Category: Uncategorized

Getting free power from the sun has always been an appealing idea for me, but costs have always been high. Costs have come down a lot over the years, but it would probably still cost me $10,000 to install meaningful solar at my house and since I only use about $800 of electricity per year, that would take too long to pay off. Going off the grid is even more expensive because then you have to have a way to store the power in a battery to use at night or when demand is higher than what you are getting from the sun. Instead, for years I have paid Georgia Power a little extra to receive solar power (or, really, Renewable Energy Credits). At one time I thought I could get a small solar panel and hook it up to a car battery and then use the car battery to charge my phone or my laptop or whatever, and have a small and simple system, but a phone uses only a few cents of power per day and car batteries don’t last forever, so it seemed like that might not work either.

Continue reading “Solar Power at Home”

I am now in my tenth year on Georgia Power’s Simple Solar plan which charges me about 10% more than regular customers and all of my electricity is solar. Sort of. Really I am buying Renewable Energy Credits (RECs), which are an accounting gimmick so that you can buy and sell solar energy credits. The RECs are purchased from someone producing solar energy and then they use or sell the electricity back to the grid. It is like buying a carbon offset. But if a big company wants to run its factory on solar and builds a 1 megawatt solar plant to run it, it would probably say it is running the factory on solar, but I bet it would still sell the RECs. So it is kind of second hand solar. RECs are fairly cheap to buy which is why I am not paying that much. Still maybe it means something. Georgia Power’s mix of electricity sources is now up to 7% solar, which is better than in the past, but not great.

Georgia Power also has a program called Community Solar where you pay $24 per month to buy the output of a 1000 watt block of actual solar cells that Georgia Power operates somewhere in Georgia. Georgia Power then lets you reduce your power bill by the actual number of kilowatt-hours those cells produce, which they say on average is 165 kwh per month, but can vary from 115 to 215 kwh. At first glance it looks like this would generally save me money, but it gets much more complicated.

Continue reading “Community Solar”

For years now I have been using Xfinity internet. I stopped using them for cable in 2018, but they were generally less expensive for internet than AT&T who seem to have set a minimum cost of $50 for any service, whereas Xfinity had intro deals I was able to renew for $30 to $40 per month for their lowest speed, which is all I needed. Last year they wanted $45 (for 150 Mbps, 100 Mbps is now their lowest speed; it used to be 25 back in 2015), but I found out that T Mobile was doing home internet via 5G (no cable, just a receiver in your house that makes a wifi hotspot) which I could get for $35 per month. Xfinity then matched that, so I kept them. Then my internet connection started getting spotty this year and I wondered if I was at the end of my contract. I was and was now being charged $59. I don’t think it was related though. I think either my cable came loose outside or my modem, which I bought so I wouldn’t have to rent one from them, had stopped working correctly.

Good time to look at options and I found that my cell provider, Mint, who has always used the T Mobile network and was bought out by T Mobile in 2024, now offers home internet similar to T Mobile, where you put a 5G receiver in your house and it broadcasts wifi. Mint only charges me $15 per month for cell service (plus fees, so almost $20), but you have to pay for a year at a time to get the best rate. No problem since I have been with them for 8 years now. They do the internet the same way and offer it for $30 per month if you get a year at a time (this is a discount that requires you to also have cell service with them). And, in fact, it seems to just be T Mobile. Although the box it came in had Mint labeling, the device itself (pre-owned) says T Mobile on it. I figured I would give it a shot and then I wouldn’t have to haggle with Xfinity every year. You get to try it for 2 weeks and can return it for a refund if you don’t like it. Meanwhile I had no internet for a few days until it showed up and quickly burned through my 5 GB cell data allowance from Mint, so I paid $20 for 3 more GB this month. Eventually I realized that there was a public xfinitywifi hotspot out there somewhere that I could connect to using my Xfinity account and that helped a lot.

Continue reading “Minternet”

I have documented my highs and lows of buying blu-ray movies on Black Friday over the years and realized it was pretty much all over last year. Very few people are still buying physical media, mostly turning towards streaming, not even buying digital copies of movies. I try to keep streaming subscriptions to a minimum, but I did take advantage of an early Black Friday Disney/Hulu bundle deal for $5 per month.

Continue reading “A Little Bit of Black Friday”

In my search for a new place in the world to live, one criteria would be the murder rate. Generally this is the number of people murdered (Wikipedia calls this “intentional homicide”) per year per 100,000 people. In the United States, which is a pretty violent country, the number is 5.8. I was looking at moving to Chile, which has a pretty low crime rate (for Latin America) and a murder rate of 6.3, just a touch above the US. In lieu of Chile, I was thinking of Costa Rica, which comes in at 17.7, much, much higher. One place I wasn’t looking at, mostly because of crime, is Mexico, which had a rate of 24.8. The number for Costa Rica really gave me pause. Maybe instead, I could go to Spain, which has a rate of only 0.7, one of the safest countries in the world. Then I wondered what the rate for my home state of Georgia was. It is a little higher than the average for the US, at 8.2. It is harder to find numbers for Dekalb County, but one source says it is 9.3 and another said 13.7. Now Costa Rica doesn’t look quite as bad, but Spain is looking really, really good.