solar – Riveted

Power Made Easy – Airship’s Electrical Upgrades

Kevin Morris — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 04:14:19 +0000

Before our 5-month trip up the Inside Passage to Alaska aboard Airship, we did some major upgrades to Airship’s electrical power system. Now, after five solid months on the boat – mostly away from marinas, here is a summary of how the system performed, what we learned, and what our “ideal” power system might look like.

SPOILER: It was AWESOME! We could not be more thrilled with how robust, reliable, and easy to use the new power system proved in five solid months of harsh use.

BONUS SPOILER: For the first 3 weeks of our trip – from Anacortes, Washington up the Inside Passage to Ketchikan, Alaska, we never once ran the generator or hooked up to shore power. We never once turned off the inverter or the water heater. We basically had all the power we wanted or needed without having to flip a switch, read a meter, or think about “how much power do we have?”

BONUS SPOILER DISCLAIMER: We said we didn’t “have” to read a meter or worry – but we did anyway. We’re data nerds. We looked at the meter about 15 times per day “Wooooo – look at that! We’ve still got 94% of battery left. Whoa! check it out – our solar array is pumping out 30 amps! Wow, we haven’t had to start the genset or hook up the power cord for WEEKS!”

OK, here is Airship’s system and the philosophy behind it.

We think of the power system in terms of power sources, power drains, and power storage. Power sources include the main engine alternator, the generator, solar panels, and shore power. Power drains are things like the refrigerator, freezer, water heater, lighting, laptops, and misc appliances. Power storage is the house batteries.

Airship 2016:

Power sources:

150A 12V engine alternator
5KW 120V Cummins/Onan Generator
Two 260W Solar panels with dual BlueSky charge controllers and IPNPro Remote display
30A Shore power cord connected to Magnum Inverter/Charger – 125A 12V charge rate.

Power Drains: (note, we are only counting “house” power – not including the navigation instruments, engine electronics, bow and stern thrusters, windlass, etc.).

Major: Water heater, refrigerator, deck-top chest freezer (These account for the majority of daily power usage.)
Medium: Nespresso coffee machine, laptop chargers, hair dryer, Wallas diesel heater fan (These account for noticeable usage, but aren’t significant.)
Minor: Lighting (Airship is all LED), phone chargers, entertainment devices (stereo, TV, etc). (These things use so little power, you almost don’t need to think about them.)

Storage:

600Ah 12V Lithium battery array with battery management system from AM Solar

Our philosophy is to set things up so the batteries can power anything and everything for one full day.

Why?

When we are traveling, we often spend only a single night at an anchorage or marina, then cruise several hours the next day to another destination. In that situation, we’d like things to be as easy as possible – no hooking up to shore power, no running the generator, just nice silent trouble-free battery power. And, we don’t want to be constantly worrying about how much power we’re using, turning things (like the water heater) on and off all the time, etc. That means we need a big enough usable house battery capacity to handle one day of our normal use, with a little to spare. And, we need an inverter big enough to handle any AC loads we might have without running the generator or hooking up shore power.

We calculated our daily usage while we were cruising around the San Juan Islands in the winter and spring. It looks like we use up to 450Ah of 12V electric in a typical day – if we leave the inverter and electric water heater running 24/7. (It turns out that the water heater accounts for OVER HALF of our total power usage on Airship).

NOTE: Don’t be put off by the electrical terminology. “Ah” stands for amp-hours. If that’s too unfamiliar, pretend that electricity comes in “gallons” and substitute that in your mind. “Airship uses 450 gallons of power per day.” Pretend that the battery is a fuel tank, and it holds a certain number of gallons. Pretend that the power sources pump a certain number of gallons per day into the battery. You’ll be just fine.

For that reason, we decided that a USABLE house battery capacity of 600Ah would be perfect for Airship. Note the word USABLE there. For normal lead-acid or AGM batteries, you should not regularly discharge more than 50%, so a 600Ah usable capacity would require 1200Ah of total battery capacity. For lithium batteries, however, they are typically rated for 100% of their listed capacity (some companies rate for 80%), so a 600Ah battery capacity gives 600Ah (or 480Ah if 80% rated) of USABLE capacity.

