A Little Late

Hopefully, not too late. Last time I promised a series on emergency backup power, with and without solar. I also promised it would take a while because I’d need to take some pictures and make some drawings. Writing a column isn’t just writing. Writing is easy, like running off at the mouth, but people like pictures. And a picture is worth a thousand words.

We’ve had a good year, from the standpoint of hurricanes.  Summer was cloudy and rainy, which are not good for solar, but it was relatively calm.  Calm in Florida.  Folks that got floods and tornadoes will disagree and they may find the backup power series useful, too.  When I get to it.  Now autumn is here.  September is great.  It stops raining, we have lots of sunshine and temperatures drop into the 80s.  Love it!  But now, suddenly, the hurricanes are popping up.  One just trashed Puerto Rico and now there’s another brewing.  After practicing on Cuba, it appears to be heading to Tampa.  Oops, now the cone includes MY house!  OK, that is getting personal.

I promise that what follows will be rambling and somewhat incoherent.  I have been distracted recently, but there there may be a useful nugget in here.

It started last Friday.  Andy, my brother, usually comes up on his day off.  We trade books , shoot guns and or ride motorcycles (instead of working on the blog).  He knows not to come too early as I am not a morning person, but I do make an effort to get up before noon when he is coming up.  So, I puttered around and he didn’t show up.  I tried texting him, but a DR650, his recent ride in the eternal quest for THE ONE, makes a bit of noise and vibration and it is not uncommon for a call to be missed.

I puttered around until after lunch and decided I would venture off to the museum, in Century, where one of my solar installations was having an issue.  I decided I needed some wind in my face, like an old dawg with his head out the pickup truck window, so I went to pick out a motorcycle.  The solar-charged Zero motorcycle is a hoot and costs nothing to run, but I felt I needed some rumble, too, so I picked the barely-muffled Shadow ACE. 

I looked for a meter to take for troubleshooting, but I could not find one.  I swear, I think the electrical field of my 400 solar panels has disrupted the time and space continuum, as tools just disappear for weeks at a time and then mysteriously reappear on my workbench.  Anyway, no meter.  Oh well, I’m a pro.  I can improvise.

So, I roar off to the park to check out the lion’s head fountain that is no longer flowing.  This is a direct drive system with no battery or electronics.  Dirt simple.  I check and there are no leaves on the panels, which are mounted inconspicuously on top of a trellis.  That leaves the pump or wiring or a bad panel.  I suspect the pump and have both a spare and an external test pump.  I really don’t want to have to swap the submersible pump, because I’d have to siphon off the pool, open up the plug, fish wires through for the new pump, drag 100 yards of hose to refill the pool and buy chemicals to keep the pool from turning into a swamp.  Algae would give the poor lion a green beard beard and we can’t have that.

Assured that the panels were clear, I went behind the fountain and connected the external pump to the wires and nothing happened.  Hmmmph.  I bumped the wires together and there should have been a  tiny spark, but there was none.  Then…did you ever test a 9 volt battery by touching it to your tongue?  Well, yes I did and there was only the slightest tingle, like a bad 9v battery.  Well, well well.  Oh, before you try that, be aware of what you are testing.  I have some panels that put out 90 volts, which would turn a tongue into fried bacon.  These two panels in series in bright sunshine might make 12v and are pretty mild.  The average full size panel is 36 to about 48v, so don’t test them that way.  Find your meter.

The fact that I got a slight tingle, along with a visual inspection pretty well assured that the wires were intact.  The squirrels had not gnawed anything.

The solar panels on the system at the museum’s blacksmith shop are shiny new things that Roberto sent from Sun Electronics and are working great.  The ones on the fountain were used and abused.  I did not bring the prettiest ones because I am planning an expansion of the Solar Shed and need these solar shingles for my roof, preferably making some additional kilowatts.  Net result is I am going to have to not be so frugal and grab a replacement panel from my private reserve to replace the bad one.  No big deal, but I’ll have to go back and get the truck and a ladder, etc.  Oh, by the way, when I got home the meter had returned to my workbench after I had taste tested the solar panels at the park.

Back at the house, I started gathering stuff to go get the lion flowing again and the phone rang.  Maybe that was Andy.  He was a few weeks from retirement and looking forward to riding all over the country on his various motorcycles.  Maybe he was ready to declare that the Suzuki was going to be the perfect ride. You know, THE ONE.  Nope.  He had been riding a back road in the next county over and had slowed to ease around a mud hole.  A tire slipped in the rut.  He fell off, broke his neck and died in an instant.

So, I’ve been a little busy with family stuff the past week.

–Neal