This photo shows my two banks of solar panels.  The panels in the foreground are 75 watts each, and the panels in the background are 40 watts each.  I also have a single 80-watt panel mounted on an old electric company cable spool, which is semi-portable.  I've been moving it from place to place in an effort to find the best location for my next bank of panels.  I currently have 9 panels, with a total output of 540 watts.  My goal is to increase the total output to at least 1,000 watts over the next few years.

While 540 watts of power may seem trivial when compared to some systems that produce several thousand watts, it's enough to run a small freezer and fridge and charge my batteries on sunny and partly cloudy days.  We heat our home & water with lp gas, and our stove also uses propane.  All of the 120-volt lighting in our home is flourescent, with the exception of some outdoor spotlights which are LED (light emitting diode).  Each spotlight contains 120 LED's, and uses only 8 watts of power.

We two lcd televisions (20" & 15").  Some people who visit this site might assume that I use a laptop computer, because laptops use a tiny fraction of the power that most towers use.  Actually, I have over two dozen working computers, and only two of them are laptops.  The laptops are rarely used at home.  I mostly use two standard towers simultaneously with a 15" lcd monitor and a kvm switch.  I also repair & upgrade pc's for friends and co-workers, so it's probably safe to say that computers consume more electrical energy than anything else in my home.

This is a stock photo of the charge controller I'm currently using.  It's a 30-amp controller made by morningstar, and I'm VERY satisfied with its performance.  It uses a fairly new technology called PWM (pulse width modulation) charging, which charges batteries very efficiently.  These controllers can be "stacked", which means several of them can be connected to a single battery bank.

My electrical system is obviously very basic, but it is also very functional.  I never bothered to keep track of all the money I've spent for this system to date, but one thing is certain.  During the past decade, more than $12,000 of hard-earned money that WOULD have been used to pay electric bills, was instead spent on other things of my own choosing.

In the beginning, it took all the courage I could muster to break the "unbreakable" bond, but it turned out to be a lot less difficult than I anticipated.  My only regret is that I didn't do it a lot sooner.



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