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parallel solar
Saturday, May 17 2008
Today Gretchen caught a ride with the photogenic vegan Buddhists down to the City, where the three of them would be attending the Farm Sanctuary annual gala. The price of admission was $400 each, and there would be plenty of vegan food, booze, and mingling with three dimensional celebrities. The place the photogenic vegan Buddhists picked up Gretchen was Kenco (strategically at the intersection of Hurley Mountain Road and State Route 28). Kenco is a local independent superstore catering to campers, backpackers, and kayakers, and while there to drop off Gretchen, I bought a sleeping pad suitable for camping. This was in preparation for an upcoming trip Gretchen and I will be taking. We have tickets for the Bonnaroo music festival in Tennessee, and the plan is to pitch a tent amongst the hippies, metalheads, gutterpunks, and Pearl Jam enthusiasts.
While I'm on the subject of music, for the last day or so I've been listening to a band called Solar Powered People (they're in rotation with Toshack Highway and Windows '78). Solar Powered People fit in the genre known as "shoegazer" - guys (originally British) with loud guitars building shimmering walls of sound while modestly staring at their feet (mostly to be sure to step on the correct pedal). It's not that I especially like all that much of Solar Powered People; mostly I just like a song called "Start the Cycle," though I don't even like all that much of even that song. What I'm in it for is a particularly creepy chord change that happens three times, at 1:44, 2:33.7, and at the end at 4:12.5. This chord change is enough to make up for the muddy unintelligible lyrics and even the cheesy synthesizer riff at 3:42. On the web, I've found a different version of "Start the Cycle", and in this one the position of the creepy chord changes are off by a few seconds.
The sky had cleared and the sun was out, so as my grid-powered computer played Solar Powered People, the solar hot water array on the roof was, for the first time ever, running in parallel collector mode. The advantage to this was that the fluid circulated much faster and at lower temperature, meaning there was less danger of a boil over and less heat was being wasted during the long trip to the basement. Hot fluid radiates more heat than cooler fluid does, and if it is also moving slowly, it has more time to do so.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?080517 feedback
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