Tag Archives: Solar Panel

Winter Solar Power Sucks

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I’ve been charging my vape, my phone, and my computer using solar power for nearly a half year. It’s pointless for saving money because running these things only costs a few dollars, if that, over the year, but it’s fun to know that your phone, the thing that you carry around with you at all time, the little mini-computer in your pocket that can do anything, the games you play, and all the fancy stock-trading, money-making, email-checking, and social-media-browsing modern Swiss Army Knife of everything is being powered by the sun. Not powered by the sun in an abstract manner either (plants photosynthesizing millions of years ago, decomposing, turning to coal, being mined and burned, the heat flashing water into steam to turn a turbine to move electrons into your home via wires and transformers, to rearrange some chemicals in a lithium-ion battery) but directly. I’ve always wondered how people can be against solar power for this reason alone: it’s so damn simple and beautiful. The sun shines and makes electricity. Why complicate it?

Everyone not on the equator is well aware that the days are shorter in the winter due to the Earth’s axial tilt of roughly 23 degrees. In the summer the Earth is tilted towards the sun, and as you rotate around on a higher latitude, you get more sunlight. The opposite is true in the winter. Here in Northern Illinois (and for everyone around 45 degrees latitude; I also feel sorry for Europeans and Canadians being even higher up) we get about eight hours of good sunlight in the winter. Compare this to our summer daylight length of 15 hours; there’s twice the amount of daytime in the summer compared to the winter!

A nice graphical depiction of these Dark Days. The discontinuities in March and November are daylight savings time. Go check out your own day/night/twilight length!

This sounds stupid, but I didn’t think winter would cause my two solar panels much difficulty. Since we’re not using the lawnmower anymore (you don’t need to mow the snow) I took the battery and hooked it up to the solar panels. I currently have five batteries storing the solar power and that should be plenty right? Six hours of direct sunlight can charge those bad boys up and I can charge my toys off that the rest of the day.

Two of the five batteries…

It doesn’t work that way when it’s cloudy for two weeks straight. I’ve never paid attention to how cloudy it usually is in the winter, especially when those clear and cold winter days are so vivid in my mind, but apparently it’s cloudy a lot. And when you get only a few hours to make power, the clouds really do fuck you over in a way that they don’t in the summer. The summer months always have dramatic and quickly changing weather, sun for half the day, hellish storms in the evening, and then a bit more sun right before sunset. Now, in January? Clouds all day, every day. Boring grey clouds that hang overhead like a depressing blanket and refuse to leave for literal weeks.

The sun was out a few days ago, but that was only enough to kick the batteries up from 11.8 Volts to 12.1. As soon as I’d plug my phone in the voltage would drop to 11.5 and not wanting to damage the batteries had no choice but to charge my phone via natural gas/nuclear electricity from the boring wall outlet. The streak was broken, and my phone, computer, and vape are now methane/uranium powered like everything else around here.

The clouds aren’t the only issue. It sometimes snows in winter (big surprise there huh?) and snow does a great job blocking the sun. While the clouds are an ever present and annoying problem there isn’t much I can do about them except wait. Snow is a problem I have to actually deal with. Weeks ago we had some shitty ice/snow storm and the next day I found my panels iced and snowed over. Using my Amazon Prime credit card (which is made out of metal, 5% cash back at Amazon by the way!) I scrapped the snow off so they could make power when the sun eventually came out. The sun never came out and it snowed two days later. I walked out, brushed them off, and waited for the sun which never came. And then it snowed about a week after that. I walked out, brushed them off, and waited for the sun. It snowed yesterday and I haven’t even went out to brush them off because the sun isn’t going to come out ever again.

I guess the snow melted…

Remember how I said that I don’t understand why people don’t like renewable energy because it’s so damn beautiful and simple? It’s not. Solar is fucking great and I love it, but during these shitty dark, cloudy, and snowy winter months it’s not ideal. Solar always relies on good energy storage and apparently five fucking massive lead-acid batteries can’t store enough power to survive the winter. I could always add more batteries, but at $50-100 per battery do I really want to spend the money to charge my phone? Naw. I’ll just wait I guess. The sun can’t stay hidden forever.

Check out my Instagram where I post pointless artistic pics and shitty poems every whenever I get around to it.

Or my other blog where I sometimes post stories.

Or Wattpad where I have a Morrowind fanfic ongoing also sometimes post stories.

Solar Power Sucks: Powering a Home?

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I suppose this is a continuation of my solar phone charger post and my broken solar panel post.

First let me digress on how this quarantine is making people crazy. It’s a subtle kind of crazy — nothing too obvious — but everyone seems so damn anxious being trapped inside. Knowing you can’t do random trips to the stores or grab a bite to eat at a sit-down restaurant. Being off of work and stuck at home. Hanging out with your friends has been put on hold. The entire world is in limbo and everyone is waiting for that unknown time in the future where we can get back to normal.

