When Your Off Grid is Off

Oh, the joys of being off grid. While there is some joy in this, there has been equally struggle and frustration. All summer Jer kept saying we need to work on our generator that charges the batteries but there were so many other pressing things.

The sun was giving us great power but even without the batteries, our invertor was giving us issues. Every once in a while, the power would just shut down. We’d stand around for about two minutes before it booted back up. It really doesn’t like the microwave. The read out kept saying ‘Unbalanced.’

Jer went to work studying and restudying all the invertor information. For those of you who don’t know, the inverter changes the power from the sun into the kind of power the house needs to run. We finally had an answer or at least one piece of the puzzle figured out.

Our friend, an electrician, who volunteered to help wire our house, wired it like someone would for a normal residential home. We didn’t know and he didn’t know that there were some nuances that should have been taken into consideration. For instance, the breaker box has two sides, called buses. When there is too much pull on one side of the bus, it causes imbalance.

There is a whole mathematical science to this which is well beyond our understanding. All we know is that when too many things are daisy chained together or too many major appliances are put on one side of the bus it creates issues.

Even though we understand this now, there is no easy way for us to fix this, at least not the way it really should have been done in the first place. We bought another battery pack that has helped some.

Now to the generator. Time was closing in on needing it. Jer could get it to start but it wasn’t charging our lovely battery packs. Two electricians and one solar guy came to help us. The solar guy made one adjustment, which Jer switched back after more study. The electricians helped the generator to speak to the batteries and charge them, but the invertor isn’t speaking back to the batteries, at least that’s what I understand.

Months later we continue to face challenges with our solar/battery set up. There is no one within one hundred miles who knows how to work on this special generator we have. The good news is that we do have power, even without the sun. There are times we stand and wait for the power to come back on when we there is too much pull at once, but we are functioning.

I leave you with this bit of advice. Don’t flush the toilet while the microwave is running.