'Watts' that you say?

 7:33 am - Sunday - January 12th - TWW - 23° F, humidity 48%, wind 8 mph out of the east by northeast.....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 43° F.  On this date in 2019 TLE and I were in Sorrento, LA having breakfast at the 'Coffee House' with Forest and Cindy Olivier, whom we met through the Newell users group many years ago.....

.....we were on our way back to Arizona, so stopped off for a few days to see them.

According to Charles it got down to 19° F early Saturday morning (he has one of those indoor/outdoor thermometers).  Our water bay temp got as low as 34° F.....just above freezing.  It stays in the 40's most of the night without any heaters running, and we believe that is due to the two Norcolds venting heat from their individual compressors, which finds its way into the water bay.  

When the overnight temps first began to dip into the low 30's a number of weeks ago, we were concerned about how to keep the water bay from freezing.  It can be heated three different ways: 1) a 120 VAC electric heater, 2) a Suburban gas furnace (the kitchen one has a vent that feeds hot air into the water bay), or a chassis heater which uses the heated coolant from our big Detroit Diesel 6v92, while we are under way, to heat the water bay, bedroom, and salon.  Running the electric heater draws around 1.2 kw of power per hour out of our Bluetti battery bank, and will run that battery down to zero overnight.  Running the Suburban gas furnace during the night draws down our house battery bank quite a bit, too, plus we do not like to sleep with the gas heaters running as they are noisy.  Once we realized the bi-product heat from our Norcolds would keep things above freezing, we stopped worrying so much about that.  Of course, if we get overnight temps in the low teens for hours at a time we may have to turn on the kitchen Suburban gas furnace in the early morning hours to protect the water bay.  So far that has not been necessary.  The last couple of nights the water bay has gotten down to 37° F.

A couple of weeks ago Charles and Phyllis bought 10 additional 400 watt solar panels to supplement their existing eight 400 watt panels, and six 100 watt panels, which are installed on the CONEX, and barn roofs.  Since they were' going to be staying 3 nights this week they wanted to begin installing some of those 10 new panels, so I spent part of the day helping Charles do just that.  Since the barn roof needs some work to eliminate a few leaks, he didn't want to install the new ones up there just yet, so we set them up in the field behind the barn, and ran positive and negative cables to the battery room.....

I'm getting aluminum stands just like these for our two 325 watt panels

.....this, of course, is a temporary installation, and once the barn roof is fixed in the very near future, we'll move them up there.  Just adding the 1,600 additional watts of solar generation increased the input wattage to the batteries from around 1,400 watts to around 2,300 watts.  When we add the remaining six 400 watt panels (2,400 additional watts) that will really boost the input wattage, and get the batteries back to 100% hours earlier.  Ultimately they will be adding additional storage batteries to the system.  The panels are wired together in series, just like the ones on the CONEX and barn roofs. 

The daylight portion of each day is slowly getting longer.  While the sunrise time has barely changed in the three weeks since the winter solstice, the sunset time is now about 30 minutes later than it was then.  With that the sun is moving higher in the sky each day, gifting us more time in each day to to what needs doing.

Thanks for stopping by!