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Time for new shoes

Well my shoe site has made $84.00 so far.  I put this site together on March 12 when I decided that I wanted a site to pay for my yearly hiking shoes.  So it took about 5 months and 3 days to hit my target amount.

I’m not going to mention the actual site, but I can tell you that since I put up my site, the keywords have become super competitive.  I used to be on page 1, not I’m on page 12.

I think I may sell the domain because it is a great domain name.

Posted in Making Money Online | 1 Comment »

Long Overdue Africa Video

Someone emailed me asking about if I did a video for Africa and I did.  I just forgot to post it on here when it was done.  So here is are 2 videos of my trip to Africa.  The first one is climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and the second one is the safari after.  Enjoy.

Posted in Vacations | 5 Comments »

Roof Shade Experiment Over

I had to take down the roof shade experiment over the weekend.  We had a monsoon and I was wondering what that thuding sound was on the roof when it hit me.  It was the concrete cinder blocks moving around.  The monsoon winds got under the roof shade and was able to lift the block up and down.

When I got up there it didn’t look like the blocks moved at all. I think that they were barely lifting and then dropping creating a really dull thud.  I only had a 5′ x 6′ size roof shade up there.  I imagine that if it was bigger that it would have been able to shift the blocks around.

I never got a real chance to measure the ceiling temperatures or the roof temps.  I’ll have to go back up and try it another day.  Maybe after monsoon season.

Posted in Green Home | No Comments »

New Subdivision Homes Built with Solar Power Included

I saw this on USA Today.  Lyon’s Gate, located in Gilbert, Arizona, is building green homes.  These homes come with solar power installed.  It says that the ECHO solar electric/thermal system produces up to 10,000 kWh energy offset annually, which is pretty much inline with my calculations.

I think a good rule of thumb for AZ is that a 1kW system produces 1,000kWh a year.  Also a 200amp home’s max. power output is 10,000kWh.

Using this you can easily ballpark any system you want.

Although the website doesn’t say, the USAtoday article said that this home had 9 inch exterior walls.  I assume that this means that they are using 2×6 instead of 2×4’s, which Hacienda homes already does.  It would be nice if they used 2×10’s, but I bet they included the drywall and stucco into the wall thickness calculation.

http://www.meritagehomes.com/builder/section/284-Lyon-s-Gate

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/07/builder-homes-produce-energy/1

Posted in Green Home | 3 Comments »

Calculating Solar Panels

This post is based on Another Investor’s comments in the previous solar post about my green home.

When the solar power rep was here he pulled up the stats from another home in Scottsdale.  This home was a 9.8kW system producing 32kW a day in June.  I would assume that this number is close to the maximum that the system could ever produce. I was told that our solar systems are limiting by our 200amp circuit breaker, so even if I had unlimited roof space I couldn’t put a 100kW in my house without upgrading to a 1000amp breaker.

So based on the 32kW a day, I took a look at my electric bill. For June I used 1200kW during 9am to 9pm peak hours. 1200 – 32×30 = 235kW. Which is really good.

But lets look at the whole bill.

Off peak I used 1544kW.  Total kW usage would be 1779kW.  I pay $0.14 per KW on peak and $0.02 off peak.  Just in straight kW savings the solar panels saved me $134.00.  But there are all sorts of other fees like delivery charge, etc… that are prorated by kW usage.  Without going into the calculation details I guessitmated that I have additional savings of about $35.   So total savings from the solar system is estimated at around $170.

My bill was $350 for the month of June, so solar would have cut my bill 50%.  I did the same calculation for May and came up with a $158 savings on a $280 bill.  Which isn’t bad.  But I guess what I’m seeing is that at maximum sun my solar panels can produce or save about $170 a month.

My average bill is $220 a month, so the savings is pretty significant at $170 month.  However, that assumes that every month has sufficient sunlight to produce 32kW a day which we know isn’t true.

If it was as easy as plugging $170 x 12 months = $2040 a year of savings, it would be easy to calculate your payback period.  I believe that Solar City guaranteed at least 10,000kW of electric generated or they would pay you for any amount under.  10,000kW comes out to 27kW a day.

BTW, I think that a 9.8kW system could only cost $12,000-$15,000 now with all the rebates.  At $12,000 we are looking at a minimum 6 year pay back.

Thanks for making me type this out.  It really helps me more and I’ll looking into the cost of buying a system or building one.

Posted in Green Home | 3 Comments »

Crested Butte Biking Trip 2010 Video

Here is the video from my mountain biking trip last week.  Enjoy!

Crested Butte 2010 Trip Video from Kenric on Vimeo.

Posted in Vacations | 6 Comments »

Not Really an Update

Ok, I can’t get the photo uploader on my blog to work.  I have to manually FTP if I want to add pictures.

So this is a quick twitter like update per topic.

Roof Shade – Been on the roof since before my vacation, haven’t gone up there to check it yet.  Hope it’s still there, we’ve had monsoon strong winds.  Still haven’t looked into the infrared gun.

Green Home – Second thoughts about solar.  Doing my own calculations I feel like the sales people are inflating the savings.  Can’t figure out how a system can cut $150 out of a $200 electric bill based on the KW they say it would produce.

Ebizs – Doing great.  Super busy now.  Looking to open another store soon.

Poker – My friend has made it to the final table in the 2010 WSOP Main Event, guaranteed payout is $800k, first place is $8.9 mil.  It’s still pretty unbelievable to me.  I will be going to Vegas to watch him play at the final table in November.

Real Estate – SLC rentals both have good tenants that pay every month.  Cashflowing well.  I really like my property management company now.  All I do is get a check every month from them.

Apartments – Not doing so great.  One has been negative this whole year.  Occupancy remains the same at 91% but expenses have crept up.  The other one which was negative for the past 2 years and finally got refi’d is now break even and should cashflow within a few months.

Posted in Making Money Online | 6 Comments »