Everyone is coping differently (spiraling into alcoholism, doing home improvement projects, gardening, lawn care, reading, binge watching Netflix, etc.) but my mode of coping seems to be gaming and doing stupid random projects more than usual. I’m thinking about making hand sanitizer for my work buddies. I’m thinking about selling vape juice online. I’m making random purchases of things on Amazon to give myself projects to do. I was thinking of brewing wine to give to my friends. In the past week I’ve made five gallons of window washer fluid for the cars; I should be stocked up for nearly a half-year. And as I’ve written in the previously cited two posts, lately I’ve been fucking around with solar power.

At first I wanted to charge my phone with solar power, but these projects take on a life of their own once you get started. My tiny 10 watt solar panel wasn’t charging it fast enough so I purchased a big 100 watt panel. The one I received was defective and didn’t provide any power, so I returned it and got a replacement panel last Sunday. This one works like a champ and I charged my vape using only solar power for three days straight. It’s not like it’s saving the house electricity really, but it’s still fun to think about. The only problem I’ve had with vape charging is I cannot leave the vape on the charger long enough to top it off.

The panel being 100 watts is a bit overkill for phone/vape charging and the natural question to ask is “What else can I do with this?” Well, power as much shit as I can with it, obviously! Consider this panel can rake in about ten hours of power per day: this will give me 1 kilowatt-hour of energy in a day. Also consider the shitty 10 Watt LED bulbs placed around your house: each one of these ran for 10 hours requires 100 watt-hours. I should be able to run ten of these fuckers per day. Since each room has a most three of these, I should still have power to spare.

And how much power does our household use anyway? I was bored enough thanks to the quarantine and it being Saturday that I looked: about 2,000 kWh per month: this is an average of about 65 kWh per day. Shit, that’s a lot of power. I blame most of this on our shitty 240 Volt electric clothes dryer. Anything that makes heat from electricity is notoriously bad with power consumption so if we stopped using this bastard and air-dried our clothes I bet we could cut this in half. Anyways, since each panel can provide up to 1 kWh per day, I’d need like 65 of them to power the entire house along with enough car batteries to store all the power. Fuck. Each panel is about $100 (everything being around an even number makes the math so much easier) so it would cost about $6,500 to buy all the panels! Jeez. But since our electric bill is about $300 this investment would pay for itself in under two years.

I’m not really trying to power the entire house off solar — that’s too big of a project — and am just trying to get some numbers to get a feel for how much a solar panel can do. I do think I’ll try to power a room or two though and if this works keep upgrading the system as my boredom allows. My plan is to hook an extension cord into an inverter (which takes 12 Volt car-battery stored power and turns it into 120 Volt AC) and plug that into the wall via an extension cord. By turning off the room circuit breaker I can isolate the room from the main power supply while supplying 120 Volt power to the room from the inverter. ElectroBoom did a video with this general idea (without solar power but the idea is the same): check it out if you’d like. Not that there’s anything else for you to do now, right?

And appreciate the fact how all of this started by me trying to charge my phone with solar power so I could go hide in the woods for a week. And now I’m seriously considering powering part of the house with a fleet of solar panels. This is my madness during the quarantine. This is how I’m spiraling. But considering some other ways to cope I think I’m doing pretty damn good indeed. I’m still only drinking on Sunday. If only Amazon would hurry the fuck up and ship my goddamn inverter…

Streak Day #33 Sucks: The Shitty Solar Panel

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I’m on break at work again. I think I should make a habit of writing while on break. Sometimes magical things happen when you sit around bored and force yourself to write. Get the creative juices flowing and see what happens.

Not that there is much else to do on break. I sometimes read but it’s hard to force yourself to read if you’re not in the mood for it. Also, reading fantasy books like The Wheel of Time puts you into a strange state where you almost cease to exist in the world; it’s shocking to come back to the real world, especially when the real world is work. It’s a jarring feeling.

As is standard, I have no idea what to write about. Well, maybe I do have one thing to bitch about…

A half week ago I bought some massive $110 solar panel from Amazon. I think I mentioned that already. My little 10 Watt panel wasn’t doing shit to charge my phone, so upgraded to a 100 Watt panel. It arrived yesterday and is ridiculously huge for charging a singular cell phone. Whatever. Overkill is never a bad thing here.

I took it out of the box and even inside the house attempted to check the output of it. Usually ambient light in the house gives some voltage even if it isn’t near the peak that it could output. This panel was only putting out like a half-Watt. Whatever, it was cloudy and it was inside so it wasn’t a big deal.

