Welcome to Home Power #8 The last year has been one of incredible growth for renewable energy. More systems are being installed than ever before. The hardware not only really works, but is cost effective. The word is getting around that RE can provide electricity where the power line can't. Five years ago I figured that a system had to be at least four miles from the grid to make RE cost effective. This distance has now shrunk to about 1/2 mile. According to SERI (the US Gov't. sponsored Solar Energy Research Institute), the picture for photovoltaics is quite bright. I quote form Sep/Oct 88 SERI publication Science & Technology in Review. "Photovoltaics can supply a major amount of electricity in every region of the U. S. For instance, in the midwest, an area 2.5 miles on a side could displace a typical nuclear power plant (1000 MW peak capacity)." In his editorial in that issue, Jack L. Stone SERI Director says, "Performance improvements coupled with cost reductions and lifetime extensions have paved the way to making PV power a viable electricity generating option for the near future. Recent results in copper indium diselenide and amorphous silicon, for example, show great promise for generating electricity at 12-15 cents per kilowatt hour within the next five years." The RE scene is blossoming everywhere. R&D promises future marvels at affordable prices. Equipment manufacturers and dealers are reporting higher sales than every before. And us, well, we're making more power than ever before. And we're doing with without damage to our environment. After a year of publication Home Power Magazine has grown also. This issue goes out under individual mailing labels to over 7,200 folks who have directly requested Home Power. Another 2,000+ copies are distributed to RE businesses all over the World. We are growing at the rate of about 1,000 new subscribers per issue. I wish we had been able to print all the informative articles we had ready for this issue. We simply didn't have space. If our page count increases, then so does the weight of an issue. This kicks us into the next higher Post Office price/weight category and cost us more than we can afford. On the back burner are articles on: large nickel-cadmium batteries, a construction project for electronic rheostats, an article on the technical differences between ac and DC power, and several very interesting System Sagas. We try to respond to what you the readers tell us on the Subs Forms. We try to supply the info you want. As such there are 5 Things that Work! reports in this issue, and more info on hydro power. A note on Things that Work! (TtW!) reports. A reader wrote in asking why he never saw a negative TtW! report. Well, we don't do them. There is enough good gear to write about without bad mouthing anyone's product. We follow Thumper Rabbit's advice, "If you can't say something nice about something, then don't say anything at all." The rules for Things that Work! are really quite simple: 1) The device must do what its manufacturer says it will. 2) The device must last in actual service in home power systems. 3) The device must offer good value for the money spent on it. For the record, a Things that Work! report is not solicited by, paid for, or contingent on advertising by the manufacturer of the equipment tested. These reports are as objective as we can make them. Several readers have asked for techie details on the production of Home Power Magazine. Well, we enter articles and do illustrations on two Mac computers, one 512+ and an SE with 1 MB RAM and a 20MB harddrive. We use WriteNow, Word, SuperPaint, MacDraw, and MacDraft programs for text and graphics. Spreadsheet chores and charts are handled by Excel 1.5. Page layout is done on the SE with Ready, Set, Go! 4.0. Since we don't have a laser printer, we trot the issue (on disk) to town & rent one for printing the issue's masters. The masters then return home for paste up, camera ready ad insertion, and photo insertion. The whole mess then gets trucked 60 miles over mountain roads to Klamath Falls, Oregon where the Klamath Herald & News prints our issues. Karen maintains the Home Power Subscribers' DataBase using Reflex+ and the Mac SE (the file is enormous, over 1.5 MB). The mailing labels for all issues are printed, using solar power, right here on the Flat with our Imagewriter printer. It takes some 14+ hours to print the 7K+ mailing labels for an issue of Home Power. Once again, thanks to all the advertisers, contributors and readers of Home Power. I want to especially thank our readers for supporting the advertisers in Home Power. It's the ad revenue that makes this publication free to you. Your support of our advertisers makes this publication possible. Thanks! RP