Solar Freedom
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In the summer of 2013 I gave it up, threw in the towel and quit. I quit trying to tell myself that I could do anything, DIY style. Over the previous year or two our solar system had been flaky at best; too many mornings waking to no power, and worse, no coffee - until the sun came over the hill and rejuvenated our lives. My wife was patient; I was quietly not.

Eileen had returned east late February. I returned in May. All seemed to be well through the end of June. Then mysteriously now and then, the camera pics would stop coming and I could not connect to that computer through Teamviewer. Fortunately we had a neighbor who did not mind running over to restart the computer that monitors everything, and to reset the timer that controlled the pond pump that watered the plants.

I have to assume that the power had cut out at those times and then had come back on the following day after the sun hit the 4 panels.


In frustration I asked if she knew anybody that could fix this. A friend of hers, Dave Jessup, a professional building inspector, recommended an electrician, Tim Pinar, who recommended a solar professional, and Dan Pritchett came into my life. He is the kind of man that a hard-core DIY could be happy relinquishing control to. He answered the questions in the back of my mind that I did not know enough about to ask; he made sense.

On July 22, all 3 of them were on my deck checking things out. On the 31st, Dan returned to take readings with his solar meter.

Over the next 2 months, the power continued to cut out sporadically and our neighbor continued to restart everything as needed.

 Early October, Dan doubled the panel count. His fee was surprisingly reasonable.


That was not the only problem, but it was the prerequisite to dealing with the rest. The existing panels simply were not enough to fully charge the batteries, and batteries that are not fully charged die a slow and elusive death; elusive because you don't really know what the heck is going on, or not, especially if you are 3000 miles away.





We returned there mid November.

A week later, on the 21st, the old inverter threw smoke and sparks out the top and the system shut down.
Fortunately I was there and saw/heard/smelled it happen.


 We drove down the hill and traveled around the Palm Springs area looking for a new inverter, to no avail.

 I had been hearing about the Outback VFX3648 Sinewave Inverter/Charger as being one of the best, so I got on the phone and went looking. Northern Arizona Wind & Sun had one for a mere $1,770. They shipped it overnight for $153 to the Palm Desert UPS store where for another $20 cash I was allowed to take it away.

On November 23rd we had power again.






 The 16 sealed 12V batteries were just getting by, still with many mornings of no power. I often got my multimeter out and took 16 readings. 4 of them were consistently weaker then the rest so on Dan's advice, I removed them. They could be pulling the rest down to their level. Dan came by and tweaked the system, but nothing really seamed to help.





I had also moved the generator from on top of the shed platform, wrapped in somewhat effective noise insulation, to under the platform behind a stone wall, which reduced the noise considerably. We were burning a lot of propane, but we had power.



On January 22, Dan replaced the 16 defective 12V sealed batteries with 16 Costco 6V golf cart flooded batteries, the kind that come with caps that you have to unscrew now and then to top them off with distilled water. I had always gone with the maintenance free sealed batteries because we might not be there when maintenance is needed. Dan agreed to handle this twice a year, which he just did on June 1 as I was writing this. He used 3.5 gallons of distilled water. That is 3.5 cups per battery. That amazes me.



After he installed the new battery bank, all went beautifully. I actually saw my Outback MX60 charge controller kick into 'Float' mode a couple of times, which is an absolute necessity at least twice a week. I don't think I had ever seen it do that before, though maybe I wasn't looking back then.


 Then one day everything reverted to the old way of being; powerless mornings; generator required; no more Floats, etc.. This was disheartening.

On February 14, for no reason in particular, I decided to remove the screwed tight lid from the combiner box. This is the box containing the 15 amp breakers that the solar panel cables feed directly into. The breaker tied to Dan's new panel array was OFF. I flipped it on. Everything has been right as rain since then.

Dan replaced them with 30 amp breakers on June 1. Apparently the power coming from the new panels was so strong, that the 15 amp breaker could not handle it. It never happened again so this is another one of those things that I cannot quite figure out.


One additional note: I now had 16 batteries sitting on the floor against the wall. Above then was a 4 shelf tool rack, and above everything was an endless supply of tools hanging from the ceiling. Any one of those tools could slip and fall on the batteries, shorting them out and blowing the system. I immediately covered the batteries with rubber mats and then ordered some 1/4" sheets of tempered glass cut to fit from the local glass shop. When they were laid across the terminals, they added a nice touch.


 The obvious lesson for me here is that DIY in this case is STPD. Dan attends tech classes periodically; he has been trained. He has installed a heck of a lot more systems then I have; he has experience. He has an innate intuition; he feels what is right as much as he knows. I do not have that.

Had I hired Dan in 2007 to install my first system, and arranged for him to maintain it throughout the years, I would have spent a whole heck of lot less money overall then I did.


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Copyright © 2014, Van Blakeman