The damn panel had plastic connectors on the wires that had no obvious way to plug into the charge controller that came with the panel. The was inconvenient. I thought about the problem and decided to solder my own wires to the output on the panel. I decided to buy two cheap extension cords because that’s an easy and convenient way to purchase wire at Walmart. I even came up with a better idea: I could leave the plug attached to the cord and put the female end of the extension cord into the charge controller. This way I could simply plug the panel intothe charge controller. If I wanted to add panels, just plug those bad boys in as well. Let me take a picture of it to clear up what I’m talking about.

Don’t judge my setup too harshly.

I did all of this work yesterday while drinking heavily. I put the panel in the window and plug everything in. It was ready to go for today and I was eager to see how the system would work.

I woke up and the panel didn’t seem to be doing shit. None of the lights on the charge controller were on, and checking the panel output with my tongue (yes) proved that it wasn’t putting out a damn thing, nowhere near 20 volts. Using a multimeter showed it was providing about a half-volt of potential. This thing should’ve been putting out 24 volts max and 0.5 volts was way too small. What was wrong?

I eventually took the panel outside into the direct sunlight and measured the output. 3 volts. THREE GODDAMN VOLTS. You can’t charge a 12 volt battery with 3 volts. Maybe I could charge two AA batteries with it? I kept trying to find something that I was doing wrong, but a solar panel is about as simple as anything can be. You put it in the sun and it gives you power. That’s it. There isn’t a button or a switch or anything technical about them. I wish I could’ve found something I was doing wrong, but there wasn’t anything.

I’ve came to the conclusion that my $110 solar panel from Amazon is simply a piece of shit. It’s defective. It’s broken. I got a piece of junk. So now what? I was thinking of taking it apart and trying to fix it — maybe there was a broken connection somewhere — but the panel appears to be sealed very well. There aren’t any screws or anything to remove. I really think I’ll just have to ship the damn thing back which is another major pain in the ass.

Amazon has a ‘defective item’ option which I’m assuming means if I want to return it I’ll have to package it back up, print off a shipping label, and haul it to UPS. I’ll have to track down all those stupid styrofoam packaging things too. I know I work there, but I really don’t like the idea of going to work with a massive boxed up solar panel to ship back to Amazon. I wonder if I could go down the road from UPS to the Amazon building itself and give them the junk panel. I’m sure that wouldn’t work though.

And I don’t know if they’ll ship me another one or if I’ll get a refund. I was really excited about my new panel, and it’s frustrating knowing this project will have to be put on hold until I get a replacement panel or order a second one. My Amazon solar panel fucking sucks.

Streak Day #32 Sucks: A Values Checklist

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Sunday, the last day of the WordPress week, and what do I write? I’m feeling some pressure now; I need about 25 more views today (in the remaining eight hours…) to have another record week. I don’t think it’ll happen. And if I pull off about 45 or 50 a day I can crack that 1,000 views in a month goal I’ve had. I don’t think that’ll happen either. I didn’t even have much hope for it the past week but the past few days has (once again somehow and I don’t know why) had quite a bit more views than usual, giving me just enough hope to have it totally crushed by Wednesday.

I’m tempted to try to write another “masterpiece” blog post but don’t have it in me. I haven’t made any progress on the Morrowind story this week and finally got around to a rough draft about two hours ago. That must be edited and posted and has priority over any bullshit I want to write here.

So what to write? I don’t know. Let me sit here and think about it. I’ve already talked plenty about this stupid coronavirus and don’t want to do it anymore. Work? Work sucks. I hate being at work but I hate being anywhere else. You trade work for boredom mostly. Any projects at home? Well, I bought a massive 100 Watt solar panel from Amazon that arrived today; not that I can do anything with it because it’s been perpetually cloudy. I think I’ll rig up some extension cords to make the system “plug-and-play” or something like that. I’m just sick of soldering shit, using alligator clips, or whatever else I can conjure up to connect wires. My last panel was a tiny 10 Watt panel; this boi is ten times the power! I can’t wait to get started.

But the Morrowind story hangs over me like these damn clouds in the sky. That’s the goal for today and as much as I want to fuck with this blog, Dark Souls, or my new big boi solar panel, I can’t until that is finished. Or at least finished enough that I can put it together before midnight or before I’m too drunk to edit, whichever comes first. That’s why I’m doing this now, to get it out of the way.

Drinking today means a trip to the store. I need extension cords for my project. I can’t believe I bought a 2 x 4 foot solar panel for $100 so I can charge my phone with solar power. It’s such a simple goal but one that is taking on a life of its own. I’m dreading a trip to the store. Last week was pretty comfy — Meijer was all but deserted — but I’m starting to have anxiety about being around people in public. Who is infected and who isn’t? Has this box of tomatoes been handled by someone with The Disease and by picking up the box I’m going to get myself and my family killed? Every person that drives by or walks by, I wonder if they’re infected or not. Everyone is a hazard, every object outside of the house is a hazard, and if you let yourself think too much about it in a careless way it’s nearly impossible not to feel frightened by the world. Remember I think I’m doing well with the COVID anxiety too. How is everyone else doing if I’m becoming this way?