So, with a 600Ah usable battery capacity on Airship, we should be able to run everything just fine for a full day without adding any power to the system and without doing anything particular to conserve.

Now, once we’ve done that, how do we refill the battery for the next day?

Time to talk about our Power Sources:

First, there is the solar. Our two 260W solar panels don’t ever put out even close to 260W each. Solar panels must be rated by a marketing guy who stands in the Sahara Desert pointing the panel directly at the sun exactly at noon. No solar panel in the real world ever comes close to its rated output. Second, even in the Land of the Midnight Sun, it’s not always sunny. You only get a few hours of good, solid sunlight per day, and most of those are at a steep angle, not with your panel pointed right at the sun. Clouds, rain, and fog all cut down significantly on your power output.

Finally, for boats and RVs in particular, there is a HUGE issue with solar that most people are not aware of – PARTIAL SHADE/SHADOW. In a normal solar panel, if you cast a shadow on JUST ONE of the little square cells (many panels have 50-60 of these little squares) – you have just cut the output by as much as 90%! Yep, you read that right. Casting a shadow on something like 5% of the panel almost completely shuts the panel down. And, on a boat, there is usually not a place you can put a panel where it won’t often be shaded by some part of the mast, antennas, or some other rooftop protrusion. Add to that the boat swinging at anchor, and you realize you just have to live with the fact that your solar panels will often be severely under-performing.

On Airship, we have a mast with a radar dome and several antennas. That means that at least one of our two solar panels will almost always have partial shade. If you have two panels on a single charge controller, that one panel will cut the output of BOTH panels significantly. So, we chose to have a separate charge controller (called an MPPT controller) for each panel. That way, when one panel is shaded and the other is in full sun, each one will have its output separately maximized by the charge controller. But – if you’re adding solar to a boat, RV, or whatever – REALLY pay attention to partial shade. Even a seemingly-small shadow is NOT OK!

We have now measured the output of Airship’s solar system over a wide range of conditions – from winter in the San Juans to mid-summer in SE Alaska. We have seen our total daily output range from 80Ah to almost 200Ah. Now, remember when we said our normal daily usage was around 450Ah? That means our solar provides something like 20-50% of our daily energy needs.

Second, there is the engine alternator. Airship has a 150A engine alternator. When we’re cruising, about 100A of that (on average) makes it into the house batteries. So, if we put 100A into the batteries for 4.5 hours of cruising, we’ve replaced our daily 450Ah that we used from the batteries. If we factor in 100Ah per day or so from the solar, we could cruise as little as 3.5 hours and end up with the batteries full again – just from the solar and engine alternator.

So – what if we don’t cruise 3.5-4.5 hours per day with some sunlight to boot? That’s when we need the generator or shore power. If we stay at anchor for more than one night, we need to run the generator to replace what we used each day. Our generator (using the “charger” part of the Inverter/Charger to charge the batteries) gives us a 125A charge rate. So, we’d need to run the generator between 3 and 4 hours per day to refill the batteries. If we have a good solar day and the solar pitches in 125Ah or so, that cuts an hour off the generator run time.

One thing we love about the lithium batteries is that they can be charged at full speed directly to full. Regular lead-acid or AGM batteries have to be charged more gently, slowing down the charge rate as they approach full. Our friend Steve says he thinks of it as pouring beer into a glass – when you get toward the top, you have to slow down to let the foam settle. So, with regular batteries, you have to run the generator much longer to charge them completely. You get to 80% or so pretty fast, but then the charge rate slows way down. Generators like to be run with heavy loads, though. It’s not good for your generator to run “easy” with light electrical loads. Lithium batteries, then, let us run our generator for a shorter time, and under a much better load than if we were trying to put the same charge into conventional batteries. It’s win-win.

