I did something dumb with my ‘pooter Friday, and it ran me out of electricity.
For most of last week we saw little sun. I did not take that into consideration in my electricity use, because my itsy bitsy free sample of an electrical system has behaved so awesomely for the past year that I got cocky. I’ve said all along, as a rule of thumb, two days without sun and you’re done. But my solar panels are relatively new and working perfectly, so there’s really no such thing as a day when they’re not getting any input at all. But wed/thurs/fri I saw no more than glimpses of direct sunlight, and I really should have been taking that into consideration. Friday night around nine, we were done. The ‘pooter’s transformer kept the input voltage steady but the single CFL light I had on started flickering, which is a sign that you’ve been behaving unreasonably and it is definitely time to start turning things the hell off.
Yesterday at sunrise the battery voltage read 11.3, which is by far a first. You should never do that if you can help it. Fortunately yesterday morning was sunny, and I recorded the voltage every hour until the afternoon clouds rolled in. We never came anywhere near float. So yesterday I stayed away from the ‘pooter, which is my biggest draw, except for an hour and a half or so in the evening. This morning the sunny interval was shorter but adequate, and we hit float about half an hour before the clouds covered the sun.
“Float,” for the benefit of people not obsessed with the state of their storage batteries, refers to the point at which the charge controller decides your batteries are charged fully enough to back off on bulk charging, and begins pulsing the charge to top off the batteries and remove any slight sulfation that may have formed.
So having given the batteries a couple of sunny mornings without loading them down, I’m duly chastised and back in pretty good shape.
Speaking of batteries, my neighbors D&L found a dead cell in one of theirs. This is a $5000 disaster. Because they run a wood shop they need 240 volts, which means their inverter input needs 48 volts, which means the minimum battery bank they can have is 16 6-volt batteries. Their battery bank is fairly old, they planned to replace the whole thing next year and had budgeted for that. But now one of their batteries is toast, and for reasons I accept but don’t fully understand you can’t add one new battery to a bank of old ones. So they have to replace the whole big bank, at $300+ each, or roughly fifteen times what my whole system cost. Youch.
And finally, speaking of D&L, they’re coming down to the final stages of tiling the floors in their 4000 square foot strawbale-and-earthbag extravaganza. And their tile scraps alone will be enough to tile the floor of the Secret Lair – although the pattern(s) may turn out rather intricate. I got a call from L this morning, “Hey, we need to cut a bunch more borders and I’m out of room in the garage. Come get the first of these out of here.” So I did, just before the rain.
This is going to be an interesting project.
