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bleached tree frog and insects
Tuesday, October 22 2024
Before driving into town to get supplies to fix the dilapidated old homemade solar panel, I climbed up on the solar deck to have another look. This time I looked more carefully at the glass side and was disappointed to see that another of the glass panels had cracked. One of those panels had been cracked since I'd installed it; it had been a replacement for a panel that had been broken in a wind storm. But another had broken more recently, evidently from excessive sagging of the panel "box" itself. The new broken panel was the eastmost one, and was in four or five pieces. It's possible I can put it back together with silicone, but that's less than ideal. I also noticed that a lot of critter were now getting into the panel and dying. This wasn't just insects either; there was a dead tree frog under the glass as well. All of these critters had been bleached nearly white by massive numbers of photons.
I took the dogs with me when I drove out to Home Depot to buy some treated lumber: one twelve foot two-by-six (to replace the top plank of the solar panel box), two twelve foot two-by-fours (to hold the box together before the new plank goes in), and three eight foot two by fours (to make temporary and permanent props to hold the panel in place while I work on it and afterwards). In addition to that lumber, I bought a single four by eight foot sheet of half inch plywood to replace some of the solar panel's rotten OSB backing. I also bought two tubes of silicone caulk and a big box of deck screws (mostly for cabin projects). As I was strapping these things to the roof, I let the dogs out to run around the parking lot. There was another dog, another pit bull actually, in a nearby truck who was very excited to see Charlotte and Ramona, though his or her dad didn't let him or her out to run around with them.
I then went to Mother Earth's Storehouse mostly to get pickles, since Hannaford only sells the inferior shelf-stable kind. I should've bought a jar of Bubbies, but another kind was half the price, so I got those instead. (Later when I ate one, I regretted my purchasing error.) I also got a bag of pasta, a bag of corn chips, and a head of lettuce, but nothing else because that place is expensive.
On the drive home, I opted to make a detour to the Tibetan Center thrift store, and as I was driving up Route 28, someone honked at me and indicated something was amiss on my roof. So I stopped and saw that the front strap I'd used to secure the plywood had come almost completely off, allowing the plywood to flap high into the air, as it was only secured by one strap in the back. The fucking strap had felt secure when I'd tightened it, as if it couldn't be pulled loose, but evidently the strap has to go around a tight bend or it will come loose like this.
I didn't find anything to buy at the thrift store, though I noticed they had a lot of windows there which could be made into homemade solar collectors.
Back at the house, it was another gorgeous day with temperatures in the 80s, so I took Charlotte on a walk similar to the one I'd gone on yesterday. (Neville decided not to come.)
Eventually I climbed up on the solar deck and worked mostly to secure the panel so it will survive for a few weeks while I work on it. I then made a start at removing the semi-rotted backing OSB. But my heart wasn't really in it, and soon I was in a bathtub heated by energy collected with that very panel.
Later I made more progress on the multi-location weather plotting capability of my ESP8266 Remote Control system after getting some very helpful advice from ChatGPT. I even got a start on making the complicated user interface necessary to get the system to switch between graphing all the weather data for one location to graphing all the, say, temperatures, from a select set of locations.
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