Finally, when we’re at a marina for more than one night, we can plug into shore power. This year, our power system was so good, and we so seldom stayed more than one night at a marina, that we hardly ever needed to get out the shore power cord. It was wonderful! (This also means that we saved a few bucks in marina power charges. Power can be expensive in BC and AK since marinas often get their power from generators. Power alone can add $20/day to your moorage fee.)

One thing we did here was reduce the charge rate for shore power. Usually, when you plug into shore power, you have plenty of time, so there’s no need to rush getting your batteries back to 100%. And, if your 30A shore connection is using most of its capacity to recharge your batteries, you can easily trip the breaker if you try to run “other stuff” at the same time. So, we tell the charger to go slowly on shore power, and save some of that capacity for other things – like making coffee.

The one thing we’d maybe upgrade on our system at this point is to change our Inverter/Charger to one of the new “Hybrid” models. These new units have the ability to sense when you’re using more than the available shore power, and actually dip into the battery reserves to boost the output. It can be almost like having 50A power available, even though you’re plugged into only 30A. Then, when you’re using less power, the Inverter/Charger goes back to recharging your house batteries. It would be a nice upgrade.

One final note, for expedition cruising, this system also gives a nice measure of redundancy. If the generator fails, we still have solar and engine alternator to give us power. If the charger fails, we have a second battery charger that can step in. If the engine alternator fails, we can divert power from the generator and solar. It’s a very robust system that (so far) has served us extremely well.

Overall, we are thrilled with the major electrical upgrades we did to Airship this year. As we said, probably the only additional thing we’d change would be a swap for a “Hybrid” style inverter. If you’re on a larger boat with 240V AC power and/or 24V DC power – all these same principles apply, you just need bigger (and more expensive) versions of the same equipment.

Airship’s Solar Upgrade

Laura Domela — Mon, 07 Mar 2016 17:04:44 +0000

When we bought our (second) Airstream trailer back in 2010 we had a solar system installed by AM Solar in Springfield, Oregon. We knew (1) we’d be using the trailer off the grid often, (2) we needed electricity to live and work (and blog), and (3) we didn’t want a noisy generator. That solar system has been wonderful – supplying plenty of energy for us to stay in remote areas for many days with no power except what we could gather from the sun.

When we bought Airship in 2014, we knew we wanted solar on it as well.

The power situation on the boat is considerably different than on the Airstream. First, the boat has a 5KW Onan diesel generator built in that runs off the boat’s fuel supply. As generators go, it is quiet, efficient, and easy to use. But, when we’re at anchor, we don’t really want to be running the generator all the time. So, we doubled the size of the house batteries (to 440Ah) added a 2,800W Inverter (to allow us to run AC loads without running the generator) and added two 140W solar panels and a charge controller to help keep the batteries charged during the day.

Solar panels, first round:

What we’ve learned in the 300+ nights we’ve spent on Airship is that we want more solar power, and we want more battery capacity. Unlike the Airstream, Airship’s refrigerator is not propane-powered, so you’ve got a fair amount of energy being used all the time to run the refrigerator and the deck-top chest freezer we added. Adding the other miscellaneous loads to that, we found that the 280W of solar we’d installed never “gained ground”. It simply slowed down the rate at which the batteries went down during the day. If we started the day at 100% battery capacity, we’d be down around 75% by the end of the day, even with the solar helping out. Since you don’t want to run AGM batteries below 50%, that means we were using up about half of our useful capacity during the day even with the help of the solar.

Usually, then, we’d end up running the generator for an hour or so at the end of the day, and another hour or so first thing in the morning. Even with solar, our batteries are basically good for 24 hours at anchor without running the generator under normal conditions.

Looking at the roof of the boat and the specifications of new solar panels, we realized we could replace the two 140W panels with two 260W panels and almost double the solar power. Of course, bigger panels require bigger wires, so we’d need to re-run the wiring from the roof of the pilothouse down to the engine room where the solar charge controller is.

