Monthly Archives: Friday September 30th, 2011

Plugwise news

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Plugwise

As most readers of this website will know I use the Plugwise system to monitor the performance of our solar panels. This works perfectly, it’s reliable, user friendly and it uses hardly any power.

It was, however, quite expensive; a Home Start set with two measuring plugs cost € 120 and a Home Basic set with nine measuring plugs cost € 360. Plugwise lowered the prices for these two sets to € 99,95 and € 299,95 respectively. That’s quite a mark-down.

On top of that there is now a discount code active which – temporarily – gives a fifteen percent discount. This means that a Home Start can be had for €84,96 and a Home Basic set for € 254,96. The latter is a discount of over a hundred euros! The discount code can be entered during the ordering process, and it is: TELEGRAAF2011.

So if you’d like to monitor you solar panels without complicated hardware and a high energy consumption, now might be the time.

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World Solar Challenge 2011 update – 20 days to go

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The starting date of the 2011 World Solar Challenge is now less than three weeks away. With many teams already settled in and testing their cars, teams and procedures and many other teams in the process of arriving it has been an exciting week. I have been exchanging some e-mails with a few of the teams, I am very grateful for their time in these stressful times.

If everything goes according to plan I am just going to write three more of these weekly updates before the WSC sets off on October 16th.

If you have any information I’ve missed, please let me know either in the comments under this article, or through e-mail.

Please read on for this week’s WSC news:

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Hochschule Bochum update

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BOGT

As their website has not been updated since August 15 and their Facebook-account seems to have disappeared, I got a little worried about the Hochschule Bochum team from Germany.

I needn’t have worried as today I received an e-mail from the team’s public relations guy with a beautful photo of their car BOGT, two very interesting PDF files (here and here) and news that the team arrived in Darwin safe and sound.

I took the opportunity to create a fact sheet for this team, which is certainly one of the most complete.

One of the most interesting facts I learned that this German team is one of only two teams that is using the expensive and high-efficiency GaAs solar cells on their car. All the other teams, except for the Belgian Umicore team, use the much more affordable silicon solar cells, of which they can use a larger surface area.

I am a great fan of the German team and their unorthodox car.  In my eyes, they seem to have understood the word ‘challenge’ in World Solar Challenge like no other team. Their four-wheeled, two-seater car is closer to a practical car than any of the other cars. Of course, they’ve basically given up any chance of actually winning as the frontal area of the car is much larger than that of the other ‘flat’ cars.

Something very interesting happened to me to day. I gave an interview about the World Solar Challenge to a journalist of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. I answered questions about what the point of the WSC is, about recent innovations, about which team I thought is going to win, and many more questions. The article should be published in about a week (possibly in hebrew).

World Solar Challenge 2011 update – 28 days to go

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With the start of the World Challenge less than a month away things are heating up. Both Dutch cars and the Belgian car have arrived at their teams, and a few more cars and teams are arriving in Australia. Solar Team Twente has its car 21Connect approved for use on public roads, so for them testing can begin in earnest. The other teams will follow soon, I’m sure.

A few other teams have announced they’ve travel to Australia in the first week of October. I have to wonder how much difference this will make when compared with the teams who will have been in Australia longer.

The coming few weeks will be very exciting with the prospect of more teams arriving in Australia, the scrutineering, the qualification race and, of course, the WSC itself.

If you have any information I’ve missed, please let me know either in the comments under this article, or through e-mail.

Please read on for this week’s WSC news:

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Wattcher on loan

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The Wattcher display

My employer gave a number of employees a Wattcher on loan so that they can analyse and possibly reduce their electricity consumption. In combination with a website where the employees can compare their consumption statistics they set up a sort of contest who can save the most energy. For the coming few weeks I have one of those devices.

The Wattcher is a nifty device which shows the electricity consumption of a house at a glance. The system consists of two parts:

  1. A sensor on the electricity meter which measures the current electricity consumption. This value is wirelessly transmitted to the display.
  2. The display, which can be placed in any wall outlet within ten or fifteen metres from the sensor and which continuously displays the current total electricity consumption of the house.  If an electrical device is switched on the indicated consumption will rise and if one is switched off it will fall.

The sensor has a light-sensitive cell which, in case of an electromechanical electricity meter, counts how often the black tab passes. In case of a digital meter, the cell counts how often a LED blinks. From these values the display calculates the electricity consumption of the house in Watts.

Immediately after unpacking the device and reading the user manual the first disadvantage announced itself: the Wattcher can’t cope (well) with solar panels (or any other device which produces electricity). The sensor has no way of detecting the direction of rotation of the disc of the electricity meter. On a digital sensor only blinks its LED, which also gives no indication of consumption/production.

I will therefore loan the Wattcher to several households and ask them about their reactions. I will publish those reactions here.

World Solar Challenge 2011 update – 34 days to go

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With less than five weeks to the start of the WSC things are getting exciting. Teams are arriving in Australia, making themselves at home, preparing to test their car and procedures on Australian roads. Two teams I had not seen any updates from, Principia and Solaris, have popped up in the news stream and it seems both will make it to the 2011 WSC.

If you have any information I’ve missed, please let me know either in the comments under this article, or through e-mail.

Please read on for this week’s WSC news:

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World Solar Challenge 2011 update – 42 days to go

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In the past week I’ve updated the main overview with two more fact sheets, those of the Tokai University and the MIT SEVT team. I could find relatively little news this week. A few teams have arrived in Australia and are making themselves at home, and a few cars are on the way, too. I think it’s the calm before the storm. It’s just six weeks to the start of the 2011 World Solar Challenge, and I expect many teams to arrive in the coming two to three weeks and start testing on the Australian roads. It’s going to get more and more exciting right up to the moment the last car has passed the finishing line.

If you have any information I’ve missed, please let me know either in the comments under this article, or through e-mail.

Please read on for this week’s WSC news:

Continue reading →