And Tropical Storm Cristobal is on the way. It looks to be heading to Louisiana, but Florida is getting the bulk of the rain. As far as storms go, this should be pretty mild, but you never know what tornadoes might pop up. Driving could be tough. Trees can fall on power lines. Hopefully, those of us in the storm zone just get some soaking rains and our solar power will keep the lights on […]

Ok, you know I like to talk about safety, often based on experience, so here is a quick one I bet you haven’t thought about. I am planning to try some of those 10 cent FS70 solar panels that Sun Electronics is selling and then write a review. I have actually used 4 of them in the lighting system in my “boxcar”, a 40′ boxcar-red shipping container. At the Solar Shed, some space freed up […]

In it was a handout touting the cooperative’s dedication to service to its members. The coop power had been out for over 3 hours at that time, owing to a car vs. pole incident. A neighbor had power because I could hear the generator buzzing. I had power, too, but nobody could hear it. Back to the power bill. I have been waiting for it with glee. How often to you hear of that? Pretty […]

Last week, during my morning coffee and internet infusion, I read of a very large solar power plant being planned for Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land in Nevada. Then, this morning, I read about a 6.5 earthquake in Nevada. Man, it’s always something going wrong, isn’t it?  Then I heard Puerto Rico had one! It just goes to show that normal, everyday conditions are not the only ones to plan for. Here in Florida, […]

Reassessing capacity. I read online solar news journals every morning while the coffee soaks in. Most of it is grid stuff, but those guys are in it for the money and have the bucks to pay for the research, so I pay attention. I also paid attention when I lived very closely with my solar power during my 44 days aboard Sun King. What I learned there was that we waste an awful lot of […]

Let’s build some cables I told you the other day I had reached the limits of what my homebrew 5500 watt inverter could do. I had a 10kw driver module to install, but it was bigger and was going to need some more cables. One night I switched the house to grid, ran a power cord from the Sun King for lights and I shut down the inverter for a recon. What I found was […]

John tells of the glories of swimming with the fish in Miami’s bays. Then he tacks on something solar. It’ll be a while before I get back into the water, but I have some solar sea stories. I built an electric boat and it was great, but I couldn’t travel with it. I could easily do a 20 mile day trip, but I wanted to go places and explore. That is how Sun King came […]

What happens when you outgrow your solar power system? Plan ahead for upgrades.

They are now making solar modules with power output in excess of 500 watts! Wow, that’s what I need for the Solar Yacht, instead of the 330s I have now. The thing is, you just can’t buy them, yet. The superest, duperest biggest and bestest go to the solar farms. Don’t worry, by the time the Gopher sets sail they will be available, but you’ll be wanting the 600s. A few years back, someone came […]

I chased one and it wasn’t what I thought it would be. A big part of living off grid or keeping the power bill down if you are on grid is efficiency. Try as you may to get everybody in the household to turn off unused lights or to not leave the fridge door open, there can still be waste. Some of this comes from “phantom loads” from devices that still use power, even when […]

Sooner or later, you gotta do it, whether it is the clock, the smoke detector in the hall, the car or your solar power system. Oh? You have grid tie and don’t have to change the battery? We’ll talk about that, too. The batteries that I had on the main bank were in great shape, but there weren’t enough of them, especially now that the brutal air conditioning season has begun. One of the auxiliary […]

Spare, extra or redundant, call it what you like, chances are you are going to need more.  Oh, yeah, there’re fuses and connectors and such as that, but I’m talking about wire and cable, here. When I was a young broadcast engineer at WCOA, Pensacola, I engaged in a total rework of its broadcasting facility. It was tricky, since the station had to stay functional while the new stuff was being installed. An important part […]

I wrote the material below quite a while back and it somehow fell through the cracks.  I have since gone through a couple of variants of a Zero Export Grid Tie system, including a new one this past weekend…and the power company’s meter hasn’t budged since!  Read this to get up to speed and there will be more on the latest changes. The season is changing and so are the solar connections at the Solar […]

