Looks like sand is teh winner.... we were considering gravel, but that's not where it's at eh?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4aRMh_yRQk

LOADS of good info here. LOADS!

Sorry for the rapid fire randomness folks.... I'm watching this webinar.

https://grassseedprofessionals.com/best-wicking-material-for-self-watering-planters/
Maybe an addition for much better wicking.

Cleaning pollen off panels in the spring time.

A little something for the nerds about home assistant. When you sample (measure) power draw for a device, it'll be in watts. That's instantaneous power. If you want to keep tabs on how much each device uses each day or month, you'll want to record that as watthours or kWh.

If you want to calculate it manually in node red (a programming language within home assistant), you'll need to figure out how many of your sampling intervals there are in an hour. Example:once a minute is 60 intervals in an hour. So take the watts at this moment/60 and add that very small number to your on going total of Wh.

Or... you can create a "sensor node" and configure a sensor for power that is available within home assistant. (continued)

Then if you look under Settings->Devices&Services, you can create a helper using "intergral sensor". Point it to the "sensor node" for power you created in node red and it'll do the accumulation of Wh for you.

The advanatge of this is that home assistant already has a way to store the values of these helper variables in it's infrastructure, so these accumulated numbers survive a reboot.

Previously , I had been sending values from node red out thru MQTT and looping them back in to home assistant... but that is clunky.

Note that I call instant reads of watts by the prefix of POWER... and accumulated power is called by the prefix ENERGY.

SEIZE AND DESTROY: SC hemp farmer gets legal win against SLED in 2019 farm raid lawsuit
It's taken seven years for Trent Pendarvis to free himself from a SC Law Enforcement Division prosecution and to get his civil lawsuit to a jury trial after agents raided his family farm and mowed down his hemp crop in 2019. Pendarvis' latest court victory moves his lawsuit against SLED and the SC Department of Agriculture one step closer to trial.

FULL REPORT:
https://www.qcnews.com/news/investigations/seize-and-destroy-hemp-farmer-scores-legal-win-against-sled-in-2019-raid-lawsuit/

Cattle panels mounted outside green house to keep deer out.