Fulfilled Promises

Guillermo shows up a few minutes after 2, as promised! I’m sooooooo psyched!

Guillermo can actually see my panels from his porch. He lives on the second floor of one of the smaller condominiums here in Alcapulco – 11 units altogether – and he is having trouble getting 10 of them to agree to convert to solar energy!

He goes inside and upstairs and sees that my panels are dirty and so he grabs his hose, and from his perch on his porch, and rinses them down.

Guillermo tells me he has two steel rods in his back from a 2^nd story fall. He was forced to find different work and solar it became!

He looks at my charger, pleased because he knows this one. He checks my inverter, also pleased, he knows the system. He doesn’t ask me why my system is 24 volts but he tells me my fridge is using too much energy and I should have gotten a d.c. fridge.

I tell him I only have a small water pump and a fan on d.c. – everything else is a.c. He’s astonished and tells me I could buy all my appliances for d.c. I tell him I’m not interested in buying new stuff.

He asks me questions I used to know the answers to but now I’m blank. Are my panels in series or parallel? What are the battery specifications? Where’s the manual for the charger?

He tells me he and his worker will return in the morning with the things he needs to really check out my system.

But later that night, Guillermo returns with several stapled pieces of paper he has copied for me. He hands me a few pages of information about my charger, and then lots of pages of information about batteries.

Hmmmm. So now I find out I’ve been overfilling the batteries and the mysterious flashing red light was not an indication to lower the voltage by using more, but it was an indication of the batteries being charged more than 50%.

Okay. Guillermo warns me not to use my system if it is under 24 volts. Tomorrow he says, after I’ve read everything, he will look at everything, wash the panels more carefully, test the batteries, the charger, the inverter, the wires, and find out where the problem is.

I can't wait until tomorrow!