We have some new buzzwords in our vocabulary and a new normal. Self-isolating and social distancing. Miami is kind of a hotspot in Florida, so John has the store closed so everyone can stay safe. Roberto is manning the phone, though, so if you need something you can still get it. The phone transfer mechanism leaves a bit to be desired as far as sound quality goes, but I had a chat with Roberto and […]

The homes of my grandparents were special places when I was a kid. Bro and I went by the former Collier house on a recent trip to Lake City, Florida. It was a sad sight. The big camphor tree, where Dad had his tree house is now just a stump. The yard is grown up. The house looks shabby and gutted. The old houses of Lake City had a great architectural element in their pressed […]

Did you ever read, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn?” I can’t remember if I ever did, but I know I had the book. If there is a tree there, I’m sure the dogs appreciate it. There probably isn’t much solar power on the neighborhood level in Brooklyn, so all is good. There are lots of trees at my place. It is a tree farm, after all. The blooming Paulownia grove is a delight to the […]

It has been in the 80s here for a week. When the nights were still dipping down low enough at night the house would stay cool enough. Not now. It is time to fire up the a/c. The solar-powered a/c. I have written about combining solar and a/c before.  Go back in the blogs to find the articles.  I’ll update some things, here. The house started getting undeniably warm, so it was time to get […]

My brother and I drove across Florida from Pensacola to Lake City on business. It was good to put faces to the voices we knew from the phone calls. What we were not expecting to see were thousands of solar panels. The last few times I’ve been across Interstate 10, all you’d see of note on I-10 was the devastation of Hurricane Michael. Suddenly, I realized something and told Andy, “Hey, we own that!” At […]

I don’t watch much TV, beyond the network evening news. I was in the kitchen eating when my ears perked up about something solar on 60 Minutes. Then I heard Rocky Mountain Institute mentioned. I had to watch. You’ll recall that a Cat 5 hurricane clobbered the Bahamas and just smashed the Dickens out of parts of it. Traditionally, power in the Bahamas comes from a Diesel plant on every island. Fuel deliveries are ever […]

Kris Kristofferson had a big hit with a song on that theme. Instead of moaning about why things had gone so wrong, though, he was wondering why good things had happened when he felt he didn’t deserve them. Well, things can go wrong in your solar power system, just like anything else, and you’ll have to get off your wallet to fix them.  You can ask, “Why me?”, but if you are just feeling sorry […]

You might thought I have forgotten poor ol’ Will. No, I have been busy and I think Will is now leaning toward grid tie. He has such a big load and the whole purpose of going solar was to save money when he retires. Grid tie can be a whole bunch cheaper than going off grid. In his case, if the grid goes down, he has a whole house generator that kicks in automatically. That […]

Going through this morning’s online solar newsletters, I saw some new products that are on the way. This is not at all unusual, but a couple of these things made an impression. In solar modules, Trina is using bigger cells, but slicing them up and arranging them so you can get 500 watts from a panel the same size as a standard 72 cell unit! Wow, and to think I was drooling over 435 watt […]

You know the old saying about one bad apple causing the whole basket full of them to go bad. The same thing applies to batteries. I am there, now, and so is Mark. Like me, Mark seems intrigued by the Simpliphi lithium batteries, but is also interested in getting a little more life out of what he has. Here’s his note. Ok, since my 8 Rolls L 16 batteries are 8+ years old, all but […]

Stan called and he was happy. His old 12v system, pictured above, is really getting tired. It consists of nearly 50 mismatched modules and two windmills in parallel on a single overworked charge controller!  His new 24v system is running, but only half-installed and there have been issues. After our little troubleshooting session the other day, Stan-the-Hermit left the cabin on the creek for a few nights on the beach. He’d returned to the creek […]

Stan-the-Hermit Needs Help I knew there was trouble as soon as I saw the Caller-ID. Stan’s system has been under performing, partly because he doesn’t have a decent battery and partly because half of his panels never got connected. Well, more than that, it turns out. I loaded up my big spool of solar cable and a fistful of connectors and adapters and headed for Canoe Creek. You can’t get to his cabin in a […]

