6:00 am, after the install of the JSP or Janky Solar Plant, came after a long night of fear and excitement and the sun was just starting to show like a 2 month late period. I quickly grabbed my voltage meter and was surprised to find my baby was already at 1.7 volts and 15 minutes later was already at 3.1 volts. If I could get my bank account to grow that fast, I would have already hired someone else to write this article.
Watching out an east facing window that hadn’t had its blinds opened in about 3 years was only interrupted by drinking a shit load of water and reading semi frequent voltage measurements out of anxiety until the first light flashed on the inverter – the red fault light. I quickly rustled through the mountain of cardboard and packaging materials for the user manual and found a pikachu. I quickly captured the yellow rodent before a mass loitering event of smelly collage kids and hipsters consumed my location and triggered Zenkor’s zombie apocalypse contingency plan.
Like any normal responsible man, I must have placed the instructions directly into the garbage where they belong. I had already watched a 2 minute rectal exam YouTube video once and know everything about earth, so I really didn’t even need them anyways. By this point more lights were flashing on the inverter and I was half expecting my next interaction to be with the local fire department, but much to their disappointment they would have to stay home and feed their dalmatian with a void of excitement.
For a while I wasn’t sure if I had purchased a power inverter or some kind of lighting effects box, since this thing wasn’t making any power or on fire, but Okeechobee music fest was about to have some competition. And then – in comparison to all the others, a painfully blinding blue light radiated out as angels sang in heaven. Photons were saved from their mundane lives of sin as they sacrificed their energy into moncrystalline; where they motivated electrons through great lengths of wire, transformers, signal generators, capacitors, and switches and granted a human being the ability to level up their Overwatch character. Worth it.
At the end the day, as Horus was finally defeated by Set, I checked my Kw/h meter and with an underwhelming .80 Kw/h for the day I can say this project was both a success and a lesson in how crappy solar panels are as far as output compared to other ways of generating electricity. Doing some pre-school quality math on a wet napkin, I decided 10 cents a day was about how much power this 200 watt system was producing on a sunny day.
When I said I didn’t measure anything before I installed these panels I wasn’t kidding, I just threw them up there with some sheet metal screws pretty much at the pitch of the roof slightly tilted upwards. I found out later that there is some kind of calculation with latitude for max power output or someone asked how old I was or something and came up with 26. I went out to measure with my super scientific phone app and the pitch was 25.7 degrees. If that doesn’t convince you that Turbine Jesus is real and is looking out for your best interests in your wild hair projects, it should.