Archive of posts from April 2023


  • Apr 24, 2023

    Lumpsum vs SIP

    Is it better to do a lumpsum investment or do systematic investment? Like many things in life, the answer is – it depends. There is usually no one good answer. But taking some examples we can see which works better in what situation. Of course these are just my opinions and they may not apply to your situation. Also, there may be many other cases which I do not cover. Finally, remember that whether you do lumpsum or SIP, in the long run the difference in returns will usually be miniscule unless you time the lumpsums very badly. With that out of the way, lets get to some examples.

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  • Apr 17, 2023

    Solar Panel Project Update - Part 5

    This is the final update in the solar panel project series for now. Hopefully by now you must be quite bored with the updates because I am sure no one is going to build a project that is exactly same as mine. But in case you are following along, you might have picked up some things that you did not know earlier or may be you found somethings that you could have done differently. The reason I am writing is to keep a journal of things. While I fixed most of the issues with my setup, I still had a couple of problem that don’t happen frequently which makes it difficult to debug. In this post I will discuss the problems and my solutions. May be there are better solutions, but these are ones that I could come up with. A reader was lamenting that my posts are too short so I let this post go as long as it needs to be. So enjoy :).

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  • Apr 10, 2023

    Inflation Affects Poor More Than Rich

    RBI has decided to pause the interest rate hike, which indicates that the central bank thinks the inflation might have peaked. While inflation is currently high at slightly over 6%, we Indians are quite used to that kind of inflation anyway. For most of the western world, it is causing a lot of pain. Not just the inflation but the rate hikes by their respective central banks. The rate hikes even affected some banks (think SVB for example). High inflation is a problem for everyone, but it hurts the poor a lot more than the rich. Yet the media makes it sounds like everyone is affected the same way.

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  • Apr 3, 2023

    Solar Panel Project Update - Part 4

    As I mentioned in my last post about solar panel setup, there still a few more issues with my sensors. One of them is temperature drift. When the weather is cool like early in the morning, the DC current sensors read one value and in the evening when the temperature is hot, they read a slightly different value. The difference is quite small but get magnified when doing the calculations. For example, in the night around 7 pm when there is no solar power, the sensor would read 2.5V which after all the transformations turns out to be 0 amps of current. All good. Then in the morning say around 5 am when there is still no sun, the sensor would read 2.52V. Not much of a difference, but it get magnified as I will soon show you.

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