Brussels

I always thought if you produce your own energy, you would need to upgrade to a bi-directional electric meter. The linked article gives interesting insight -- that consumers need not switch to a bi-directional meter.

IIUC, the figures are like this:

bi-directional meter: you receive ⅓ the price of energy you inject as the cost for consuming. (wtf? That seems terrible)

analog meter: your injection simply makes the old analog meter run in reverse. So I think you must get equal credit for energy you supply. But you must pay a flat €50/year (correction: €50 per kW per year) extra tax for that privilege.

Both scenarios seem a bit far from fair, but it seems like people with modern digital bi-directional meters really get screwed. Or am I missing something?

update: sorry, I thought I read flat €50/yr. It’s €50 per kW per year. So if you inject 1500 kWh/year, you pay €75,000? Can’t be. What’s wrong with my calculation here? Billing deals with kW hours, and the tax is based simply on kW (capacity). I’m not sure what a typical kW would be.

update 2: Actually there is no prosumer tariff in Brussels:

https://soltis.be/en/faq/what-is-the-prosumer-rate/

That makes it easy. So IIUC you get equal compensation for electricity injection in Brussels if you have an analog meter.

update 3: Heard a rumor that analog meters are being replaced with digital ones in all of Belgium eventually. Brussels is slow but it will happen. And when it does, people with the new digital meters will get screwed if they are injecting power into the grid. I’m somewhat wondering if Brussels is deliberately slow. Maybe they are waiting for more people to be enticed to install solar panels before they do the conversion.

Bait and switch.

update 4: some sources say digital meters will replace analog meters soon in Brussels. There is nothing good about this for consumers. Why people should resist this change:

• (unfairness) Digital meters will enable the electricity supplier to compensate consumers less for injection than they charge for consumption. Even though they are not using unfair pricing yet, the digital meter paves the way to make unfair pricing possible.
• (reduced availability) Digital meters enable Sibelga to remotely cut off the power to your house at the flip of a switch. People behind on their bills will lose power more easily.
• (surveillance?) I’m speculating here, but once the meter is digital it might enable the energy supplier to monitor the meter in realtime. This would enable them to (e.g.) know when someone is home, how many people, etc.

I see no advantages for the consumer w.r.t. digital meters. Maybe you won’t need to periodically let someone enter the house to read the meter anymore (not sure), but in any case it’s a bad trade-off.

Brusol’s deal seems almost too good to be true. They provide solar panels, insure them, install them on your roof, and maintain them for 30 years, all at no cost. The panels remain the property of Brusol for 30 years.

Any energy you use is free to you to the extent of the input energy. Essentially you give up roof space in exchange for some free energy. Seems like a good deal.

But of course I’m looking for how this can go bad. If you want to bring in batteries and take all the energy for yourself (e.g. to go off-grid), they charge €850 per panel. I heard that’s ten times the cost of a panel. Apparently they factor all their labor and overhead materials into that price.

Intermarché has a 1+1 promo on clips of Cubanisto (Tequila flavored beer). Then the 3 packs of beer themselves had 2+1 printed on the case.

There is no print to say the promos cannot be combined. So of course I expect to pay for 2 bottles and get 4 gratis. Other grocery stores work that way. If there is a promo of that discounts multiple clips and then there are also in-pack promos, you can end up buying fewer bottles than what they give for free.

In the case of Intermarché the register is a bit extra diligent and works out which promo is better then makes adjustments to ensure the promos are not combined.

I fixed the motor for my washing machine. All the components work fine now (motor, drain pump, water inlet valve). But the controller board is trapped in an error state because it does not know that I fixed the motor.

So I need to reset the PCB to clear the error. Beko refuses to tell me the special sequence of keys to reset the board. And I won’t pay them €200 (more than the value of the quite old machine) to send someone out to reset the board.

Buying a new PCB would likely fix the problem, but the parts dealers sell just about every part for my model except the PCB.

