Oh Dee! You really are a trip! LOL! You are great with your words and I think that you are awesome! You have made me cry and made me laugh, made me smile, made me think and made me dream, and sometimes made me mad. Are you my sister?
LOL
You are really special, Dee. I love reading your posts, but it was the solar panel "Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee" That really got me! LOL! I don't really know how you meant that, but it really sparked my day. I owe you for that.
RADAR
Well honestly, I'm just a little silly sometimes.
So I guess I should share a few photos of my solar panels since I got all hyped up about it. Gotta back it up with proof..
Dad has a friend that sells used solar panels. He replaces old solar panels with newer, more efficient ones for oil companies, they put them around pipeline valves out in fields to run monitoring stuff. I guess.
So Dad said he would buy me like 10 panels each time he sees his friend, eventually we'll have my roof covered with them.
Things all came to a halt last year when we lost Mom though. I hope that maybe this summer we can get back to this project.
It would be really nice if I could totally replace my lights with battery powered LED lights, the panels could charge the batteries.
I wouldn't think to try and power the whole house, that's just not going to happen. And I don't want to wire it into the house electric.
I want it to be a totally separated and independent system that only provides for LED lights, that way there's no inefficient and expensive inverters, just sweet, free solar generated electricity..
I've got the basic starter stuff, we put up a few panels, a lawn mower battery and a solar charge controller to power a few LED lights to test and see if it's feasible and worth the expense to take it up a notch.
We put the panels you see in the photos up last April and the test light has been on 24 hours a day since then. It generates zero heat and is about as good as a 5watt night light.
I need to buy wire to put to all the rooms of the house and put lights in every rooms, the garage, porch and patio. A relay will be held open as long as there is city power. When the city power fails the relay will close and power up all the LED lights. So in a storm when the lights go out I'll instantly have light that will last for DAYS even if the sun doesn't come out at all for 3-4 days.
Back in 2010 the power went out for about 8 hours in the middle of the night while I was in the shower.
. I was in total darkness. I could not find a flashlight, a lantern, a candle, matches, a lighter or anything else. I stumbled around in total darkness feeling around trying to find anything to get some light. After almost an hour I found a candle and a lighter. The candle was wimpy and almost useless. It took me another hour to find a flashlight that was dead. I changed the batteries out from my TV remote control and then I found a propane lantern. THEN I had light. But the lantern generates a LOT of heat and the A/C was off so it was miserable. I just sat in a chair and was dead still for hours trying to pretend the heat away. That was the breaking point for me, it was then I decided that I had to have some sort of emergency light system and Dad came up with the solar panel / batteries idea.
I looked at a professional solar system but they are STUPID. By law, they are required to shut down when the power fails so that they don't feed power back into the utility lines. They say it could kill a worker that's out trying to fix broken wires. That makes sense but I don't understand why they don't design it so that it disconnects itself from city power when the power fails so that it can power your house without danger of feeding back into the system. That's pretty limited thinking on their part. You've got batteries that can run your house for hours on end and you still have to sit in the dark like everyone else? I DON'T THINK SO!!
So to heck with them, make your own solar/battery system that is 10's of thousands of dollars cheaper and that works when you want it to work.
Now make no mistake about it, I am not an expert on this stuff. Far from it. I just have a smart Dad and a little personal common sense (sometimes) and I lean on my Dad a lot for brain power when I need to overcome the many stupidities of life..
In college in the 60's and into the early 60's Dad was a radio and TV repairman. He had this big black van he worked out of that I was terrified of, it looked like a hearse! At least I thought it did.
Dad said it was, I think, a 1948 Chevy something. We also had several Studebakers over the years, Dad was a big fan of Studebakers until they went out of biz and he couldn't get them anymore.
We had a Studebaker sedan that Mom wrecked when I was very little. I was in the car with her, it's amazing we weren't killed, that car had no seat belts! Seat belts were still optional equipment when I was little!
The car was totaled, Mom and I survived. And there was the wagon. Dad traded it in for a Dodge Dart for Mom and he bought a Ford station wagon and he hated it. It was the last Ford he ever owned.
So anyway I threw the "hearse" and Studebaker photos in just for nostalgia.. This was in front of our first house. The city tore the entire street up to put in pipes for something, sewer I think. Mom was NOT happy with this, it took them months..
(pic #1 is 1961, pic #2 is 1963)
