Running On Solar Power: Minimal Life Adjustments

A perfect balance- we were using exactly
as much as we were producing.

It's been a few weeks now, living off grid, and we have learned a lot about our system's production abilities and our usage.

Last week, we went the longest yet without any sun. Five days of overcast skies still didn't stop us from lighting our home or powering up devices. We designed our system to work on a 1.5 day battery bank, meaning we could expect to continue general power use for 1.5 days without any sun, thanks to our battery bank.

We were a bit wary of that number in the beginning, but like most things we quickly found a way around it. If it's cloudy- use less power! I'm sure most everyone reading this has lived through a major storm which caused power outages. If you live in New England then you have probably had the pleasure of living through more than one snow/ice storm. When I lived in Southern Maine- two winters in a row we had ice storms and lost power for 5+ days. I ended up temporarily relocating to a family's house each time. Bottom line- I lived.

Arriving home..looking through my clean windshield
at 8 more "windshields" that need to be scraped. Fun.

With those memories floating by, I quickly adjusted my attitude. Dan and I now have a much keener eye to the skies. We follow weather reports closely, make note of our battery bank percentage on a daily basis, and keep a close eye on use of the items that pull the most power.

A sight for sore eyes! After 6 days of
no sun, this was a relief!

Here's what we have learned....

-On a beautiful day in November- we can gain about 15-20% of our bank back.

-On a semi cloudy or "light cloud" day- we can still gain about 5-8% of our bank back.

-On a dark cloud day - we get no juice.

-Solar panels will gather zero power when covered in snow and ice.

-Our house- sitting alone for the day uses about 2% of the power bank. (Only the fridge and an alarm clock remain plugged in all day.)

-In the evenings when we get home- we use roughly 6-8% of our power bank. That includes running both interior lights for 3-4 hours, the outdoor light for 1 hour, 1 laptop for 3-4 hours, and miscellaneous mobile device charging.

-We can go upwards of 7 days without any sun. We went about 6 days with no sun and our bank dropped to it's lowest so far- about 31%.

Overall, the switch to solar hasn't made much of an impact on our daily lives. We don't feel restricted by any means. We like to keep conservative to begin with. Once the bank was getting into the 50 percent range, we scaled back our use. We ran devices off battery power, shut off lights and turned to candles- which actually makes for a very cozy atmosphere!

We even had our first trouble shooting instance. We noticed that the amperage was not reading anything other than zero, and then also noticed that our battery level hadn't moved either. We checked all of our connections outside- everything looked fine. So we turned to the monitor itself. After moving it around a little, I noticed the numbers go all wonky. It was definitely the wiring in the battery monitor itself. Dan fixed it in less than a minute. Man, am I glad it was an easy issue to fix.

With all the heater troubleshooting, I was not ready to have solar go on the fritz too!

Other than that, we haven't had a lot of movement around here. Well not in the building sense. We have been running around getting gifts, finishing errands, decorating, wrapping, and so on. This will probably be my last post until after Christmas. 

We want to thank you all so much for taking the time to read our adventures, share your thoughts and encouragement, and make us feel we are part of a community. We hope you all have a lovely Christmas (or equally wonderful December holiday) full of family and friends, love, laughter, and happiness.

Thanks for reading!

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