My Solar Energy Quest

After hurricane Maria hit and knocked my garage’s roof on top of my car (only a dent on the car’s roof is the extent of the damage from one of the beams) and left me without electricity I was really down in the dumps. Although I fared better than a lot of my neighbors whose tin roofs were stripped from their houses, it is still tough to have one’s life come to an abrupt halt. And I still have no electricity.

Working for twelve-days straight to clean the surrounding area and clearing the debris from the 300-feet driveway I really had nothing else to do but sit around and wait to see how fast the power electric company was going to take to restore service. Let’s just say I got tired of waiting and if I had been holding my breath I would be dead right now.

Up until the first week of November I just spent my days trying to get back online thru metered mobile phones and reading during the day and at night, mostly Agatha Christie novels. After these were exhausted I decided to go to WalMart and purchase a tablet so that I could read my eBooks. This tablet would have to be a Windows 10 tablet as I wanted a full OS. I was able to get one around the first week of November; a Nextbook Flexx 11A.

The reason I wanted Windows 10 was because I also had plans to use it to get my work done as soon as I could get back online. My plan was to use a 12-volt battery to power the tablet at nights and charge the battery with my gasoline powered portable electric generator. This plan quickly fell apart because I just could not keep that up, gasoline is expensive.

At that point I really started looking into solar energy and today I power my tablet and cell phone with a 12-volt truck battery¹ that I charge with a 105-Watt Foldable Solar Panel Kit. It is working so well that I can’t believe I suffered for so long thru so many blackouts all these years. Many of those blackouts lasted for as long 52-hours!

This is my current setup.

• ACOPOWER 12V 105W Foldable Solar Panel Kit
• Cobra CPI890 800W Compact Power Inverter
• 12-volt Farm and Truck Battery (195 minutes reserve capacity and 81 amp hours)
• Nextbook Flexx 11A
• Unlimited 3G/4G Internet from a mobile carrier

My suffering thru blackouts is a thing of the past.

I will be writing more about my solar energy experience, so stay tuned.

1. Wrong type of battery, I know. I could not find a deep-charge battery locally, people rushed to the stores to buy them before I even thought about setting my system up.