on solar elevation

The swift onset of winter caught this whorphan woefully off guard – his solar panels no longer spend time in the sun. Instead of basking and gulping in full exposure, they sip spare photons while lounging in this little house's lengthening shade. While preparing and splitting piles of wood for the wood-stove, he neglected his solar setup; while raking and composing mounds of leaves for the garden, he overlooked the realities of diminished daylight. Oh, how quickly it occurred, how rapidly our planet tilted on its axis, the sun now rising a few compass-ticks south of due east and, after noon, avoiding fully the front yard's short run.

What is a lowly solar farmer to do? Does he relocate his 2 sets of 3 solar panels? In order to do that, he'd have to move the entire battery bank along with both inverters and run some new wire into the house; besides, positioning the panels closer to the drive would put them at greater risk of getting struck by a passing car. Does he raise the sets on bamboo poles clustered and woven together so that they share the weight? This has both advantages and disadvantages. Among the advantages are these: if the panels were raised to a height of eight feet and lashed firmly to bamboo poles, they would be exposed to direct sunlight for a longer period of time during each day (provided the sun were to shine); they would be completely out of the wet grass; they would be at lesser risk of being broken from thrown or falling debris; if run into accidentally by a vehicle, the poles would splinter and bend while the panels above them would remain safe (this is an assumption), whereas if the panels were to be struck by a vehicle directly, they would be ruined totally. Among the disadvantages are these: the panels would face only in one direction and could no longer be manually rotated to track the sun; the wire cables with which they feed electricity to the battery bank would have to be run through a tube or otherwise secured against tripping and entanglement; they would be lashed to bamboo poles, which disintegrate over time, with either rope or some form of metal bracket – either way, the poles and lashings would have to be replaced every few years.

The third option is, of course, to do nothing, to adjust to a diminished charge in the battery bank, and to resign myself to my panels only getting full sun between 0830 and 1030 in the morning. I do not like this third option because it forces me to choose between recharging all my electronics batteries and firing up the 750 watt inverter to watch a full-length movie (a luxury I plan to cut out of my life anyway, as I have seen too many movies of late, and read too few books); it sees me standing by the window each day hoping that the sun will shine when I want it to. Therefore, the third option is off the table; I will raise the panels to a great height, lash them firmly to their mounts, secure all loose cables, wash the mud off my tools, put them away, and go watch Caddyshack for the umpteenth time. Mahalo!

(p.s. Upon further consideration, I have changed my plans. I shall not raise my panels on platforms, and I shall not drag them up to the roof. Now, instead of risking the panels causing damaging to or being blown off of the platform or roof, I have decided to locate them closer to the lane and to cut down a large bush next to the house, so that now the panels are only in the house's shade for maybe an hour, and not all afternoon. Sometimes, the old mantras come in handy; in this instance, I remembered the Latin saying Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate, English for Keep it simple, you bleeping numskull.)

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one small thing

It was but one small thing, one simple step not taken, that caused the big battery to drain. It started with d-cell batteries, themselves a few decades old, that I was trying to charge for the first time in their lives, so as to use them in a lamp, for reading; the d-cells, even after sitting in the charger for nine hours, had not retained any charge, providing not even trace illumination. Conceding defeat, I had dutifully unplugged the charger from the extension cord that runs to the 750-watt inverter in the basement, which is connected via alligator clamps to the big battery, a 12 volt deep-cycle marine type.

The reason that the marine deep-cycle exhibited a diminished charge compared to if it had simply sat there not providing power to anything was that I had forgotten to turn off the inverter when done using it; therefore, the little green LED light that burns when the inverter is turned on had slowly whittled away at the big battery's charge, over twelve hours chewing up a couple of amperes. One small thing overlooked, one simple step not taken, had impacted demonstrably, using up less electricity than I had originally feared, however, for after turning off the DC-to-AC inverter, the big battery's charge jumped back up almost all the way back to where it would have been had I not been such a fool. Had it not been for the post-booze haze which moved in Saturday morning and hung on tenaciously all day, I might have remembered to depress that one small button, thus saving myself a bit of consternation, but, ah well, the past cannot be changed, while the future is pregnant with smarter decisions, better made. Huzzah.

And so, I shall hazard to declare, it goes with many things in life – the small and easily-overlooked, if they are indeed viewed as small, if indeed they are overlooked, quickly turn into things of tremendous import, wreaking havoc if allowed to grow from tiny saplings into towering trees. It is for me, then, to remember to attend to the small beginnings of things, and to stay with them, patiently, until they have reached their natural end. In this fashion, then, I might actually make something of this pathetic life of mine. Mahalo.

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