And, since bigger solar panels mean more power, we’d need to replace the solar charge controller which wasn’t big enough for the new panels. We opted for 2 separate charge controllers to make the system more efficient even with the partial shade we often have on one panel or the other from the radar antenna.

And finally, using the new charge controllers meant we’d need a new display, control panel.

So, we ended up with a pretty big project removing the old solar system and replacing it with new. And, since (ahem) one of us had his right arm out of commission, it was up to the other one to do the vast majority of the actual work.

The new solar panels JUST fit…coming right to the edge of the pilothouse:

Leaving room for the center hatch to open just fine:

For comparison, previous (smaller) 140 watt solar panel on the left (note the amount of space between the edge of the pilothouse and the panel, and the panel and the center hatch):

New (much larger) 260 watt solar panel on the right (note lack of space around new panel):

Running new wires down through the mast:

Wiring the two charge controllers in my slippers, like a boss (shut up):

It's a pretty cramped workspace down in the engine room, so we put enough wire on these so we could bring 'em up top to work on them, and then just coiled it up and zip tied it after we installed them (this is apparently called a "service lead"):

It took about two days to finish the whole project. Everything seems to be working great, although we’ve only really been able to test the system in the marina. Yesterday morning before we left Cap Sante and headed for LaConner, at 9am with a still-low sun we showed to be putting 15 amps into the batteries. Woohoo!

At the moment it's gray sky and pouring rain, but we're in a covered slip now so it makes little difference as far as solar is concerned:

We're in LaConner having some electronics upgraded and some carpet replaced with Amtico (the flooring we already have throughout most of the boat). I brought the boat from Cap Sante yesterday morning and Kevin drove the truck over and met me at the dock. (Yay, I soloed the boat!) It was pretty windy, with quite a bit of chop (even in the channel) but it was a relatively chill little hour-and-a-half cruise.

Home, Work, Hike, Work

Laura Domela — Fri, 04 Mar 2016 20:18:23 +0000

We've been quiet and boring, I know. We just left you there with that bread maker thing for a week and a half! Sorry. Here's a photo of the (muddy) hiking trail near our house:

It had been raining for days and days, but we had a nice stretch of a week or so with some dry times so we made sure to do our 3-4 mile hike every day that we could while we were home. We've been working quite a bit, but guess what? We're heading back to the boat tomorrow!

We're taking Airship over to La Conner on Sunday to get some electronics upgrades. Those upgrades will take about a week, and then we've got a guy who is going to replace a couple of the spots where there's carpet with Amtico (the flooring we have in the rest of the boat), and we're going to also talk to him about upgrading the countertops from laminate to Corian or something similar. There will be a night or two where we can't stay on the boat and we contemplated driving up with the Airstream and using the La Conner Marina RV Resort (the Airstream and Airship, together in one place!) but it's a bit too much hassle, so I'll probably just take the boat from Anacortes to LaConner and Kevin will drive the truck and meet me over there so we have a car while we're there, and then we'll get a hotel when we need to. (The doctor today said Kevin can start some weight-bearing things with his right hand, like doing dishes and carrying groceries, so I think grabbing the dock lines for me is totally within his therapy now, too!)

I mentioned that we upgraded Airship's solar system the last time we were in Anacortes, but it was so crappy out that I didn't get many photos (plus, I was doing all the wiring!) so as soon as we get up there and get a few more photos, we'll post about the upgrade. (Also, we're selling the solar kit that we had before, so let me know if you're interested in that and I'll send you the craigslist link…it'd be great on a boat or an RV.)

More boaty fun, comin' up soon!

Alumafandango Dry Camping Report

Laura Domela — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 13:46:59 +0000

We decided to dry camp at Alumafandango, so we never connected to electric or water (there was no sewer) while we were there – Tuesday through Sunday.

Our AM Solar power system kept up with our electric needs 100% – we had 100% battery charge when we left. We ran computers, espresso machine, microwave, Traeger pellet grill, hair dryer, flat iron, lights, TVs, music system, and charged hexacopter batteries. The lowest our batteries ever got during the week was 88%.