Here is an interesting battery for Will. Yes, it HAS been a while since the last post. This time of year just seems to keep me busy. Last update on Will’s system we essentially concluded he is going to need a huge battery. Batteries should not be a system afterthought. They are probably the most important and expensive part of the system. Do it right and you can minimize having to do it again, unless […]

If you have your own solar power system, you literally own the power company. Heck, you ARE the power company. It can be a big chunk, at first, but over the long term you should save some big bucks. Like the big power company, you’ll have maintenance costs, but at least you won’t have to replace 10,000 poles next time a hurricane or ice storm rolls through. The big power companies know that solar is […]

Will needs a big solar power system for his big house. We figure he has the perfect slab of roof for installing enough solar modules. Now, since he wants an off-grid system, we are going to think about a battery. A really BIG battery. No, I have not forgotten about Will and his new solar power system. It’s just, well, holiday season, firewood cutting season and working on my own system season. I have been […]

I’d have done this a little differently. Take a good look at the photo. These guys are going to lose space for an entire panel because of a vent pipe poking up through the roof. Why are there vent pipes? Because when you use a sink or any other water source in the house, it needs to be vented to drain properly. The vents stick out the roof because clean water is not the only […]

And connectors, and terminals and adapters and… Just a quick tip coming from experience. I was out in the Solar Shed, today, pulling wire to add a couple more panels to my Non-Export Grid Tie experiment. I’ve been running 1200 watts, being shared by two GT inverters. Now it is 1800 watts. Soon, it’ll be 2400 and live on the grid instead of in the lab. I have the giant spool up on a rack […]

We now know a bit more about Will’s roof, his power consumption and what he wants to do. Let’s get started…on some Texas-sized solar power. I’ve been in contact with Will and he supplied some more information.  If you read Part 1, you know he wants to go with solar power, but that leaves a lot out.  We now know that he has a big house, 3700 sq. ft., and pool.  He also has a […]

Using the hot sun to keep the groceries cold. Awesome!

Actually, Will has several questions, but they all boil down to “how do I get started?” ” I am looking into installing solar panels on my roof. I have a straight gable roof that the back slope faces South. I have a 200 amp breaker box and would like to keep that amount of power when I go solar. Looking at solar panels, they come in different amounts of watts per panel. How many watts […]

Tropical Storms in the Gulf, tornadoes in Alabama and lots of rain. That’s not a time when you’d normally think solar power, except how little the panels are putting out. It IS a good time to hole up with a small project. In the last post, I mentioned the Tiny Watts group and their tiny projects. And I mentioned that Solar George had given me an idea. I had a couple of small solar panels […]

Just a few notes on solar in the news. Click in the parentheses for the links, since I can’t seem to make them show up in some browsers. A really biased (headline) blames California power outages on climate change. The actual cause of PG&E outages is PG&E pulling the plug when it gets breezy! Proper powerline maintenance, line stabilizers and right-of-way maintenance to reduce fuel would go a long way to prevent fires from powerline […]

When installing a new power system or doing a little troubleshooting, an appropriate meter can be just the thing to make the job easier.  For example, with the analog voltmeter and the digital ammeter, we were able to determine that the panel above was a little low on output.  What could possibly be wrong? There are analog meters, which you don’t see much, anymore, and the digital meters which seem to be in favor these […]

Some folks have big systems and some have small. A small solar power system is pretty easy to wring out if there is a problem. Use your multimeter (You DO have a multimeter, don’t you???) to tell if you have volts getting to your charge controller, or if you have it up to that fuse that blew, but not beyond. A bigger system can be a little harder to keep up with. My system has […]

My first solar project was to put 4 tiny 6 volt solar panels on the top of the instrument panel of my old Piper TriPacer.  The panels were little more than experimenter toys made from solar cell scraps in a plastic frame.  40 years ago you took what you could get in solar.  Old airplanes have tiny batteries, crappy starters and high displacement engines. Add in flying them only on the weekends and you can […]

