset your own consumption though. Even in that case, I’d suggest solar, because I think it’ll get you more energy.

2) The Queen’s ILC shows an average wind speed of 3.5 m/s over the past year (note that the ILC access data wind speed numbers are in kph). Mind you, this is at the top of a tall building (Goodwin, so 5 storeys), and it’s got much better lake exposure than downtown Kingston. The downtown core has more taller buildings close by, is not really close to the lake (it’s close to the bay, which is more enclosed), and may not be as tall, so you’re probably looking at less than that.

Let’s optimistically assume 3.5 m/s. The information from the turbine manufacturer shows that you’ll get about 80 kWh out of this turbine in 1 year (I used a ruler against their annual power curve). Yeah.

3) Noise. From the looks of the turbine, they seem to have done some work that should help with some noise, so this may not be as big a concern as with some of the other small turbines. Of course, having not seen any numbers, that’s just speculation.

Paul Gipe (a big mover and shaker in wind) wrote an interesting article about small wind turbine noise. Just for reference, a turbine with an 80 m diameter rotor generally have guaranteed maximum sound power levels of around 104 dB(A), which generally maxes out at 9 m/s. Some of these small turbines rival that (up in the 80s and 90s). Ok, decibels are logarithmic, but so is human hearing. I think it’s crazy that such small turbines (a few kw output) generate anywhere near as much noise as the 2MW giant machines. Your turbine may be quieter, but it’s still going to be attached to a nice sounding box - your building.

5) Approvals? Solar is enough of a pain in the ass to get approvals for. My boyfriend is working on putting up panels on his parents’ house in Ottawa and he can tell you how frustrating that’s been. Wind is even harder to get approvals for mainly because of the tower requirement and the noise generated.

4) The case for solar:
The gubmint has insolation information for all of Canada. Here’s the info for Kingston.

The first table actually tells you how many kWh you should expect to generate in each month for every kW of installed solar at some given angles. This table shows that 1kW of solar will generate more power in the month of February than your turbine will generate in a year. 500W of solar would take January /and/ February to generate the annual output of your “500W” turbine.

Other considerations include warranty. Solar panels will probably come with a 20-25 year warranty. I’d be surprised if you got a 20-25 year warranty on a small turbine. Small wind generally needs a lot more maintenance, if only because of wear on the tower.

So, small wind won’t generate much power in your situation, won’t get you nearly as much money as solar, will make noise (who knows how much), and probably won’t last as long as your panels. I think the best choice is pretty clear. Even more economical is solar hot water. It is by far the cheapest way of offsetting consumed energy as long as you use a decent amount of hot water in your building.

Unfortunately, I don’t think roof mounted wind is a great solution in this case. Unfortunately, small wind usually isn’t. Good wind resource tends to be found a) out of built up areas, and b) high above the ground. In those cases, you’re better off installing bigger turbines. If you’re looking for something to do in a city, especially in Ontario, solar is a great option.

I really enjoyed “gardening” so I decided to try making a bigger garden this year. We went to a Seedy Saturday at the Royal Botanical Gardens and spent $50 on seeds. Trevyn had lots of fun asking about cactuses, so hopefully there will be some cactuses on the balcony this summer too. We’ll be making a couple of Earthtainers, without the cages, and planting corn, beans, pattipan squash, peppers, cucumbers, peas, carrots, broccoli, beets, lettuce, herbs, eggplants, and pea asparagus. I’m hopeful that we can cram at least a bit of all of that on our balcony with the help of lots of pots. I’m really excited about growing the Three Sisters - corn, beans, and squash. It sounds like I should be able to plant a mound or two in one Earthtainer. Hopefully there will be enough corn for the cross pollination.

We’re going to start the tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers next weekend, as it’s 8 weeks from last frost in this part of the country. I need to find out if I can start corn early too to give the three sisters a head start. I’ll let you know how it goes.

While visiting with Steve and Seanna over the Christmas holidays, Seanna said something that got me thinking. I can’t remember the context (other than that it was in a teasing sense), and I’m sure she doesn’t even remember saying it, but it was something along the lines of, “Well Adina is obviously into instant gratification, she reads comic books.” It’s odd. Although graphic novels do take me less time to read per page I actually find it more difficult to read graphic novels than I do regular novels.

I’m a fast and voracious reader, although less so than before university. Given the time, I race through novels like crazy. This is great most of the time, but sometimes I wish that I could savour a book a little longer before reaching the last page. Once, on a family trip, I forced myself to slow down to a read aloud pace so that I wouldn’t finish my book so quickly. It was an interesting experiment in really experiencing what I was reading but I found it really difficult to resist the urge to speed up.

As Seanna’s comment implied, it’s possible to get through graphic novels really quickly. I could easily race through Daisy Kutter, one of my favourite graphic novels, in less than 15 minutes. When I first started reading graphic novels, that’s exactly what I did. However, when I do that, I miss 3/4 of the story. They are called graphic novels for a reason. In Daisy Kutter, Kazu created some stunning art that deserves to be savoured. When I’m reading it, I have to work hard to resist the old habit of reading as quickly as I can, and slow down to notice the details.

It’s interesting how something that seems like it should be so much easier and faster pushes me into being slow and mindful.