fratermus

... in which I relate my first wild bear sighting (with crappy pic) & and double the size of my LiFePO4 house battery bank .

The domain name is up for purchase ($9999.99 according to my registrar), so it looks like it's lost rather than just temporarily parked for a slightly overdue bill.

Luckily the site was recently backed up by the Internet Archive and the archived All, gpx, and csv links seem to work.

a swamp cooler and humidifier of this design are doing the same thing: blowing air through a wetted, porous medium. The goals are different (humidification vs cooling) but the mechanism is the same.

TL:DR: I saw a set of cheap panels with weird specs at Home Depot. I bought some to experiment on and to use as portables to augment my mounted solar.

Home Depot is selling 200w of panel for $114. That's $0.57/Watt. Not amazing compared to used panels (typically $0.33/Watt) but HD is all over the place and has free ship-to-store.

It also comes with mounting brackets and one of those single-stage PWM controllers. I'm not bagging on that kind of controller, but it's not a great fit for this particular set of panels.

#THE CATCH

The panels are a weird design, apparently 24 cells in series. Normal "12v nominal" panels have 36 in series for ~18Vmp. These have a Vmp of 12.0v, so I think we would call them "8v nominal".

This makes them practically unusable in parallel for charging lead or LiFePO4.

You could run the panels in series on the PWM controller since it has a 50v input max and the series Voc would be 30v. But, due to the way PWM works the panels would be running at in the 14v range at the most. This is way, way off the 24.0Vmp of the series array. I'd expect a max harvest of ~120w with that kind of setup. If these were normal panels in parallel and on PWM I'd expect a max of ~160w. We can go into the math on that if anyone wants.

The best case scenario IMO would be to run the panels in series with an MPPT controller. This would get us closer to ~170w max harvest.

some other thoughts:

• The panels might work well enough in parallel for 3S Li-NMC because of that chemistry's lower voltage
• HD has a 10% discount program for veterans if you provide them with a bit of documentation.

... in which I camped in a spot infested by mule deer, picked up spent brass, and trusted the local forecast enough to do my cooking off solar....

in which I bumblefsck through figuring out why my solar setup no worky

I was outside the zone of totality, so was still making some power.

Notice that panel voltage did not decrease like many think, it does. Vpanel is stable above ~10%-15% insolation, depending on the panel

I did this because the hotplate was a bit more than my offgrid rig could handle comfortably. Been using it at ~500w to very good effect.

This is probably worth considering in general, but dealing with financial lockouts on the road is a particular kind of dumpster fire.

TL:DR: I deposited a check and things went weird (not an NSF scenario). My bank got spooked and locked not just that one account but all of my access for two weeks.

I scrambled to open new accounts elsewhere and move direct deposits over. Soon (like 12 hours) after completion my bank said "oopsie!" and restored my access to the accounts this morning. Having pre-existing accounts at other locations would have been stressful because one institution could not bogart my funds.

... up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Yay.

BTW, I keep track of laws like this in this RVwiki article

Like an idjit I smoked my old shunt by shorting it while moving stuff around. I eventually replaced it with the Aili type.

It works fine, but I don't like how the data is presented. Totally my fault, I saw what the display looked like when I bought it. Grrr......

House Bill 1365 was filed in January. It prohibits camping or sleeping on public property without a permit. The bill would give local municipalities the power to designate specific areas for sleeping or camping. Such properties must have restrooms, running water, security, and access to health care for mental and physical health. Also under the provision the specified areas may not negatively impact local businesses.

Here is the info if you want to follow along