Category: Solar

January 29th 2020

Wednesday morning and we are finally settled in at LaPosa West, when we came in on Sunday we did not take time to dump so that was how we spent our Tuesday afternoon, not real exciting but a task that was do, with 8 rigs in front of us so it was a fair wait. We had showers and Miss Laurie did a load of laundry to take advantage of all opportunities that are available, and again it was our grey tank that was full, miss being able to weep the grey…just saying. We put the window shades on yesterday to cut down on some of the heat, it is amazing how much they help in controlling the interior coach temperature, was definitely a good investment last winter. I’m also impressed with the extra solar, I will get a better idea in the next few days as yesterday got messed up with us having to go in the afternoon to dump.

So I need all our friends at Oak Grove to be sure and welcome Butch and Betty Ward back to the park…we are so glad that thing came together and they were able to escape back to the sunshine, but make sure to tell them to be home by the second week of April, cause we will be looking for a place to stay on our way back from the desert…just saying.

Now that most of my little projects are done, at least for now we are planning some excursions with the Bannon’s, that could possibly involve a ceasar or two or three. It hasn’t been a great solar day as we have had some heavy clouds and even about a dozen rain drops, one thing that has came to light, I just discovered that when our solar panels are harvesting at their maximum we are suffering a voltage drop of half a volt. Now half a volt don’t sound like much but when the controllers work on battery voltage to control the charge amperage it is a big deal, and that 0.5 volts can make the difference between charging at 60 amps or 5 amps the difference between bulk and float. I suspect that I will need to upgrade the size of the cable, I think with the new panels I’m just exceeding their amperage capacity because the issue is only there at full amperage and lessens as the amperage drops…there you go my next project.

Just a snapshot of the last hour of today’s solar harvest, the yellow highlighted line was the reduction of amperage going into the batteries from near 30 amps to 0, the purple line highlights the battery level, today we got within 20 amp/hours of being fully charged. The green highlights the instant pot cooking our dinner on the slow cooker mode, it obviously just controls the pattern as it doesn’t appear to have a lower wattage mode.

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