Okay, challenge accepted. Enter the redneck!

It figures. Doesn’t it just freakin’ figure?

All of January passed with hardly a cloud in the sky. Never snowed once. Perfect weather for solar power. All those beautiful photons raining down on my panels, where they did no blessed good at all because my damaged batteries couldn’t deal with it.

Finally I get new batteries and what happens? Snow, of course. From clouds so thick you couldn’t prove such a thing as a “sun” even exists.

WAH! I wanted to play with my new toys! Specifically, I wanted to see how fast-or-slow I get a full charge in these slightly larger batteries, and how much load they’d tolerate.

But noooo. Now I’m concerned about even getting enough power for lights at night. The batts aren’t thoroughly charged to begin with, and who wants to run down brand-new batts?

Well. I don’t have to put up with that. A normal person would just fire up his generator, but I’m far from normal and don’t own one. What I do own is about 400 feet of extension cord.

Technically, Landlady owns most of this. But I know where it is!

And don’t write to tell me about the power loss across that much extension cord. I know that. It’ll stretch cross-country over the ridge from Ian’s Dome to my power shed and run a Battery Minder, and that’s all I care about.