I need a junkyard that that allows people to remove parts. These seem non-existent in Brussels. I only found 2 trash points where large appliances go to die. I’ve been kicked out of them like half a dozen times now. It seems they pile the e-waste quite high, which causes more damage and creates a safety hazard (which would be part of why they kick people out). They seem to be breaking stuff down to its raw materals for melting down. I see no middle step in the process; no way for repairers to salvage the components they need.

So ultimately it looks like I will have to throw away a functional washing machine just because some bits on the circuit board are flipped the wrong way.

> > > “In terms of cost, we estimate that – during over 13 years of its deployment – 819 million hours of human time has been spent on reCAPTCHA, which corresponds to at least $6.1 billion USD in wages. Traffic resulting from reCAPTCHA consumed 134 Petabytes of bandwidth, which translates into about 7.5 million kWhs of energy, corresponding to 7.5 million pounds of CO₂. In addition, Google has potentially profited $888 billion USD from cookies and $8.75-32.3 billion USD per each sale of their total labeled data set.” > >

Where else are people forced to solve a reCAPTCHA in the course of public administration or essential public transactions like utilities? We should make a list.

(edit) Those figures are for worldwide use of reCAPTCHA, not just Sibelga. I’m just calling out Sibelga for adding to the problem. Hope my thread title isn’t misleading.

I’m not talking about the telco landline phone booths that were probably around in the 1990s. I think it was ~5—10 years or so ago that there were many hole-in-the-wall convenience shops that had phone booths. I never used them but I’m not liking GSM voice prices so I wanted to try them out. I assume they are cheap voip lines.

But I cannot find any now. I saw 6 or so (what I think are) phone booths in a Ria money transfer shop, but they were taped off and out of use. Anyone know of any that still exist?

I found this but I think they are just talking about telco serviced phones:

https://www.thebulletin.be/public-phone-boxes-thing-past-belgium

I figure the moment I turn on the heating the ultimate source for energy is Russia. So at that moment, I would be feeding the wrong side of Russia’s war.

Anyone else trying to see how long you can go without heat? I hang out in a room that has no external walls. I’m probably unavoidably leeching some heat off the neighbor’s wall.

I guess if it drops below 5°C indoors I will have to throw in the towel to prevent water pipes from freezing.

> Un castor s’est installé pour la première fois depuis sa réintroduction en Belgique, à Bruxelles. Cela fait plusieurs mois que l’un de ces animaux a pris ses quartiers au bord de Senne, au nord de la capitale, a rapporté vendredi l’agence régionale Bruxelles Environnement.

> Le distributeur de cadeaux Saintnicolis de bpost fait son retour dans 15 villes belges du 6 au 30 novembre. Le distributeur de colis fera escale dans des lieux stratégiques partout en Belgique. Centres commerciaux, cinémas Kinepolis et gares principales ont été choisis pour leur accessibilité, permettant au plus grand nombre de familles et d’écoles maternelles et/ou primaires de s’y rendre, précise bpost. Parmi les endroits choisis, on retrouve notamment le shopping Rive Gauche à Charleroi (8 et 9 novembre), la gare de Namur (13 et 14), les Kinepolis de Bruxelles et de Braine-l’Alleud (16 et 17), le shopping Médiacité à Liège (22 et 23), le Docks Bruxelles (22 et 23), l’Espace Arlon (22 et 23), et les Grands Prés à Mons (29 et 30).

> Les cadeaux sont offerts par plusieurs partenaires de bpost. Outre ce distributeur spécial, bpost gère comme chaque année le secrétariat de Saint-Nicolas. Tous les enfants désirant envoyer une lettre peuvent le faire à l’adresse suivante jusqu’au 15 décembre: Saint-Nicolas, rue du Paradis 1, 0612 Ciel. Toutes les lettres postées seront ensuite traitées et une réponse écrite du Grand Saint sera renvoyée.

“ClientEarth alleges that the Belgian National Bank's participation in the CSPP, by not taking into account climate, environment, and human rights impacts, violated Article 11 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU and Article 37 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (both concern the obligation to integrate environmental protection into EU policies).”

^ wow. Really disturbing that a national bank has such controversial investments. When a commercial bank invests in fossil fuels, we can boycott. But you can’t boycott a national bank.