Yesterday afternoon I was vegging out at the laptop, binge-watching old Star Trek episodes. It was somewhere around 3 in the PM and I happened to look up and notice the system voltage was almost a full volt lower than it was supposed to be. That was startling enough to get my ass vertical and go out to look things over. As far as I could tell, everything was just fine; the batteries were charging, albeit at a lower-than-expected voltage. The charge controllers reported everything copacetic. I even grabbed my good meter and checked the output of the four solar panels I could get to; they were each outputting cheerfully away, just at lower-than-max.
My system wasn’t defective, the sun was. I determined to keep an eye on the voltage the next day, which would be today, when the sun was near zenith…
…and of course everything is just peachy.
Sigh – it’s getting around firewood-cutting time. Kind of snuck up on me. We got almost no Monsoon this summer and it’s been so hot and still I’ve fallen into bad habits about sitting around indoors when I ought to have been active and productive. Now summer is gone. The good news is it’s finally cooling off. The bad news is pretty obvious…
Sadly yes it is “that time of year.” Just today I started in on the winter preps. No rush, since there’s around a month and a half before I can expect any serious snow. However, the thought of doing some of the maintenance in the frigid, rain soaked weather of South Ontario in late October, early November gets me motivated every year. It wouldn’t be a big issue if I had a garage to work in, but I don’t.