12/28/04 - 1/2/05 Learning the Ropes Under Duress

There's more to a shakedown cruise than a dumped desk & smashed wine glasses. It's supposed to be a learning experience too & I didn't really appreciate how green I was. Especially with a new solar power system that I had installed cookbook-fashion, but that I didn't really understand operationally. Like how much juice do I really have in my batteries, what do I run when I'm driving, how do I cope in poor weather? But I've always been one to learn on the job, so I figured "Hey, how bad can it be? The sun shines in California, so I'll just figure it out as I go." Unfortunately, California was not in a cooperative mood. Little did I know that the sun would not shine in CA for weeks.

To pick up our story line, we're parked at Morpheus & Shannon's spread, somewhere in the Diablo Range, it's Tuesday morning and it's still raining. First task is to get parked in a solid spot & get leveled. I'm glad I have 4-wheel drive for maneuvering through some soft spots with 10,000 pound Gypsy. We hook up to water from their well & I start taking stock.

I notice the indicator shows the batteries are now half charged. I had optimistically left pretty much everything in Gypsy plugged in & running on electricity during the trip down, expecting either sunshine or eBoy's alternator to keep them charged. I had also run the furnace for the preceding 2 nights, and the blower uses quite a bit of juice. I hear humming sounds coming from the entertainment system. I know inverting battery DC to appliance AC uses power too, so I decide maybe I'd better unplug all of the AC equipment and go on an energy diet while I sort things out.

It finally stops raining by evening, but it's getting cold, we're at about 2500 feet. To keep from draining the battery, I try running eBoy with the umbilical attached when I run the heater for warmth. Still the batteries go down, showing low by the time we turn in for the night.

Wednesday morning and the sun is trying to make a show, finally breaking through midmorning. I climb up on Gypsy & tilt the big panels for better exposure & get out my mobile 80 watt solar panel & face it to the sun. My charge indicator gets up to 25 amps, yay! And the break in the rain gives us a chance to look around the property & talk a walk up the road. It's an unusual area, almost a wilderness, yet so near San Jose. We're just a few miles east of Lick Observatory on the back side of MT. Hamilton. It's kind of a desert savannah ecosystem, with live oaks, grey pines, and some type of cypress in open woodlands except for the south facing slopes which are mostly chaperal. People are thinly distributed and most live in mobile homes.

By early afternoon I realize Gypsy is oriented too far to the east. I hook up eBoy & give her a shove or 2 to get a more southerly exposure, then re-level. But by now the sun is playing hard to get & then the clouds come in. So I'm still short in the battery department. I decide it's time to turn off the inverter & just try to live on DC. It turns out to be a useful exercise since I discover that I have a lot of stuff that runs on DC: plenty of lights, even the furnace blower. And I've decided it would be a good idea to get a gas only heater to supplement when I just can't afford to run the furnace. So things are looking up.

It's been fun comparing notes with Shannon who lives "off the grid" with his own small solar power system, 2 panels & two 6-volt batteries. We seem to be getting about the same performance in terms of charge percentage as indicated by battery voltage. Shannon & Morpheus are better equipped to deal with the lack of sun though. They have a nice big wood stove for heat & plenty of kerosene lamps for when the batteries run out. It was nice to come up to their place and settle in around the stove when things were feeling cold & dark in my trailer.

It turned out that early Wednesday was the only real sun for the whole week. It rained most of Thursday, off & on Friday (New Year's Eve) & Saturday. I spent Friday night & Saturday with my life long friends, Tim & Sandy & hoped that by the time I got back up the mountain Saturday night, I might see some charge back in my batteries. No such luck, even though there was virtually no electrical drain while I was gone.

There was a little good news though. It had been 40° inside Gypsy when I got back & the new little gas heater I had installed Friday morning kept the chill off, raising the temperature back up to 50° by Sunday morning. But Sunday was turning out to be a dismal day. Steady drenching rain. No outlook for any sun at all & the forecast was for more of the same heading into the week.

I had to be ready to go to work on Monday morning. I had got the satellite dish set up and working Friday morning, but I was going to need some reliable power to put in a full day Monday. Reluctantly I decided I needed to head for a campground where I could plug back into the grid. I got out my Woodal's Capground Directory, called around & decided to head for Pinto Lake Park in Watsonville since I had planned to spend a little time in the Santa Cruz area and their price was better than some others. My first choice was New Brighton State Beach, but it was closed to RVs due to the rotten weather.

I packed up, climbed on top of Gypsy in the rain to secure the solar panels, hooked up, said my goodbyes and headed back down Mines Rd. Four soggy hours later I was setting up in the dark & rain. My desk came through in good shape since I had hog tied the drawers, but between Mines Rd & the pot holes on 101, I had smashed 3 more wine glasses & a couple of champaigne flutes. The wine glass rack still needs work!

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