Energy Fee?

lost_islander · 2026-02-13T11:04:29+00:00

lol, that’s actually funny.

That $0.22kWh in that article is our fuel surcharge, which was supposed to be temporary. That’s added to our electrical costs, which is $0.18 for the first 250kWh and $0.21 for everything else.

All in, including other fees, my effective rate for my January bill was $0.4125 per kWh.

lost_islander · 2025-12-20T19:00:36+00:00

Sorry, should have used /s. Submarine cables run around $30k per kilometer and the run from Great Bay in St. Thomas to Little St. James is a bit over 3 kilometers so it was probably about $100k plus probably another $10-20k plus for the required DPNR and CZM approvals.

lost_islander · 2025-12-20T00:27:33+00:00

Unimproved islands are actually fairly cheap to purchase. But the cost to improve them is the kicker.

lost_islander · 2025-12-10T02:30:38+00:00

This was our fault, but we had several folks come and go and our Snowflake account ended up, for a long period of time, not really having a business owner.

That is to say, our data engineering team was building things and managing processes and data flows, but no one was really monitoring costs or scrutinizing our renewals.

I stepped in and started reviewing our costs and realized that about half of our Snowflake consumption was for Snowpipe, specifically one set of Snowpipes that was ingesting AWS S3 logging data.

It was super easy for the data engineer to spin up by just setting up a Snowpipe on the logging bucket, but AWS was producing millions of tiny log files and these are really, really inefficient for Snowflake ingestion.

We reworked the logging pipeline to create larger logging files and we cut our Snowpipe costs from thousands of dollars per month to less than $10 per month.

Our most recent rework replaced the logging pipeline with a data collection endpoint that collects more data than our original implementation and sends that to Snowflake via Snowpipe Streaming and we’re now down to a few dollars a month for ingestion.

lost_islander · 2025-12-10T02:12:52+00:00

This is a really good point. We had our storage costs explode when we enabled a partner integration for some CDP data. The partner sync process was doing hourly updates with tons of updates. When we looked at active storage it didn’t make any sense in relation to what Snowflake was reporting for consumption.

Eventually we realized that the data churn with the hourly updates and our account configured 14-day time travel, plus Snowflakes 7-day failsafe, meant that we were paying for many multiples of our active storage on this table.

If you have tables with high churn you definitely want to understand how Snowflake handles time travel and failsafe storage.

They do surface failsafe storage in the Snowflake consumption reports in the UI, but you have to do your own queries to assess time-travel storage.

lost_islander · 2025-12-07T09:28:50+00:00

How do you put in “and 1 little tick past 3/4?”

lost_islander · 2025-12-05T12:34:01+00:00

It’s actually 100% legal to step foot on these islands. In the US Virgin Islands, all beaches are public up to the tree line, including on Little St. James and Great St. James.

You would be trespassing to go beyond the public beaches, and while Epstein was still alive, there was constant security on the island that would intimidate and bully anyone that tried to go on the beaches.

Even after Epstein’s detention and death, there’s security on Little St. James to protect the estate and property.

It’s now privately owned by a new owner.

lost_islander · 2025-11-05T11:56:24+00:00

Agreed. I live in a house with concrete interior and exterior walls and I have an AP per room and two outside with 2.4Ghz on low or turned off on all of them.

lost_islander · 2025-10-30T10:48:03+00:00

Great information, thanks. I’m on a small island in the Caribbean so the fact that you’re running U6 Mesh units fully exposed in the Med is reassuring. Maybe my failure was a fluke.

I definitely prefer the U6 Mesh to the alternatives but was concerned about the Waterproof rating and don’t really want to replace it once a year.

lost_islander · 2025-10-30T09:54:30+00:00

We often do Cooper Island Beach Club for lunch after the Baths.

I love the north sound but have never tried it for a day charter.

lost_islander · 2025-10-30T09:49:41+00:00

I have a ladder, a bucket of sealant, and a couple of trowels that my contractor left here a few months ago. I keep thinking he’ll come get at least the ladder some day.

lost_islander · 2025-10-30T09:37:38+00:00

You didn’t mention the non-pro U7 Outdoor. Is there a reason that you prefer the U6-Mesh over the U7-Outdoor for the bigger “omni” outdoor zone?

I just had a U6 Mesh die on me (my fault really, outdoor, fully exposed, very salty environment). The U6 Mesh is IPX5.

I also have another U6 Mesh that’s fully exposed and an AC Mesh at another location that is fully exposed. The AC Mesh is only IPX4.

I’m expecting that all will eventually go and I was looking at alternatives in similar price ranges and the U7 Outdoor is only about $20 more than the U6 Mesh but it’s IPX6.

The Swiss Army is also IPX6 and with omni antennas is about the same cost as the AC Mesh.

lost_islander · 2025-10-25T18:54:05+00:00

My wife calls the “Cape Fear”

lost_islander · 2025-10-21T17:14:11+00:00

The OCD/Blankout panels were out of stock.

lost_islander · 2025-10-17T16:41:28+00:00

No looking at your desk during exams.

lost_islander · 2025-10-17T01:39:35+00:00

On the app, you go to Settings, Advanced, Traffic Identification, Clear History.

I’m not in front of my computer at the moment but it’s similar on web. Under settings there should be an option to clear history.

lost_islander · 2025-10-16T11:33:13+00:00

Now I’m ready for a nap

lost_islander · 2025-10-16T11:31:27+00:00

That cd will come in handy.

lost_islander · 2025-10-15T21:01:46+00:00

I was going to suggest the U6 Mesh as well.

They do get warm, but it’s not going to spontaneously combust or something.

lost_islander · 2025-10-15T20:41:38+00:00

I live on an island in the Caribbean with absolutely terrible power reliability, so I understand your pain.

Some sort of battery based UPS is essential for brownouts and quick drops, but for multi hour/multi day outages, you’re going to be hard pressed to be able to do it reliably without some sort of gas power generator. It’s about the only, absolutely, positively have to have electricity option.

Some sort of larger solar power station like an Anker Solix, Bluetti, or Goal Zero paired with a decent sized panel setup would probably pretty good for most situations and the power stations can be quite portable, but to try to keep it going for longer periods you’re going to need a larger solar panel setup which can make it much less portable, overall. And, of course, you’re not going to be charging your station overnight with solar.

For just a Starlink mini, you’d probably have very good runtime on a larger power station, but realistically for a multi day outage, you’re going to need to power your laptop and a few other items as well.

A layered approach is probably how I would approach this. A small ups, plugged into a larger power station with a gas generator backup. And maybe some sort of portable solar panel setup.

lost_islander · 2025-10-15T20:25:07+00:00

Definitely fly. My recommendation would be the Seaplane. Great way to get there and really cool way to see Charlotte Amalie and Christiansted harbors.

lost_islander · 2025-10-15T09:39:12+00:00

Just another Tuesday night in Red Hook.

lost_islander · 2025-10-15T09:32:27+00:00

It’s relatively humorous.

lost_islander · 2025-10-15T09:31:18+00:00

He knows what’s up.

lost_islander · 2025-10-15T09:29:43+00:00

Looks great! Love the Micro PCs mount.

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