David Pitkin

I love my energy detective. It is a display that shows our household electricity usage converted to $/kWH all the time. My favorite usage so far is checking when I leave the house to ensure that the usage is below 0.10$/Hour, if its higher we forgot something left on. I wanted to share the Groton Electric settings for it… if you pay your bill early (10% discount included)

Tiered Rates T1 (0-500 kWh) = 0.0612 + 0.0088 + 0.03157 + 0.01842 – 0.0126 = 0.10739 T2 (>500kWh) = 0.0717 + 0.0088 + 0.03157 + 0.01842 -0.0126 = 0.11789 Annual Charge = 0 Fixed Monthly = 0 Min. Monthy = 5.62 Tax Rate = 0%

My meter is read on the 23rd of each month, all this information was easily available from Groton Electric

A few pictures of installing mine, don’t forget that the red dots on the clamps need to be on in the same direction.

I love my energy detective. It is a display that shows our household electricity usage converted to $/kWH all the time. My favorite usage so far is checking when I leave the house to ensure that the usage is below 0.10$/Hour, if its higher we forgot something left on. I wanted to share the Groton Electric settings for it… if you pay your bill early (10% discount included)

Tiered Rates T1 (0-500 kWh) = 0.0612 + 0.0088 + 0.03157 + 0.01842 – 0.0126 = 0.10739 T2 (>500kWh) = 0.0717 + 0.0088 + 0.03157 + 0.01842 -0.0126 = 0.11789 Annual Charge = 0 Fixed Monthly = 0 Min. Monthy = 5.62 Tax Rate = 0%

My meter is read on the 23rd of each month, all this information was easily available from Groton Electric

A few pictures of installing mine, don’t forget that the red dots on the clamps need to be on in the same direction.

I love my energy detective. It is a display that shows our household electricity usage converted to $/kWH all the time. My favorite usage so far is checking when I leave the house to ensure that the usage is below 0.10$/Hour, if its higher we forgot something left on. I wanted to share the Groton Electric settings for it… if you pay your bill early (10% discount included)

Tiered Rates T1 (0-500 kWh) = 0.0612 + 0.0088 + 0.03157 + 0.01842 – 0.0126 = 0.10739 T2 (>500kWh) = 0.0717 + 0.0088 + 0.03157 + 0.01842 -0.0126 = 0.11789 Annual Charge = 0 Fixed Monthly = 0 Min. Monthy = 5.62 Tax Rate = 0%

My meter is read on the 23rd of each month, all this information was easily available from Groton Electric

A few pictures of installing mine, don’t forget that the red dots on the clamps need to be on in the same direction.

This afternoon I took advantage of working near Lincoln and saw a talk by David Sibley. He was presenting his analysis of the video that the Cornell Lab of Ornithology believes is a Ivory-billed woodpecker that has been long believed to be extinct.

His presentation and published analysis in Science convinced an over-tired me that the evidence was inconclusive at best. He did not seem very happy about the entire situation but I agree that when conservation dollars and attention is being spent that all the information needs to be out there. It sounds great to re-discover a species but identifying birds is hard, David Sibley would know that better than anyone I know.

Last weekend I did an animal tracking workshop at the Nashua River Watershed. It was a bit cold and the lack of snow made finding tracks hard but I learned more about noticing the clues left by the animals in the woods. Since Kristin has access to lots of birding knowledge I took a set of feathers from some animals dinner home to get identified. She found out that they were from a pheasant. Now the interesting part is that pheasants are not native to New England. They were imported fromAsia and can not survive our winter. The state grounds are stocked just for hunters by MassWildlife. A few years ago there were even state run farms to raise the birds but now it is cheaper to just buy them.

I like to pay attention to the things that come in the mail and we got a cool one yesterday from the Frog’s Leap Winery. They are proud that they converted their entire winery to solar power this year and sent out a secret decoder to show off. It has a pair of concentric pieces of paper and when you rotate the smaller top one a fact such as Even during a full Moon we can collect 5 - 6 kw and then the bottom has the result of that which is That’s enough power to light the winery.