3/25/18 Projects

First of the day's projects. I've been meaning to hook up an Anderson power pole adapter to my portable solar panels so I could charge my Goal Zero Yeti 1000 power bank without using my rig's inverter. It's super inefficient to do it that way, 17 volts or so comes into the solar charge controller, which charges the batteries, which supplies the inverter with 12 volt power, which it converts to 120 volt power, which then supplies the Goal Zero AC charger, which turns 120 volts into 17 volts to charge the unit. Super inefficient and a lot of wasted power in all those conversions. And the AC charger only supplies 63 Watts. Plugging my external panels directly into the built-in charge controller is charging it twice as fast. And I could add another two or three panels if I had them, and up the charge rate even more. The biggest problem with charging from my onboard inverter was the fact that I had to be there. I couldn't start that process and then leave, because if it clouded up or something that inverter would then draw my batteries down. Anyway, to make a long story short, everything is charging like gangbusters and I'm parked in the shade. That's awesome. 














Second project today. It's hard to see, but that's a garage door screen that I installed in the doorway of my little storage building. Not an earth-shattering thing, but it will keep the carpenter bees out while I'm trying to do things in there. And hopefully the mosquitoes too.

It's definitely helping that the weather is just about perfect right now.  Next up, taking some of the crap in there to the flea market and getting rid of it.