John was just about worn out when I talked to him, yesterday.  He’s at the big solar show in Salt Lake City.  Sun Electronics does not have a booth, there.  He’s there to hobnob and network, catching up with old friends and keeping up with the latest offerings. All of the panel makers are there, including the Chinese, who are not selling a lot of modules owing to the tariffs.  I’m sure each maker is […]

It Doesn’t Have to Be! My neighbor Connie got her power bill yesterday.  It was $497.  That was just the one for the house, she has another for the well.  I got my bill today and it was $67.  Mind you, $27 of that was for electricity and 40 is for taxes, fees, waste and corruption.  So Connie only used $457 worth of electricity, but she gets mad when she hears about my tab.  Well, […]

This morning, going through the email editions of American Solar Energy Society’s Solar@Work and  PV Magazine, I came across an article on things found wrong during inspections of photovoltaic power systems, both at home and commercial installations. You might want to take a look at the article and then take a look at your own system! https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/09/19/solar-power-installation-techniques-dont-do-this-w-pictures/ –Neal

Don’t Worry, We Can Fix This After Hurricane Katrina, solar power took off in New Orleans. Long nights without power left folks wanting a little more control of their situation and rooftop solar took off. How much of that was actually usable when the grid is down and how much was grid tie? I’m betting there was a lot of grid tie. Nothing wrong with that, especially if you get real net metering. Figure up […]

John called the other day for some solar chit chat. He asked if I was still using my solar air conditioning and I replied that I was. It was holding up well in the blistering heat. He said, “You should write a blog about it.” Well, gee John, don’t you read this stuff? There are 3 articles here in the tech blog, I think, about air conditioning with solar power, but maybe that isn’t obvious. […]

Don’t Try This at Home Did you hear about the solar panel fires on the roofs at various WalMarts?  Don’t let it happen to you! Little bits and pieces of this story have been coming out in the solar trade press for a few weeks, now.  What I have gathered from this is that the rooftop solar power systems at 7 WalMarts have caught fire.  The roofs were steel and the stores were not extensively […]

Survival Stories 460 years ago, a Spaniard named Tristan de Luna y Arellano sailed into Penscola bay to establish the first European settlement. A few weeks later, before they even had all the ships unloaded, Luna and his 1500 colonists discovered the hurricane. I can only imagine the shock and terror as these folks held on for dear life as their makeshift houses blew away. It got worse after the storm was over, because one […]

Condo Solar As promised, I am passing along John’s description of the emergency backup system he put in his condo, years ago. Battery backup, with solar and a generator. The power does not usually stay off very long in big cities, but it doesn’t have to go off at all! When I started Sun Electronics 35 years ago, I used my home office, it had been my Kyocera America East Coast and Latin America office. […]

If you are in the storm zone, we wish you all the best. If you have a backup power system that survived or can cobble something up, let us know what worked. If your system failed, let us know about that, too, so we can learn from it. I spoke with John Sunday night. The blogs have been getting an overhaul and he is having trouble making posts, so I thought I’d let you know […]

I was working on a new series of posts on the basics, but something has come up…a hurricane.  The projected trajectory has it going over Puerto Rico, where they’ve still got a lot of PTSD from the last one, then pass by John’s balcony in Miami and maybe come ashore somewhere between West Palm and Jacksonville.  I have a friend in St. Augustine who has had chest deep water in his living room twice in recent […]

So you’ve been thinking about solar power or battery backup and wondering, “Can I do it myself?”  Well, let’s stop for a moment if you really meant, “May I do it myself?”  Those are two different things and I’ll talk about both, separately, but I wanted to point out both considerations.  Without any more information, I’d say, “Maybe” to both.  Can you?  Let’s talk about the physical requirements.  I’m 65 years old, am 30 pounds […]

John and I have been talking about using solar power to survive in relative comfort after a storm.  In my efforts to mostly eliminate my old 24v solar power system I realized I was putting together what would make a good example for survival power.  Why did I not eliminate the 24v system completely?  My solar electric launch, Sun King, is in the Solar Shed and needs to be kept charged up in the dark […]