For the first time in 12 1\/2 years of living off my solar panels and batteries, I finally depleted my batteries last night. I’ve been close a few times, my experience has been that three days of stormy overcast was pretty much the limit for my system. Not generally a problem in the desert because three days of overcast is very unusual. But here in the Pacific Northwest during fall and winter, weeks of overcast is quite normal. I knew I wouldn’t last long if I stuck around here too long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The converter usually charges the batteries in an RV when you are plugged in to the regular electrical grid, but I disconnected it 12 years ago. In other words, whether I have been on the grid or not, I still relied totally on my panels for battery charging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This morning the refrigerator signaled low battery, and my standard for adequate battery voltage is whether the fridge’s control board can function. So I connected the converter back into the charging circuit. Major event.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the first time in 12 1\/2 years of living off my solar panels and batteries, I finally depleted my batteries last night. I’ve been close a few times, my experience has been that three days of stormy overcast was pretty much the limit for my system. Not generally a problem in the desert because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2760"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2761,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2760\/revisions\/2761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}