Wow! And I thought things had been getting exciting before! Read on, dear reader, right to the end….
Drove in to Montpelier to pick up a few things before the weekend. No lines. No hoarding.
Got most everything put away, and the power went out. No, no Irene yet: beautiful blue sky, high barometric pressure; gorgeous, in fact. And besides, our power doesn’t go out. If there’s a power outage, our battery backup switches on a literal microsecond later – and even if our batteries had been depleted (inconceivable!), we ought to have been producing at least two or three kilowatts more than we were using (a perfectly clear noontime).
So WTH? [I was taught that “WTF” was rude.] One of our charge controllers had overheated, that much I could tell. Billions of error messages on the console (battery voltage too high; battery voltage too low; can’t communicate with inverter; etc.). Hmph. I’d actually planned to top off the electrolyte in each cell (before the upcoming storm), so I brought the distilled water downstairs, shut everything off, cleaned up the batteries, and checked the levels: all were A-OK. I checked the voltage, and each battery was right at 6.96 ±0.03 volts. Turned everything back on.
Everything was OK, mostly – except that there kept being some missing power. Bright sun, a couple hours past solar noon, say each set of panels should have been generating about 800 watts DC. They were, for a total of 3.2Kw DC. The batteries were full, so all power should have been inverted to AC, which can lose as much as 20%, so that would be about 2.5 or 2.6Kw AC. We were using about 500 watts. So we should have been “selling” about 2Kw out to the grid. Only 1Kw was going out.
Unresolved.
Later, after the sun went down, I found that I was “buying” back about 1Kw from the grid in order to charge the batteries, which were 100% full. Something squirrelly here lies. The good news for the upcoming storm is that the batteries are full and that we can use that power in the house, if the grid power goes out (I tested this). The bad news is that I’m not entirely sure that recharging the batteries will work properly – either from the solar panels or from the grids. I don’t want to test this in case it doesn’t work properly and I end up with less power stored before the storm.
And our solar electricity expert – and good friend – had the temerity to unexpectedly die last spring. [We and hundreds or maybe thousands of others mourn his loss for infinitely more important and personal reasons. But still, there you go.]
In the midst of all this, I heard from our summer neighbors that they had not left yesterday for their winter home; that, in fact, one of them had been to the emergency room at the local hospital twice in the last two days, and was even then en route to Fletcher Allen Hospital in Burlington. So I’m keeping an extra eye out on their house and of course let them know that we’d be here for them if there was anything we could do.
Lots of outdoor cleanup: pieces of clapboarding and carpentry refuse that usually gets entirely cleaned up only right at the end of a job suddenly represent potentially lethal objects. This is entirely done, but the rest of my list for tomorrow’s outdoor cleanup is very long.
But by the end of the day, I know I’ll have Karen and Timothy and Clara back here, and that’s going to be great.
Finally, I think I’ll leave you with film footage from the 1927 flood in Vermont. The forecast for this weekend is for slightly less rainfall than that year, and our ground is somewhat less saturated. Hopefully, this time, we won’t lose more than 1200 bridges:
I wish people were more even-keeled about this kind of thing: we should not panic, but neither should we shrug and say that everything is over-hyped. A big storm is coming: make sure you have supplies on hand and that your yard is picked up and that you have a plan for what to do if you’re flooded out or a tree lands on your roof or you have no power for a few days (remembering that sump pumps require electricity!). Then gather your friends or family and play Settlers of Catan.
