Sunshine Power

Fredericksburg, Texas

An extremely important event has happened today. The Old Fat Man would be dancing with delight and excitement if he could dance. An old friend with lots of adventures and stories to tell has finally started his blog. He has been pounded for a year to get a blog going because he has tooooo many great adventures and stories to share with us all. Please check this out http://mobilestudiotravels.blogspot.com/ and enjoy it. Bob is a neat fellow from over in the Carolinas. Be sure and ask him about his inflatable kayaks. He is also good at muck dancing like was mentioned in one of my blogs a few weeks ago.

Another thing that surprised me today was the information that the Fort here in town had closed down. That was my only contact with Mac. Maybe luck will smile on me and he will bump into me somewhere in town. That would be really nice.

Speaking of nice. On a walk tonight it was wonderful to hear the sounds of folks out playing. There were two basket ball games, one softball game, a tennis match or two and some other party event at a pavilion. Lots of laughter and fun noise. That is great to see and hear.

As of about three pm today, Comfort Castle is on solar power for all it’s twelve volt needs. There are two batteries that came with the Castle and now one hundred watts of solar to recharge them. About three is when the charger from the 120 volt service was unplugged. It is going to be a nice study to see how things work out.

The work today was easy but slow. Frying a controller was not in my plans. Every step was read twice, then simulated and re read to verify my actions were right. Here are the results. First a broader view of how it looked inside the Castle.

And now you can see that the system is charging even though the sun is very close to the tree line across the creek.

All told it took about eight hours to install the system and clean up. Probably over half that time was read and verify to prevent expensive errors. A replacement controller would have cost about $250. That would have been a major ouch. Supposedly the future costs are only a couple of batteries every five to seven years. My current batteries are working on their third year.

Now the bad part. With all the contortions, up and down the ladder, standing at weird angles and all that kind of thing, man I AM SORE. Being a lazy bum has it’s detriments.

About five this evening, some golf practice was the order of fun. My technique was terrible but my fun level was overflowing. That was a great way to try to have tooooo much fun. TheOFM.