crimsonlonghorn

I switched from CyberQ to a Fireboard a few months ago and love it. Great product. I also have a couple of wireless Meaters for when I use the rotisserie and I am less enamored with those, but when they work they work really well.

If they do know they damn well wouldn't tell someone on the internet about it.

I second this one. You didn't say what you were using it for, but ours is an all-purpose farm wagon used for feeding the chickens and hauling shit around and I've never had a lick of trouble with it. It's very easy to convert to four seats when you need it, but with two seats the cargo bed can easily be tilted and dumped when needed.

Don't listen to this guy. He's trying to rip you off and take advantage of a widow. Despicable. I can't believe people like this are allowed to walk the streets. I'll buy them all for $500 and come pick them up, too. Just let me know.

Nice! Post pics plz.

Team Hellcat in the house!

Speaking of shipping ammo. The big spring skeet shoot is in San Antonio in two weeks and they are low on ammo to sell. Usually they literally have cases and cases for purchase from every conceivable manufacturer, usually at prices lower than most retailers. Good thing I have my own stash. ("Inaugural" means with the new name. Blaser didn't renew their sponsorship this year.)

A week late, but +1 to this. I ship it all the time. Print my own label, tape the diamond on the box, take to the UPS customer center. Never had a problem.

When I lived in Massachusetts, those "hunting shoes" were my "snow boots". They are awesome.

I have two pairs of boots from them, about to order a third. Love them and there is no comparison to store-bought boots, both on fit and quality. Turnaround on each pair was four months. He (Sal) was very upfront about the lead time when I ordered the first pair and I knew what to expect when I ordered the second. I doubt you are going to get yours in less than two months.

Yeah, the current house is 30 years old with batt insulation and older appliances. Architect and builder are still discussing insulation needs in the new one (i.e. blown vs foam), but either way it will be more efficient and modernly constructed with modern appliances, so the per foot energy consumption should be lower. How much lower, I don't know, but the increase in overall size should still cause some level of increase in overall consumption. I can't see it going down, but it's definitely not going to double, either.

Too small?

This what Mrs CL and I are discussing this morning to add to our house plans. Solar panels and the backup generator are probably redundant, but I'd rather spend money up front than not in case the weather prevents the solar panels from working right. Only problem is that the back of the house with the best real estate for solar panels will face NE which is the worst direction to point the panels. We probably won't get as much from the panels as we would hope. We probably don't want to put the panels on the front of the house because of the angles and aesthetics. We were on vacation for a whole week last August, which is why July was the highest month without having the highest day or hour. Someone check my math. I have no idea if this is right or not, but it seems to be in the right order of magnitude.

My brother is the risk officer for an electric coop and says this is a bad idea. You either plug stuff into the generator itself or you need to use a proper cutoff switch. It's extremely dangerous to others upstream of you if you are "backfilling" power into the house and onto a line that they think is dead or cutoff from the power source. See video below.

It will keep them warm too. So philanthropic for the community.

We are in the design phases of building a new house on some semi-rural land. I'm now convinced to add solar panels, a whole home generator, and the biggest fucking underground propane tank they will sell me.

Exactly. Great example. I saw a piece on the news this morning about a lady who was a Griddy customer who was bitching that her price spiked over the weekend. Guess what: THAT'S THE POINT OF GRIDDY! You get cheap as shit electricity 99% of the time but that 1% is usually expensive as hell.

This gets back to what Brisket mentioned earlier, which is a "capacity market" which more or less pays generators to be available when needed. That's one way to help cover the losses when they do need to turn on and operate at a loss. And the question of losses also gets to a major problem with the utility industry that there is no "real time" pricing for consumers, there are only pleas from the grid operator for conservation. Think of "surge pricing" for Uber and apply it to electricity and gas usage. Some people say that something like that is inhumane or unreasonable or unfair, but without it you get the situations posted upthread of people throwing parties and blasting their outside lights and running their clothes driers. If the grid operator declared an emergency and said, "Everyone who is consuming more than _____ kw is getting charged the full $9 price for each extra kwh", most people would turn those lights off quick. Set the baseline in emergencies to some level based on heating one room or running one light etc and then charge the hell out of the people who violate it during an emergency. Conversely, if a generator knew that he was going to get compensated for the full cost of his super expensive generation by some dumbass who wanted to waste electricity, he might choose to keep his plant on and make those expensive megawatts instead of removing the production from the market. The problem is that it is politically unpopular to give real time price signals to consumers while the producers are expected to abide by their own, but only when it is beneficial to the consumer. We have the technology with smart meters to be able to monitor (and even curtail) usage in real time, but every time the subject gets brought up the story turns into "big brother" and privacy instead of energy supply and demand. But shit, as a society we are opposed to ANY real rime price signals to consumers in ANY market. "Price gouging" is nothing more than scarcity pricing during periods of usual supply and demand. If you don't want someone buying up all the TP at HEB during Covid, charge 10x the regular price per roll and then the Karen buying it all up might think twice and leave some for someone else to buy. Same as with plywood and water during a hurricane. Raise the price so that those who aren't conserving have an incentive not to use so much so there's more to go around and people value it properly. This kind if pricing would solve a huge portion of our energy issues during emergencies, but politicians for very obvious reasons are never willing to take that step.

