Power Problems

Not much power is generated by solar panels on cloudy days.

In the city, when the power goes out, the only thing to do is light candles and wait for the power company to fix whatever went wrong. Out here in the wild, you have to fix the problem yourself. Which could take days or weeks.

When we got back from a week-long vacation we discovered that one of our big red batteries (the ones that power our house at night) went dead. We thought, at first, that this happened because it had been cloudy and snowy for several days while we were gone and the solar panels were unable to charge the batteries. The first evening we were home our inverter shut off the power due to the battery array dropping below 10.2 volts.

The next morning I measured the voltages of all six of the batteries. Five of them had a pretty good charge - 2.25 volts (they are 2-volt batteries). The sixth battery showed only 1.25 volts. I disconnected it from the system and checked again a few hours later. Zero volts! It had shorted out internally. The batteries were only a little over two years old. We shouldn't have had a failure.

The substitute battery in place.

We cannot run our power systems without all six batteries so that put us in a bind. They are connected in series to produce 12 volts. With one missing battery the array only could produce 10 volts. We took the dead battery back to the place we bought it. The good news was that it was covered under warranty. The bad news was that it would take up to three weeks to get a replacement. We bought a deep-cycle marine battery to use as a temporary substitute for the big battery array. This allows us to have some minimal lights on at night. I had to disconnect half of our solar panel array so as not to blast the little substitute battery with too much power when charging during the day time.

Fortunately we have a back-up generator for higher power loads like our washing machine. We were running the generator for a few hours a day until, one evening, I went out to start it and it wouldn't start. Another problem! This happened during a five day period of cloudy weather, too. Double trouble!

When we moved in here three and a half years ago, the previous residents told us how to turn on the generator. Several times a year we ran the genny whenever we needed more power than the solar panels or batteries could deliver. It always worked but was often not easy to get started. I began to wonder when the generator was last serviced and couldn't find any record of it.

Replacing spark plugs in the generator

I pulled the spark plugs and one of them was  covered in black goo. This meant that it had been running on just one cylinder for a very long time. I put new plugs in and it now runs better than it ever did, maybe better than it has run in four or five years. When I first heard the generator running, way back when we moved in, I figured that was how it was supposed to sound - a sort of put-put-put sound. Now it hums. Great to have figured that out!

We are back to running the generator two or three hours in the evenings so we can watch a movie and run the washing machine, run power tools, grind coffee, etc. We are still waiting for the replacement battery. It is supposed to come in next week and then we will be back to better than normal - better because the back-up generator is in much better shape than it had been.

Such is the saga of off-grid living. When the power goes out, the power company is you!