That's the route we've planned on taking when we finally get to our beautiful 20 acres in Terlingua Ranch. Our property actually has power poles not far away, but we both really like the idea of being off the grid and not having power lines to impede our view. (Plus, having just a few poles installed is VERY expensive.) Neither of us are electrical geniuses, though we have family members who are very well versed. (In fact, my brother-in-law like unit is a commercial electrician, licensed in Texas and he's done electrical work on the giant wind turbines.) But, we need to understand and we wanted to have the system right from the start, so we decided to utilize a company in western Colorado to help us figure out our system. The phone company in the Big Bend area requires a certain amount of storage capacity, and a system to supply it, before they will run the phone line. (Yup, out in the middle of nowhere, we have a phone box, including, I'm told, fiber optic cable for our internet.) Yesterday we got our quote. We're hoping that tomorrow Dave will be able to drive to Glenwood Springs (ish) to pick it all up. It's a system that will power us in the trailer, meet the phone companies requirements and be expandable for when we have the house built.
In the meantime, we purchased a couple of smaller (tiny) units for charging electronics and batteries. The first is a little cheapie unit from Harbor Freight. A $15 battery charger. So far I've charged 4 AA batteries in about 90 minutes. I have yet to check the output with a volt meter, so we'll see how it really did. The second thing we got is the Goal Zero 7 watt panel with battery charger/power pack. I used it this morning to charge my Nook. While the Nook wasn't so low on power that I was being told to charge it, it was pretty low and would probably need charging while I was reading tonight. I was super happy to see the little amber light come on as soon as I plugged it into the panel! (My husband called me a geeklette.) Less than 3 hours later, I had a fully charged Nook!
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| Goal Zero charger and Nook soaking up the sun. |
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