Our AM Solar system ROCKS!
Our fresh water was at 1/4 capacity when we left. We took four showers, washed dishes, brushed our teeth, etc.

Our grey water was at 1/2 capacity when we left (still in the "green").

Our black water was at 5/8 capacity when we left. We used less than a half-bottle of propane (7.5 gal bottles). The propane ran our refirgerator, stove, oven, and hot water heater.

As usual, fresh water was the most precious resource.

(Posted by Kevin)

Resource Conservation

Laura Domela — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 19:54:57 +0000

We've been asked a few times now if we have any good tips for conserving resources while dry camping or boondocking. Since we seem to be pretty good at it (according to ourselves anyway, and the length of time we've managed to dry camp), we thought we'd do a post about it. Maybe you already know all of these things, or maybe you're just starting out and this will be super helpful. Either way, we thought it would be kinda fun for us to think through all the little things we do to increase our efficiency in the Airstream.

Dry camping on the edge of Lake San Antonio, CA

Basically, there are four categories we think about: water, electricity, holding tank management, and propane, in that order. If we're dry camping or boondocking, fresh water is the first thing to go. If we're in a campground with partial hookups (electricity and water only), then tank management and propane are the only things we have to worry about.

WATER

The two biggest drains on fresh water are washing dishes and taking showers.

Washing Dishes:

We wash our dishes using a bowl with a squirt of soap and a little bit of hot water to start. Wash a bunch of silverware and wait to rinse it until you have a handful. When you rinse, rinse so the water goes mostly into the bowl, and this will increase the amount of soapy water you have to wash with.

**Note: While you run to the water and wait for it to get hot, run that water into something else so you can use it. We have a Sodastream carbonator in the Airstream and so we fill an empty bottle with the "not yet warm" water to use for fizzing/drinking later, or in the reservoir for the espresso maker.

We never leave the water running while doing dishes. Wash a few things, rinse a few things. It takes a little bit to get used to, but you'll get the hang of it.

**Holding Tank Management Note: If we're trying to be extra careful about gray water capacity so that we can shower, we sometimes pour the used dishwater into the toilet/black water tank. Since that tank is much slower to fill up (and it actually helps to have extra water in there) it seems like a good move. Some campgrounds have little drain areas specifically for dumping dishwater…also a good option – stretch your legs, walk your dishwater out to the dishwater dump.

Showers:

We switched out the stock shower head that came with our Airstream with an Oxygenics shower head. It uses quite a bit less water than the original one. Also, don't leave the water running when you shower. Both the stock Airstream shower head and the Oxygenics shower head allow you to cut off the water flow on the shower head. (Note: both of these shower heads trickle in the "off" position…it's supposed to do that and yours is not broken.) Get wet. Soap/shampoo, then rinse. Condition/shave, then rinse again. It's not luxurious, but running out of fresh water or filling up the gray water tank isn't luxurious either. We can both take pretty good showers and increase the gray water tank by only 1/8 or less. To us, it's worth being this careful because it's totally worth it to be able to take a shower while you're camped on the side of a lake somewhere where there ARE no showers. If the campground has showers and they're clean, use them. It'll save a tremendous amount of water and holding tank space.

Brushing Your Teeth:

Don't leave the water running while you brush your teeth. Duh.

Also, we have a couple of these 6 gallon BPA-free water jugs and if we plan to be out a while, we carry those full of fresh water. They're still light enough to be able to lift up to add water to your fresh water tank if you need to.

ELECTRICITY

We replaced all of the stock halogen bulbs that came in our Airstream with LED bulbs. Each halogen bulb was 10w and each LED is 1.2w. Most of the newer Airstreams now come with LEDs…which is nice because that was not a cheap switch for us (31 bulbs, or something like that!) That means you can save 88% of the electricity it takes to run your lights by using LEDs instead of halogens.

