The Eagle Has Landed... finally. Well it was about two weeks ago.

The idea of this experiment was not just to punish myself it was actually to see if I could live fairly comfortably with a pretty small solar array (one 130W panel) and a revolutionary DC micro grid (see previous posts). After a few teething problems involving me destroying the battery back up before plugging in the solar input we are finally up and running and the system is functioning gloriously. I can't tell you how good it feels to finally be able to come home and turn the lights on and charge my phone and laptop. I can read without cranking up the wind up lantern every 15 minutes, I can watch Iplayer and movies again, I can write my blog and I can have friends round again (although I didn't convince them that cold showers were actually better than warm ones). I have never managed to run out of electricity and can comfortably run lighting, phone charging, internet and music on my laptop all evening without any problems. Ok so it is the middle of summer and we are getting much more solar resource than can be expected in the winter. On the other hand I intentionally only used a pretty puny 130W solar panel. If I was doing this in the winter (which I am hoping to do) I would use a slightly bigger and more efficient 250W panel, or if I can, a monster 333W panel.

Scott and Alex after spending their first night off grid together. They seemed to be very much in love. Alex took his sleeping bag home with him as I don't have a usable washing machine.

Here is the kit working...

Lithium Ion battery with 480wh capacity, two 4 W LED lights which  would last forever and the clever bit; The Home Energy Hub borrowed off Moixa. It acts as a charge controller. So far neither my laptop or mobile phone have blown up. How.... fortunate [Mr Bond].

You can now watch this Youtube Clip, it is what I sing in the shower (the clip isn't actually me in the shower, don't worry).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76RrdwElnTU

We bolted the one solar panel vertically to the west facing 'balcony' rail (I use inverted comas as you can hardly call it a balcony). The rail is solid iron. We used M8 bolts, Hilti carrier section and Hilti End clamps. All suitably over engineered fixings so I can sleep at night.

Here is Glen, the Joju roofer lining up the mounting rail.  Perfectionist.

And most importantly, can you see the panel which is providing all my electricity needs this summer?

Yep, it is there somewhere.

As we all know a west facing solar panel won't generate as much as one facing south and vertically mounted panels won't do as well as one at a 30 degree pitch. My panel will generate roughly half what a perfectly orientated panel will generate. There is a fantastic website which will work all this out for you, take into account local climate data and give you a breakdown for each month and a daily average. Really useful:

http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvgis/

My panel should generate around 250wh of electricity per day in July. Plenty:

Solar resource broken down month by month. Loads of energy in the summer, but could I go off grid in the winter? Average of 30 wh per day with a 130W solar panel in December.