Our solar panels are up! As is a lot of new hardware attached to the house – an AC combiner to combine the output of each of the 18 panels and micro-inverters, a sub-panel for the circuits which are being powered by the battery backup, the system controller, and the battery backup.

Unfortunately, they’re not producing any useful power yet; the lead installer said that they need to set up some sort of account on the Enphase servers before they can turn on the controller, and that won’t happen until after the weekend (or maybe not until final inspection).

Progress!

One of the key concepts in David Allen’s Getting Things Done method involves realizing that some tasks can only be done in certain contexts. For example, when the book was originally written, “needing a phone available” was a frequent context to use in categorizing your tasks (those were simpler times!). One of the other contexts that comes up is how much energy and mental alertness you need for a task; he even suggests creating a list of tasks you can do with limited brainpower.

Today was a “limited brainpower” day – between not having gotten enough sleep last night and my back still bothering me, I didn’t want to do anything needing a lot of mental energy.

I was surprised how much I got done – I “renegotiated” the price for SiriusXM service for another year (go to their website and choose for the “cancel” option; tell the nice customer service chatbot that you’re cancelling because it’s too expensive; wait for an agent to enter the chat and tell them the same thing; reduce the rate from $23.05 to $7.27 per month), changed our flights to Frankfurt in the fall to save $1000/person and give us an extra day there, visited the chiropractor (my back is better, but still not recovered), and even cooked a couple of meals.

And the materials for our solar system got delivered; they’re doing the installation tomorrow.