Since we spend so much time in our Airstream, we also sometimes watch TV and movies (although many people think it's very uncool to watch TV while "camping", we think of this as our home, and at home, sometimes we watch TV. Whatever.) We installed two very low power 12 volt 22" tv/dvd combo units by Skyworth that we got from www.roadtrucker.com. They use MUCH less electricity than the standard AC-powered flat screens.

Anywhere possible, we use low power 12 volt appliances. (We also turn everything off when we leave for a few hours.) One of the biggest electricity users is actually the heater. Even though the heat comes from propane, the fan uses quite a bit of electricity. Keeping your thermostat low (or off when you're not there) saves electricity as well as propane.

The kinds of appliances to be really careful about are things that make heat: toasters, microwaves, coffee makers, hair dryers, curling/flat irons…all of these things use tons of electricity. If you're boondocking, use them sparingly or not at all. (Particularly for cooking you'll want to use the propane stove and/or your outside grill instead of any electric cooking appliances.)

Pretending to dry camp by not using the hookups (Wouldja lookit all that solar!) at Depoe Bay, OR

Now, we do have a crazy awesome solar system with 400 watts of solar panels on the roof, a 2000 watt inverter and 6 bigass AGM batteries in our trailer, and this has a huge effect on how we think about electricity while we're dry camping or boondocking: we don't think about it much at all. We can run both of our laptops, espresso maker, microwave, 1000w hairdryer, tv/dvd, the Traeger grill, etc. as much as we want, and as long as we have good sun, our batteries never get below about 90% and are back to full by mid-afternoon. (The only thing we can't use when we are dry camping or boondocking is the air conditioning. Obviously, not everyone has this crazy set up, so your mileage will of course vary.

We don't have a generator and with the solar system we have, we don't need one. If you're boondocking much, however, you'll need either (1) a good generator, or (2) a pretty substantial (and more expensive) solar system. (The small solar systems that come as factory options on some Airstreams are really only good for keeping your batteries topped up when you're not using the trailer. They won't supply a significant amount of a typical day's electricity use.)

Dry camping on the edge of the Columbia River at Skamokawa Vista Park.

HOLDING TANK MANAGEMENT

I covered most of this subject in the above categories: (1) don't leave water running when you shower, do dishes, or brush your teeth; (2) try to dump dishwater sometimes in a dishwater dump reservoir or sometimes in the toilet.

Our fresh water tank is 39 gallons. Our gray water tank is 37 gallons, and our black water tank is 39 gallons. So if we manage the tank levels closely along the way, we can add fresh water as needed and stay out for a couple of weeks without having to dump our tanks.

PROPANE

Heater: Keep the heat off if you don't need it during the day, and set it as low as you are comfortable at night when sleeping (use plenty of blankets). If you have the thermostat set high (or even on what you're used to at home) and leave it on all the time, that uses up propane in a hurry.

**Note: When we are hooked up to electricity, we have a small space heater that we use for heat instead of our Airstream heater, saving our propane for when we need it.

Water Heater: The hot water heater really only takes about 10 minutes to heat the water, so we leave ours off most of the time and only turn it on before we're going to use it to do dishes or take a shower, then turn it off again when we're done. Otherwise you are using propane to keep 6 gallons of water hot all night while you sleep and all day while you're out exploring.

Kitchen appliances: The stove, oven, and fridge use very little propane, so we don't worry about those at all. We can probably dry camp a couple of weeks without using up one propane tank (unless we are somewhere really cold and need to run the heat all day.) If your fridge and/or your hot water heater have an electric mode, learn how they work and use them when you're plugged into electricity. This will save more propane for when you're dry camping. However, if you're running on an inverter off your batteries, be sure that your fridge and hot water heater are NOT on electric mode — they'll drain your batteries in a hurry.

Have you got any conservation tips to share with us? Post 'em in the comments section!

(Posted by Laura & Kevin)

Dry Camping Report

Laura Domela — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 21:19:01 +0000

We played musical campsites here at Porto Bodega the other day. When the music stopped, we were in a spot with no hookups. So, we are dry camping again.

