solar panel and emergency battery for camping

I bought a Duracell PowerPack 600 and an InstaPark 30W solar panel with the idea of using them as a power source/buffer system for charging electronics batteries/boombox/lights/etc while camping without running the car battery down.

The PowerPack comes with jumper cables, an AC charger, and 3 AC outlets and 1 DC outlet. The solar panel comes with a controller, cable, and charge controller. I also bought a male-male 12VDC extension cable.

After getting all the parts together, it appeared that I was supposed to run hardwired wires from the panel to the charge controller to the plug for the battery. That seemed like a bad idea to me, so I went to Ace Hardware and looked around for a bit trying to find a good plug-n-play connection method. Basically something to attach the charge controller to that would have room for connectors on each side.

It was not looking good for that...tons of options, but none that looked solid and yet re-useable and easily attached/detached. Then it hit me..phone cord is still rated for the old Ring Voltage level.

So I bought a phone wall jack box and front plate with two RJ11 ports, connected the solar panel to a male RJ11 plug and then ran into a problem. The 12VDC connector for the battery has standard 12VDC wires, about 5 times larger than what a standard RJ11 can usefully be attached to. So I just ran it straight in through opening at the back of the RJ11 port and connected it directly to the back for the time being. Later I'll do a down convert on the wiring since it doesn't need to be that high gauge since it's carrying at most 12V@1.6A. I'll try to remember to take some pictures of it tonight.

Then when I get back from Burning Man I'll have to work out a better connector/plug combination.

Tested out the outputs with my new multimeter and even at twilight the panel is producing 12V@0.1A. The charge controller is only rated for 3A max, but then the panel only produces 1.67A max, so it should be a good reasonably fast charge in bright daylight.

July 2011 PV totals

18.7MWhs generated so far for a total of 1100 last month. I'm really hoping to get a real monitor for the system soon. Then I'll be able to get daily totals, graphing, web access, etc. I wanted that when I bought the system, but they failed to provide it to me and I haven't had the cash since then.

PV totals

17.6mWhs generated so far, meaning I generated 2kWhs in June this year. I want my meter to spin faster backwards, and I want a better way to track the information. Maybe I'll be able to afford the web interface this year.

Full spectrum solar

Full Spectrum Solar or at least more full than it is now appears to be on the horizon. This should drastically increase the efficiency of solar power generation. So many break throughs in PV, I can't wait to see which ones work out.

pmconfig cannot find/create /etc/.cpr_config

Now here's a bizarre one. I created the meta device to start mirroring two drives on this x2270 running Solaris. When I finished and let it finish syncing and rebooted, it worked fine. I added the other metadevices for the other slices and rebooted and I got a drive error.

I wish I could have copied down what that initial drive error was, because it might be important, but unfortunately Oracles ILOM java based remote console doesn't have any way to copy text to or from it. So...anyway, drive error. I reboot to DVD and run fsck. It finds some problems, but nothing major. I reboot and get drive errors again. So then I'm wondering if there was some problem in creating the meta device so I switch back to booting from the disk slice 0.

That's when I start getting the error in the subject line. Again, I wish I could have copied it all exactly but this is the main error:
/usr/sbin/pmconfig: cannot open/create "/etc/.cpr_config", Bad file number.

It also listed a missing inode. So I thought maybe that file was corrupted or something. So I did the reboot to DVD thing, changed the files name, found a valid version of it and copied it into the directory, etc. Should lock down the inode to the renamed file.

No good.

So after a bunch of googling and waiting for Oracle to get me an OS/software guy to call me he found the solution. And it was a stupid stupid thing on my part.

When I switched back to booting from the disk/slice, I forgot to change /etc/system so that it didn't include the reference to the metadisk as the boot disk at the bottom of the file. Very stupid mistake.

Now...I still don't know why it failed the mirroring, but now that the system boots and is stable again, I can start troubleshooting that part.

homelite 24v cordless is a failure

In 2008 I bought a Homelite 24v cordless lawn mower. It worked beautifully and would often cut my yard twice per charge. That was even with the mulcher in, so it was mulching the whole yard without any problems.

Then in 2009 it wouldn't even charge up far enough to cut the yard once. So I got warranty service on it, and got a free battery out of it. Oh, but they decided it wasn't the battery, it was the battery charger which somehow wasn't covered in the warranty. Replacing the charger and battery cost me 80% of the original cost of the mower when it was new, but of course I didn't find that out until after the work had been done. I put in all of the complaints about that I reasonably could, and just hoped the mower would work for a while.

But no...even the same summer I'd had it replaced the new battery didn't work as well as the original. But it worked well enough to cut the yard. In 2010 I got the blade sharpened and figured out that if I took the mulcher out and was very careful about how I mowed and made sure to mow often and when it was as dry as possible, the mower would reliably cut the entire yard.

Now it's 2011. The first time this year I mowed, I noticed that the mower lost power much more quickly than it should. But it made it all the way through the yard before giving out. So I thought maybe just the first charge of the year was the problem. Unfortunately it rained pretty much all of May and I didn't get a chance to mow, so today when I tried to mow the grass it was a foot high and while I waited as long as I could for it to dry out, it was still pretty wet. The mower wouldn't even finish the front 1/8th of the yard. Now admittedly this is a worst case scenario and would have been a problem even for a gas mower, but I don't think there is any chance it'll work much better later in the summer when it's dry but hopefully it'll get me through this summer.

Next year I'll go get a corded electric mower. I really don't want a corded electric mower, I hate using my corded snow thrower it's such a pain in the ass. but I don't see that I've got much choice since I hate gas mowers even more. I certainly won't be buying a homelite mower again regardless...their service is absolute shit.

SMIT tensile solar

Flexible cloth-like solar. I'd be interesting in finding out how it attaches to the grid, or what it uses for level regulation, etc. Didn't find that information in a quick search though.