I want to share with you guys a really crappy situation we have been with our solar power system. This has been a continuing saga for months now, and it has greatly affected our off grid situation and my personal mental well being.
As an off-gridder and content creator, I have to make a choice. Do I post all the successes I have and pose like a badass super smart off grid person? Or do I share the blunders and mishaps along the way? Sharing failures takes a lot of guts, especially when I do something so blatantly stupid. But I think it's important to share the failures along with the successes, as it gives a better picture for others about the homesteading lifestyle.
I will start from the beginning, but also try to make this a shorter post, because I could write a whole chapter about what happened.
We purchased this property with no utilities on it, so we decided to do solar as our main form of electricity, we are in Arizona after all, and the sun is abundant.
We spent a TON of money on this system, around $15k after purchasing all the cabling, mounting hardware, backup battery system, panels, inverter, control panels, etc. For us, it is a lot of money, a whole lot.
We mounted the panels on our shipping container (which was also a whole lot of money) and all the equipment was housed inside the container. We placed all the heavy equipment on heavy duty metal racks, which also costed a WHOLE lot of money.
Get my drift? Stuff is really expensive! But that is not the point to this story.
As summer 2021 came along, our shipping container was getting really HOT. And we had to keep our temps down for the equipment to run properly. We had one of those spinning roof things to suck out the heat, but the Arizona sun just made it too hot in the container.
This is where things get REALLY STUPID.
We opened the door to our container for airflow. Now, shipping containers are waterproof and mouseproof when the door is CLOSED. Not when it is open...
The local mice decided that our container made a great home and they moved in, in droves. They literally crawled and pooped on every surface, all over the batteries and our totes, boxes, equipment, etc.
We worked on culling the population, but they just kept multiplying. I wasn't terribly worried about it until....
We went to our local bike night for a couple of hours. When we got home, we had no power, which was odd. We investigated our equipment and saw that our inverter had smoked! It could have really been a disastrous fire, but we got lucky.
We figured it was a manufacturing defect and it was still under warranty, so we crated it up and sent it to AIMS Power, after paying nearly $300 for freight costs.
I got an email from AIMS, assuming it would tell me how it was all their fault and they would repair it and send it back, covering all the freight costs.
That was a big NOPE! The reality is, the mice got into the inverter and peed on a couple of circuit boards. It caused these boards to fry and melted down our inverter. Case closed!
Also, so much dust and bugs, yuck!
We were in a pretty good shock from this, because the openings into the inverter are TINY. But mice have a way of getting into everything, and we had to learn the hard way.
AIMS Power will not work on an inverter that has mouse excrement in it, so it is up to us to repair the machine.
This is where things get really fun. The circuit boards that were fried have been sitting on a SLOW BOAT FROM CHINA for months.
The boat itself has been sitting off the port of California just waiting to be unloaded. So our off grid solar power system has been offline for close to half a year.
The silver lining is that we acquired our next door property that had a well and a power pole on it, and we got it for a steal - this will make for an excellent post. So we luckily have had power. If not, we would have been on generator power, or simply no power for that whole time.
Update! The boards have arrived!
After waiting for over FIVE months for the replacement boards, they have finally arrived. And they costed us over $900. Shipping the inverter to and fro costed us over $400. And our power bill added up to about $700 for those four months. So, the whole debacle ended up being a $2,000 mistake. The inverter itself totals to around $3,500 so it was worth the fix instead of buying a replacement.
Moral to the story. Mice can and will DESTROY things quickly, they can do so much damage within a very short amount of time. Do not underestimate mice. If you have a mouse problem, resolve it as quickly as you can. And do not assume that they will not get into something, because they will squeeze themselves into ANYTHING.
Also, don't be afraid to share failures, as we can all learn from your mistakes. Maybe this post will help someone out, maybe not.
Thanks for reading!
Sincerely, Regina Cal.
