I am not a handy sort of person. Can’t fix much of anything without guidance and tend to avoid it for as long as possible. Perhaps not the type of attitude you need to live off the grid.

As soon as the panel was gone we began having a problem with the system. We found out after months of my procrastinating that our generator wasn’t putting out enough power for the inverter to work properly…so it didn’t charge our batteries. This was actually a simple fix as well.
 
My lack of understanding and procrastination left us without a source of quiet and clean electricity for 3 months. Ok...I am done hitting myself over the head for this now.
 
Regardless of how we ended up that way it was an eye opening experience. A person simply cannot live without electricity in some fashion in todays electronic world.

We began by using flashlights and simply suffered through the lack of real lighting for a month or so. Many wasted batteries later I turned to an led lamp which greatly extended battery life and actually offered real light in a sense. I highly recommend that anyone keeping standard flashlights and batteries around for an emergency switch to led.

To amuse ourselves we listened to a battery operated emergency radio for a while. When this is your only source of amusement and you use it all day it simply eats up batteries. I am not sure why all radios require 6 C batteries. We ended up buying a little $3 radio that used 2 AA batteries and were rewarded with less wasted batteries and money.
 
The emergency radio did have a crank on it but I challenge anyone not in a dire situation to crank anything a thousand times for 2 minutes of actual radio play.
 
On occasion, when we simply wanted to be amused by the television we would run our little generator for a few hours. The noise was prohibitive and made the experience much less enjoyable.

The generator continued to run our washing machine and that was about it. Even though we live in a remote location I still did not want to disturb our closer neighbors by running the generator all day. Some here do that and I know what it sounds like. Annoying.

One benefit to not having electricity is that a person does not have the luxury of staying up until 3 a.m. watching television or sitting in front of a computer. I found myself reading many books in the evening thanks to the led lamp. A much more rewarding experience.

For my wife it was much less a comfortable situation and she and our child would simply listen to the radio and get to bed early. I often went to bed much earlier.

It was at this time that we began talking about getting back on the grid. Convenience and comfort were mentioned often in our discussions. Given the way we had been living it is understandable.

We didn’t understand how to deal with the system we had and didn’t ask for help. We had had enough and simply wanted to live like normal energy consuming people.

The time finally came when I asked for help with the system. A new solar panel was put in to play and our batteries, inverter and generator were all set up to work together properly and a few sunny days later we have our entertainment and our light back.
 
I learned a lot about myself from this experience. A lot about my wife and child and now realize that I need to educate myself on every aspect of the set up we have. If it isn’t working simply ask someone to help rather than wait.

And so…we are lighted and amused again. Lifes not so rough and this whole solar thing isn’t so bad. There is only one problem and that has left us standing at a crossroads which I will talk about in my next entry.