My Work: Living on Solar Power - Part 4

January 1997

The main bedroom was finally finished. Charlotte raised her hands in the air and cried, “Hooray, my parents are moving out of my room.”

A few days later, the wood furnace couldn’t keep the house warm, neither the radio telephone nor the computer would work, the generator had just shredded its fan belt, bills were still piling up and I had a cold. I said to Susan, “Maybe it was a mistake moving out here.”

Susan replied, “Maybe it was. No one should have to deal with so much.”

My dream was in ruins. The scariest part was that Susan thought so, too. We had to do something. That evening, we both took deep breaths and talked about the day. That helped. The kids and I read stories to each other in bed while I struggled with my cold. That helped. We planned how to rescue our dream. That helped a lot.

We started by upgrading the inverter/charger to a 2500-watt model with a charger that filled the batteries to capacity. Now, 25-amp service may not seem like a lot, but it was more than a four-fold improvement over what we had. Actually, conservation and common sense can go a long way toward reducing power needs. So can energy-efficient compact fluorescents and no power hogs such as air-conditioning. Now we could run the washer, table saw, toaster, or various other power-gulpers without turning on the generator. The new inverter was pure sine wave, which meant no hum on radios and smoother computer compatibility. It had an LCD readout for measuring all states of the power system, seventeen menus ( one just for error messages) and a 141-page owner’s manual. Next was more solar production. We added two more 75-watt solar modules to our array and suddenly increased our power production by 50% to 450 watts peak power on the days we had full sun. That made life a lot easier, too. We saved our lanterns for the barn and gleefully snapped on a light when going upstairs. We added a second, larger water tank to cut down on how often the water pump ran.