My Somewhat Solar Life

“It’s not a very solar day.” My lovely and long suffering wife is by now used to my gloomy pronouncements on cloudy days. Also, after decades of marriage, she is used to my committing to some random goal (“I’m going to ride my fixed gear bike back to Minnesota!”) and then seeing me devote what many folks would think of as an unreasonable degree of time and energy in pursuit of said goal.

My latest obsessive project began when I somewhat reluctantly got an ebike. In my work at Bike Friday I wound up doing more and more ebike work and my boss Alan gave me enough parts and encouragement that eventually I pretty much had to add an electric assist system to my own bike. The purist in me felt guilty about adding an e-assist to a bicycle that I was perfectly capable of pedaling around 100% on my own but I did have to admit that the e-assist was handy and useful.

To assuage my guilt, I came up with a plan: I would vow not to plug my bike into the main electrical grid. Any e-power I would get would come from the sun. That was last April and since then I’ve stuck to my vow. Along the way I’ve learned some things and I quickly added items to my “no grid power” list. Since April my phone, laptop, radio, Kindle, ebike lights and the ebike itself have been 100% solar powered.

My first attempt at solar power I documented in a post I called The Sheddy Kilowatt Story and the solar shed still forms the basis of my solar system. As time has gone by I’ve learned some things and made some changes and I figure this update might help other folks who might be interested in lessening their dependence on the main power grid.

First off, I don’t claim to be 100% grid-free. Christine and I are still (semi)normal people who have a fridge, stove, washing machine and other big power items that plug into the wall. I just figured I’d see how much stuff I could manage to run on a fairly small solar power system.

The first thing I learned from my solar shed was that my cheap flexible Chinese no-name solar panel was, in retrospect, too cheap. It claimed to be a 100 Watt panel but it never even came close to generating half that and a spring wind storm somehow mysteriously killed it. I replaced it with a heavier, rigid, name-brand Renogy 50 Watt panel. The Renogy panel consistently puts out more power than its predecessor ever did.

My Floureon Power Bank is the heart of my solar system and it continues to perform like a champ. This is one of those products that is so nice I bought it twice. I’ll explain more about the second one and how I use it a bit later on.

As solar skeptics like to point out, solar energy is variable. On a bright, sunny day you get a lot of power, at night you get none, and on cloudy days things are somewhere in between. But if you have a lithium ion power bank hooked to your solar panel, what power you get can be stored for when you need it. Most of the devices on my list have their own internal lithium ion batteries and charge via mini USB ports. The bike and the laptop charge via their wall chargers which I plug into the 120 VAC inverter on Floureon Power Bank.

For charging small things, like a phone, the 50 Watt panel is overkill. Renogy makes a little ten watt panel with a little lithium ion power bank that is very reasonably priced. I wound up getting several of these when I had delusions of going into the solar business but I quickly figured out that I am not really an entrepreneur. I’m more just a guy who explains things. I wrote a little paper about how to charge your phone off solar power and decided that I was not a businessman.

My stock of those little Renogy panels are great when dealing with the one big problem I have with my solar shed. The problem is this: it doesn’t move. In the spring and summer, this is no problem, plenty of sunlight lands on the shed’s solar panel. In the fall and winter I’d figured that I would get less sun due to cloud cover but I’d inconveniently forgotten the basic fact of the earth’s tilt. In the dark months the days are shorter and for the bulk of the daylight hours my shed is in the shadow of my house. Oops!

The shed still manages to crank out just enough power to keep the ebike charged if I don’t go too wild with using the e-assist. I’ve decided that this is one of the great lessons of my solar experiment, I am living within my solar means.

I can move those little 10 Watt panels to where the sun is shining. I have one on my backpack and when I get asked about it on cloudy days I say it is there because I am an optimist. And then I explain how it charges my phone. I have a couple more panels stuck to my south-facing bedroom window where they and the cat look out at the squirrels who feed in the morning sun.

My darkest day (literally!) was the winter solstice. My shed generated zero Watt Hours but I’d socked away enough juice in the various power banks that I didn’t go empty. The little south-facing panels put out enough to keep my phone and other little gadgets going. The days are getting longer now.

The last piece of my solar puzzle fell into place when I realized that the 50 Watt Renogy panel is actually small enough I could fit it on a bike trailer. A 50 Watt panel, an inexpensive Allen cargo trailer, a storage bin from Home Depot, and a second Floureon power bank combine to give me a mobile solar e-bike charging system. So now I have a solar bike shed and a solar bike trailer.

The trailer is handy for grocery shopping and I can use it to keep my ebike solar powered on tour.

I may not be 100% solar powered (yet!) but my somewhat solar life is rolling along.

Kent Peterson
on a not very solar day in Eugene, OR USA