Free electricity from the sky!

That's right! Those of you who are faithful followers of this blog know how appealing we find the fact that with a relatively small investment in solar power equipment you can gather free electricity from the sun!


Needless to say it works better in sunnier climes (like the desert) but of course works anywhere the sun shines!  It's the boon of the boondocker (those who live in RVs where there are no plug ins) a necessity even!


Two years ago we bought a single  solar panel and upgraded our battery pack and were able to run almost everything we wanted to (not the microwave :-{  ) without having to engage the generator and burn up more dead dinosaurs.


Since neither of us were thrilled with clambering up on the roof of Prince Reindeer we just chained the solar panel to the ladder pointing at the sun.  Our resident wizards (Buck and Bruce)  wired it in so we just had to plug it into our battery array and voila! We had free electricity from the sun.


This year we decided to bite the bullet. The prices of panels have come down significantly so we went to the handy-dandy local solar dealer and bought a new panel and had both mounted on the roof and wired in permanently. They also installed a nifty controller that tells us the level of the charge in our batteries, the voltage of the array and the amps that we're downloading. As I'm writing this we are getting about 8 amps of electricity from the sun! Did I mention the word  F-R- double E?? Or for those of you who prefer it full out:  F-R-E-E...the long way!  (if you haven't seen 'A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum' you won't get that reference!)


We also decided to give Prince Reindeer a new awning. The old one was very tired, and the wrong color and we just hated it.  There's a place here that does new awnings in your choice of colors and then comes to you out in the desert and installs them.  


We ordered a new awning in a color much more in tune with Prince Reindeer's color scheme on Monday and the installer was here on Tuesday!  We all stood in awe as this (obviously) very experienced professional removed the old awning and installed the new one in jig time!  It was very impressive! So much so that we were so engrossed that we forgot to take pictures.


However, Buck is getting a new awning on Saturday so perhaps we will post some photos of that!


Till next time! Stay Warm!