I realized that sometimes my favorite mode is dry camping at one of the places that has both hookup and non-hookup sites. Sometimes, you get the cool "beachfront" sites for dry camping while the full-hookups are all back in the bushes. It can be better than dry camping at an all-dry-camping place, because in those places you typically have lots of people running generators and making lots of noise. In a full-hookup campground, those generator people tend to be plugged in and we find ourselves dry camping in the quiet out with the tents. Nice! (Oh, and it's cheaper!)

The last time we dry camped was a couple weeks ago at the jetty campground. We were there for six days:

Solar worked flawlessly. We never got below 92% capacity on our batteries (8% used) and the solar recharged us to 100% every single day. We ran lights, laptops, microwave, espresso machine, traeger, hexacopter battery charger, blow drier, flat iron, internet, TV, audio, and recharged iphones and ipads… We made no effort whatsoever to do any "extra" electric conservation. If the trailer is in direct sun – we have all the power we need indefinitely.
Fresh water was the weak link. We used 7/8 of our tank in six days. We carry a six-gallon container to refill our fresh water if needed without having to move the trailer. We didn't end up needing it.
Grey water only got to 5/8 full in 6 days. We washed dishes, took a couple showers each, and so forth.
Black water only got 3/8 full…
We used less than a half tank of propane… We carry two 7.5 gallon tanks. Propane ran the heater (it got down into the 40s at night), the refrigerator, the stove, and the hot water heater. We have also gotten very good about turning off the hot water heater overnight and when we're not using it.

Overall, with our current setup, we can dry camp comfortably for a week with no issues and no real compromises. The big asterisk there is that we can't run the air conditioner on solar. If we were somewhere hot, that would matter. Luckily, those places seem more likely to have electricity hookups in campgrounds.

(Posted by Kevin)

Inverter: Good News/Bad News

Laura Domela — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:53:45 +0000

Okay so recently, our inverter started kicking its breaker any time we ran a couple things together (at first, then whenever we ran one thing for longer than a minute or so) even when we were plugged into shore power. We had AM Solar check it out and they eventually came to the concusion (bad news) that it was the whole inverter that was bad, and not just the breaker switch they were setting out to replace. Luckily (good news) we were still 10 days away from the end of the two-year warranty that we didn't even realize we had.

The fix was to just swap the old inverter for a brand new one. BUT. There's another, bigger, better version that we decided to upgrade to while they were in there. (Our old inverter was 1000W, the new one is 2000W!!). We'd always felt like the old one was just a little too small for our needs and we'd been regularly bumping into its limitations or having to work around it. ("Okay, done with coffee so I can use the microwave?")

We also had them take the fridge off the inverter system so it's either LP or electricity when we're on shore power, and never runs through the inverter (when we forget to change it when we're on solar). We had them change the outlet near the television (over the sofa) to be shore-power-only so we can plug in our little electric heater there, and we had them install a shore-power-only outlet inside the back of the closet so we can plug in and mount the new Dyson in there and it can charge when we're on shore power. Streamlining things as we go is fun!

This morning here behind AM Solar we did some tests: we unplugged, and while using only the solar system/inverter we made three rounds of espresso, microwaved some stuff, I dried my hair (all of it!) with my new 1000W hair dryer, both our computers were charging…maybe some more stuff I forgot…and we only got the batteries down to 97%. Pretty great!

We love AM Solar. Thanks Greg and Deb!

(Posted by Laura)

In the shop

Laura Domela — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:02:48 +0000

at AM Solar

(Posted by Laura)

AM Solar

Laura Domela — Mon, 14 May 2012 16:15:21 +0000

Update: here we are!

Heading down to AM Solar today for a few tweaks! Love these guys…I'm kind of excited to go back. We're still so happy with the system they put in for us two years ago.

Here's a cool pic of their very nice shop (from their website):

(Posted by Laura)