Category: Personal

January 28th 2020

420 Watts More?

I talk a lot about solar, and some of you just roll your eyes, so I just thought I would show the difference a couple of extra panels. The only difference is the panels, we have not moved, and both days are nothing but sunshine, the new panels were installed by about noon yesterday, but I had to pick up a couple of connectors to wire them in so they did not start adding to the cause until about 1:30, and I had to reset the controllers to work properly as you may notice by the pattern forming at the far right of this snapshot. Sorry the amperage and battery level are opposite to the ones below…

Here is a snapshot of solar life, this is from 8 am to 10 am on the 27th of January. The blue line shows the battery usage, while the brown line shows the amperage. The purple arrow shows where the solar first started to add to the batteries. The green points out when the beverage fridge kicked on, notice the big draw to start the compressor. The red indicates toasting bread for breakfast. The yellow arrow was the fresh water pump, also at the bottom of the toaster operation. And the orange is the solar recharging the battery bank.

This is a snapshot of the same time on the 28th of January. The blue and brown show the same information. Generally very similar with the big difference being the blue line and the sharper uptick in the battery recharging. The scaling on the brown amperage line is different because of a short usage of the microwave (which is a large draw) to soften the butter…lol. The same refrigerator cycling, water pump, and of course our toast at about 9 o’clock. About the same time the solar stops the discharging of the batteries.

The difference in the above two snap shots is the addition of 420 watts of solar just show the improvement. With sunrise at 7:35 am we did not start putting power into the batteries till 9:00 am, then the toaster pulled a full 6 amp/hours before the solar started adding power again, in fact if you look close on the top snapshot you can see that the first batch of toast was put back down (I like my toast a little darker), then the spike while Miss Laurie’s toast was started. The draw spike for the beverage fridge in the basement is quite severe but only cycles on about every 45 minutes, and runs for about six minutes as seen in the amperage draw brown line. Even with the two extra panels by 4:45 pm we are falling into a negative amperage, sunset is 6:02 and we are already -6 amp/hours. The reality is that we are getting less that eight hours of solar harvest strong enough to charge our batteries…the joys of winter. But the nights have been warm enough that I have shut the boiler off. The scaling between the days is different because we needed to nuke the butter for our toast which because of the draw changed the amperage scale, and at 10 o’clock on the second snapshot we were bringing in 16 amps as compared to the 7 amps, the difference because of the new panels…just saying

January 4th 2020

Saturday! We had great plans for today…the key word there is “had”, as Miss Laurie is still down and out…so our plans have changed our visit with Gilles and Francine is off, no sense of infecting any one else with this bad cold…especially people we actually like…just saying.

It’s another sunny day in Yuma, temperature should get into the low seventies today, that’s low twenties in Canadian, after the proper exchange as been applied…we have taken our battery bank to new lows overnight, but so far the solar alone is starting to bring it back, I have pulled out the Zamp solar suitcase and set it up, I have also tilted the fourth panel on the roof, after much consideration, it was just the right thing to do, and to give us a true picture of the solar, and we are now pushing over thirty amps back into the battery bank we have gained over 5% but it is obvious that we will need some more generator time today to get us back into a better SOC (state of charge), I’m going to try to get us back around 75 to 80 percent SOC which is a big push considering we started this push from 17% SOC. My first thought is that we are definitely going to need more panels, now it is determining how many more watts we will need to add, we need to get to a level that we can replace as much power as we have used, plus a little bit for a cloudy day or two.

The upside of being captured in the coach today is that some of the NFL wild card games are on the television today, and the Buffalo Bills are actually playing…well let me rephrase that they are being given the opportunity to play today, we will see how many of them actually show up to “PLAY”. I have not seen a Bills game since heading to Arizona so it will be good, I have to head out to get a couple of beverages before the game and pick up some supplies.

Sorry for not finishing this Blog yesterday but there were a number of issues that jumped up and fought for my attention …let me explain. The quick trip to purchase some beer got me side tracked by a hot chicken wing bar right beside the beer isle (talk about doing a great job of up-selling), and watching a Bills game it’s almost a requirement to have wings and beer so I purchased some wings and then of course had to sit down and eat said wing with a couple of beers. And then there was the GAME, and in typical Buffalo Bills style they sucked everyone into thinking that they might actually win a playoff game for the first time since 1995…just to crush our hopes by a few suspect play calls. Hell they even took it to overtime before taking an unnecessary suspicious 15 yard penalty to take themselves out of a possible field goal position to win the football game.

So because I had decided when I started writing this blog, I thought it would be best not express my thoughts while under the influence, and by the time I got to the end of the Bills game I was definitely under the influence I just knew it was best not to write what I was really thinking hence the delayed publication of this blog…just saying.

Battery SOC update: at the lowest level yesterday the bank was at a low of 17%, by late afternoon we had made it back to 49% gaining 32% just from the harvest of solars, my objective yesterday was to get back to at least 75%. So I added a couple of hours of generator time and at 8pm we got to the 75% level so I shut down the generator, now on Sunday we will just use solar to see if we can get back to 75% by 8pm on Sunday. I just let the state of charge get away from me this week by not increasing the solar harvest quick enough, so my bad. Now we will just wait and see what the results of Sunday’s solar harvest as we will be on the move again on Monday so time will tell.