I'm getting The Beach House bug!...

 

This winter has me feeling a little restless and dreaming more of warmer, sunnier days ahead.  While snug inside by the wood stove, although I love being warm by the fire, I find myself thinking of what I could be doing outside like working on things on the beach house or getting the Scotty Gaucho ready for camping.  I write list after list of "things".  Then I realize I cannot do some of those outside things right now due to the weather, so I force myself to do those inside things that I keep putting off because I keep adding to  my outdoor dream list!  I need to just let time pass and do what I can during each cycle.  One part at a time vs pinball machining everywhere!

This afternoon, the temperatures got up into the 40's and I took this opportunity to get out to the Beach House to conduct a winter solar/off-grid experiment.  

I've had my solar panel on the roof for about a year now and it is hooked up to my deep cycle battery, charge controller and inverter.  But, I also have a heavy duty extension cord running from the house for when I get the inspiration to go out there and read or clean or re-arrange.  Recently, I watched one of Will Prowse's live streams and he talked about the life of a solar panel and how if it is hooked up but no power is being drawn off of it through the battery, it will degrade much faster by just absorbing all the sun's rays and not utilizing the power.  Enter my experiment....actually it is my second experiment.

The first experiment was to hook up a small LED lamp and monitor the battery performance during a full week's worth of sunshine.  I plugged the lamp into the inverter and turned it on.  Every day, I watched the monitor show me the smiley face of "everything is fine".  I was pleased!  What I did not take into consideration was that over 5-6 consecutive days and nights, the battery didn't have a down time to charge.  I left the light on 24/7.  On the last day when I checked the monitor, it had a sad face and there were zero's across the board.  The inverter shuts off automatically so there was no fear of damaging it.  

On to the second experiment....I plugged the lamp into a timer and I will monitor the results of the light only being on for two hours in the evening and two hours in the early morning.  This will give the battery the recharge time it might need during the daylight hours.  I will let you know how it went when the experiment is over.