Thunderstorms yesterday and all night. The scary stuff passed south of me, mostly. For me, the important thing was that it clouded up in the morning and the sun never shined all day. Which, if you’re off-grid, means you should take heed of how much electricity you’re using.
I didn’t. There hasn’t been the slightest cloud in the sky for weeks, and I got cocky. If I’d been in Monsoon mode, turning things on when I want them and off when I don’t (and not wanting them very often) all would have gone fine. But I wasn’t. So it didn’t. The inverter kicked off a little after 8:30 in the evening, and that was all she wrote for about twelve hours because I don’t have a backup generator. I have written “nothing will turn you into a light-switch nazi faster than living off-grid.” Remind me to take my own advice, okay?
Fortunately the system is designed to do exactly what it did and there was no damage. Which is more than I can say for my good neighbor J. He lives on a high ridge that always seems right in the path of every thunderstorm. His house and most of his outbuildings bristle with lightning rods, but they can’t be everywhere. As far as we can tell his satellite dish took a hit. He lost his modem, but then the lightning did one of those perverse things it likes to do. J runs his computer gear on a separate solar power system, which is supposed to protect him. In this case it either made him more vulnerable or saved his primary system, I can’t decide. The smaller system that powers his computers is fried; both the inverter and the charge controller are total write-offs. Fortunately they’re small and won’t be very expensive to replace; if it had happened to his primary system it would have been a disaster.
The incident reminded me that home-built electrical systems do require maintenance. I’m careful about keeping the batteries topped off, but other things sometimes go begging. Once things charged up decently I took this opportunity to disconnect the batteries and do a good cleaning. Found a going-bad connection at the inverter that would have ended badly, too.
