Bye-bye electric bills, hello sunshine!

So. Our plan for last weekend was to have a nice fish dinner Friday evening, then install our solar panels Saturday morning (the clamps arrived in Friday's mail, along with our new netbook computer). The weather was predicted perfect (80s during the day, 60-ish at night, moderate winds) so we'd planned to anchor out in the undeveloped Rhode River where I could do some long-overdue writing.

The weeknd started great. Salmon brushed with some lemon-pepper-garlic oil that Melissa had given us at Xmastime, rice medley with portabello mushrooms and cream (NOT from a Campells soup can, either!) and green beans, and a bottle of wine. But then on Saturday morning, the solar panel installation proved to be more complex logistically than we'd expected. So by 3:00 in the afternoon, we had the first panel up, but no wiring connected.

We decided that finishing the project would be more gratifying than going out for the weekend. And in many ways, staying in our slip is almost as nice as being out. (We're paying the upgrade for a slip directly on the creek, with a great unobstructed view of passing boat traffic - and worth every penny of it!)

To make a long story short, two trips to the marine supply store, a lot of trial and error, a fair dose of self-doubt, and reading and rereading the instructions, plus two different textbooks on boat systems, and by mid-afternoon Sunday .... success!

I'm pretty confident of my calculations for our power use. If the panels live up to their advertising, and we continue to conserve as we've done in the past, we'll be able to make ALL our power needs on sunny days, until we have 3 cloudy days in a row. The only thing we won't be able to provide is air conditioning. For that, we'll still need shore power. Of course, if we're on the water, its cooler and breezier so perhaps we'll need it less often.