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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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Capital Gains Harvesting
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned about tax loss harvesting being a legitimate way to reduce your taxes. In this post, I will explain another way to reduce taxes while taking capital gains using capital gains harvesting. A capital gain harvesting is basically a method of tactically selling some of your investments for capital gains without actually paying any taxes on them. How does that work? Let’s find more about it in this post.
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Solar Panel Project Update - Part 3
In my previous post I explained how I improved the accuracy of my DC sensors using ADS1115. But there is one problem though. The ADS1115 gives accurate reading even when the supply voltage keeps changing. Yet, the sensor values will not be correct. The reason is that if the supply voltage is changing, the reading on the sensor will also change, but the accuracy of the reading will be stable because ADS1115 is independent of power supply voltage fluctuations. For example, let’s say the supply voltage is 2.5V, then when there is no current, the DC current sensor will read 2.5V, and in the code we assume the current is 0 at 2.5V. Now if the supply voltage drops to 4V then the sensor will read 2V, which is still the mid point and indicates 0 current. But in the code we have a hard coded number that 2.5V is the midpoint and we mistakenly assume that some current proportional to -0.5V is passing through the wires. That is the problem.
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Tax Loss Harvesting
There are lots of legitimate ways to reduce taxes and tax loss harvesting is one of them. However, in practice, it is much harder to execute. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let me explain what tax loss harvesting is in case you don’t know. Tax loss harvesting is nothing but selling your investments for a loss when the value is below your invested amount. Then use the losses to offset any other capital gains or income that you might have. Generally tax loss harvesting works well with equity markets because there is a possibility that the markets fall and your investments could be worth less than what you invested.
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Solar Panel Project Update - Part 2
This is a continuation of my previous post giving updates about my solar panel setup. As you will probably remember from that post, I found a good sensor that would measure AC voltage and current accurately and I was satisfied and very confident about the data coming from the sensors. However, I cannot say the same about my DC measurements. Many components in the system should be measured in DC including solar panel current, battery voltage and current etc. My initial set of sensors were not accurate and used to drift quite a bit with supply voltage and ambient temperature. So I set out to find better sensors and upgraded them and I cover part of that story in this post.
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Reducing My Asset Allocation Swings
Ever since I started investing back in 2011, I have always wanted to do tactical asset allocation. The idea was not to maximize returns, but to minimize volatility. Tactical asset allocation is different from the general advice which you receive from many people including me which is to keep a fixed asset allocation and rebalance once in a while to make sure that the asset allocation difference remains within a small range. That advice applies for any long term goal like retirement. For shorter goals you may receive advice to reduce equity allocation as you near the goal. If I did not make any sense there, then let me explain with an example.
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Solar Panel Project Update - Part 1
It has been a while since I gave any updates on my solar panel project so I thought I should write a post on it. This can get pretty technical so if you are not into electronics or software, you can skip. Since I last reported about my design I’ve made a few changes mainly to increase the stability of the system. What happened was that in the long run, I found some problems that rear their head sometimes intermittently. As a result I had to change the design to recover some components from their weird state. In addition I reduced the variability of readings by the sensors.
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Year In Review – 2022 Net Worth
The last post in the year in review series for the year is on my net worth. I am doing the net worth calculations using the very basic formula for net-worth which is basically
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Budget 2023 And How It Affects Me
Every year after the union budget I publish a post on how it affects me. I am doing the same again now. Usually the budget does not affect my financial planning much except for that one time when the finance minister introduced the tax on long term capital gains on equities. This budget was pretty mild and simple. No nasty surprises (at least for me). The only announcements that needed any financial planing were –
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Five Years In Financial Independence
It has been more than five years since we became financially independent. It was end of 2017 when we concluded that we have enough investments to call it a day and hang our boots. It felt like life would be awesome and we can enjoy living a slow life. Which is exactly we did for the past five years and we have absolutely zero regrets regarding early retirement. We are living the life at the slowest pace we have ever done. There is barely any urgency in any matter of our life. No wonder so many people ask – what do you do with all the free time?
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