Fair enough. Same result.

I am going to do it again. Worked well last time and total peace of mind that the pipes can't freeze if there's nothing flowing inside of them that can freeze.

Agree, you need "technology" to get the observations and aggregate them, but I was speaking more about forecasting models. Large scale computer forecasting only started in earnest in the early 90's. Before that meteorologists (real weather scientists, not blondes in tight dresses) would have to analyze data and compare it to similar patterns in the past and divine a weather forecast without the aid of computers. They might not have been as precise as the computers can be now, but they also knew that certain temperature and pressure patterns over North America and the oceans could lead to hurricanes in the gulf or cold snaps in the plains or whatever. This is what the computers do now, they are just able to do it in bigger quantities and with more inputs and more granularly than humans can by themselves. But you are right, a thermometer and a satellite are both "technology". I should have been more precise that I meant computers.

Hard freeze in Sugar Land the next two nights. I'm going to shut it off again and drain both nights. Hopefully Saturday morning we will be done with it.

I saw a tweet several weeks ago - late January - from an old analog forecaster (I can't remember who) that said, "Get ready for an arctic blast, Texas!" At the time the long range models and forecasts were still very warm. Like many things, we are almost too reliant on technology sometimes instead of old-fashioned skill.

In theory, ERCOT doesn't need a capacity market because of the way the market and grid are designed, but in practice it almost certainly would have been the difference in keeping this from happening in these specific circumstances. One of the more commonsense reforms would be to set up a capacity (or readiness) market for Mondays only or in declared forecast weather emergencies or something like that. Unfortunately, I think the rarity of these circumstances will be ignored and lead to more comprehensive and cumbersome changes instead. Politicians gonna politick. Again, I'm willing to cut ERCOT and the generators a lot of slack given the multiple sigma nature of the weather event and the serendipitous timing relative to the markets. I'd much rather that they continue to focus on summer loads and handle grid reforms and winterizing with a light touch, but most people are very angry right now and there will be political consequences because of it.

Something that I have yet to see mentioned in these articles - and don't get me wrong, I don't disagree with the conclusions that ERCOT fucked up and the competitive system isn't far enough forward-looking to incentivize grid improvements- is that this happened on the back half of a four day gas trading weekend. So not only was it a five or six sigma weather event, it was also really bad timing on the trading calendar. Had this happened on a non-holiday weekday, a lot of the power supply issues would have been avoided or minimized. (Some other poster way upthread alluded to this when he was talking about buying gas for his power plant) For the most part, these resources are traded and managed "day ahead", meaning that gas is purchased and power sold and plants brought up or down the immediate day before. (There is something else called "real time" but that is more like fine tuning what is already up and running, you don't usually startup cold power plants in RT) It's hard enough to schedule and manage supply for normal weekends, which cover Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Saturday and Sunday have lower demand than Monday, but you have to trade the same amount of product for each day and then you manage it during the day after the schedule is set. Saturday and Sunday positions will sometimes get closed out at a loss with the expectation that Monday's profit will make up for it. For Monday holidays, they add Tuesday to the weekend package, so now you are trading four days of equal volumes and price but you have a different load profile on each of those days. Last Friday, when the cold was on its way here, it was already in Oklahoma and points north, and that caused gas prices to spike in those areas. Where gas is normally $2 or $3 per MMBTU it was $100 or more. And it was so cold up north that a lot of their wells were frozen off and unable to supply, so they were buying gas in South Texas and shipping it north, which made the price of South Texas gas - "Houston Ship Channel", "Waha", "NGPL STX" - spike as well, FOR THE WHOLE FOUR DAY WEEKEND. Instead of the usual $3, it was trading $200. 10-20x higher than it has ever traded. Well, ERCOT underestimated the demand on Monday and a lot of Texas generators woke up on Friday and looked at the Ship Channel price for the four day package and said, "Fuck that. That's too expensive." and they shut their plants down for the 4 day weekend. Then when the shit hit the fan on Monday, those plants were all cold and there wasn't any gas to run them anyway because it had all been exported north AND the wells in Texas were frozen off too AND one of the STP nuclear units got shut down because the water intake was freezing. And that's how you end up with no power supply when demand is going through the roof. As I said at the beginning, had this happened on a normal weekday, a lot of those resources would have been online and available. The bad forecast for the back end of a four day weekend with record gas prices is a big part of why the power grid went down. Also, as mentioned above, Houston generators got socked the hardest because there is a very large amount of gas generation here AND it is a gas trading hub AND it typically doesn't get as cold here so the plants are more susceptible.