I suppose there is that paper the therapist gave me from Thursday, something about discovering your values that I haven’t even looked at yet, so maybe I can check that out. Fuck, let’s do it together. I’ll type it out here and if that takes too much effort I’ll take a picture of it.

Exercise: A Values Checklist

Below are some common values. (They are not ‘the right one’; merely common ones.) Please read through the list and write a letter next to each value based on how important it is to you. Of course, some values will be more important in one area of life (e.g. parenting) than in another area (e.g. work) — so this is just to get a general sense of the values that tend to matter to you the most.

  • Acceptance/self-acceptance: to be accepting of myself, others, life, etc.
  • Adventure: to be adventurous; to actively explore novel or stimulating experiences
  • Assertiveness: to respectfully stand up for my rights and request what I want
  • Authenticity: to be authentic, genuine, and real; to be true to myself
  • Caring/self-care: to be caring towards myself, others, the environment, etc.
  • Compassion/self-compassion: to act kindly toward myself and others in pain
  • Connection: to engage fully in whatever I’m doing and be fully present with others
  • Contribution and generosity: to contribute, give, help, assist, or share
  • Cooperation: to be cooperative and collaborative with others
  • Courage: to be courageous or brave; to persist in the face of fear, threat, or difficulty
  • Creativity: to be creative or innovative
  • Curiosity: to be curious, open-minded, and interested; to explore and discover

Okay well this list is forty items long, so I’ll just put the values and omit the explanation. If you need them defined: Google them.

  • Encouragement
  • Engagement
  • Fairness and justice
  • Fitness
  • Flexibility
  • Freedom and independence
  • Friendliness
  • Forgiveness/self-forgiveness
  • Fun and humor
  • Gratitude
  • Honesty
  • Industry
  • Intimacy
  • Kindness
  • Love
  • Mindfulness
  • Order
  • Persistence
  • Respect/self-respect
  • Responsibility
  • Safety and protection
  • Sexuality
  • Skillfulness
  • Supportiveness
  • Trust
  • Other:________
  • Other:________

Apparently the list is from Russ Harris at this website right here. So I didn’t steal it, okay?

Hopefully you guys got something out of that. It sure does seem like something you really need to sit down and think about that’s for sure.

So as I was typing that, I realized all sound really good and I think I hold nearly everything as a value somewhat. There aren’t any that I noped away from: everything sounds great! Maybe fairness and justice can get the axe: life simply isn’t fair. I think we should strive for fairness but claiming something is unfair doesn’t mean shit. Anyways, this only complicates the matter. I think it’d be easier to ask what values you don’t hold than to ask what values you do hold. Trim the paper until you’re left with a shape that is actually you, in a way.

Basically on Thursday the therapist said that maybe if I had a clear value system it might be easier to define my actions, to uphold my values in a way that gives my life some integrity and meaning. Not that I don’t have integrity or am a total heathen, I’m just lost and confused to where I’m aimless. She said to give myself some goals to give myself direction, and when asking about what goals I should set because I don’t know what the fuck I want to do she said to figure out my values. What I hold dear in life. The shit that I think is important. So basically values -> goals -> direction, something like that. More layers to the onion, I suppose.

Now my issue is I’m not sure how to live according to values exactly. An obvious one I have is curiosity; I’m always surprised that some people, maybe most people, simply don’t seem to give a shit about anything around them. Is anyone curious? Given the COVID-19 example you’d think maybe a large chunk of the population are reading about viruses, immunity, ventilators, exponential growth, RNA sequences, the flu, or vaccines, but most are probably reading questionable articles from Facebook (and spam-sharing them) about how maybe shoving some herbal supplements up your ass might make you immune to the disease. I don’t know this for a fact — luckily most of my friends don’t seem to be raging dumbfucks — but in the 2020 post-information/disinformation age curiosity and critical thinking in general appear to not be a huge priority to people.

Rant aside, how do I live according to having curiosity as a value? Just be curious? That’s it? I think another value I have is “helping people” or “spreading knowledge” but how the fuck do you help people be curious if they aren’t already? How do I leave by example? And even if I figure this out, how does it apply to a life goal? What job can I get that values curiosity and teaching people? A teacher? Is that what I’m supposed to do? What about that minor dream of being a flight instructor? Well, shit, maybe all of this therapy bullshit does make some sense if you think about it enough.

And that’s enough thinking about it for now. Onto the store, a six/twelve-pack of Claws, and editing that damn Morrowind story. Maybe perseverance is one of my values as well…