Seriously? Again? :)

Yeah... NASCAR is Done... Poor lil' Danica took the wall again. Her first win will have to wait for another race, but... THAT was not the "Again" I'm speakin' of.

Know how I whined that something always seems to come along and consume our NASCAR wages?

Uh huh... it's THAT that. A couple nights ago I got into bed and forgot to turn off the inverter. Sooooo I slid down the bed... I know, some of you have already caught it ;) ... I slid down the bed and reached out to punch the inverter button...

... zap!

A static charge jumped from my finger and hit the charge controller monitor panel.

I was only a small lil' zap. Wasn't even visible in the dark. Only enough for me to feel it. Buuuuut, it was enough to cook something in the Solar System Charge controller. I've disconnected the monitor. I've hit the Reset button on the controller in the dark, in the daylight, with and without the monitor connected... Nada.

The only thing I ain't done is do a hula dance on the roof in my jockeys drinkin' a beer and hummin' taps.

No joy. The charge controller is frozen in a mode that is telling it the system is fully charged, so it won't let any power flow through. Unless one of the guys at RV Solar Electric knows some trick to get it unfroze... I'll just replace it.

So before we start our slow Northern Migration via Death Valley, I'll spend the next day or so tracking down a fresh solar system charge controller and getting it installed. I can't complain much. This one is six and a half years old and done fine work that whole time.

Maybe we'll be lucky and the price of those has come down too. I checked the panel price the other day and those are down by 50%!!! The Kyocera 135 panels we have cost $640 a piece as I recollect. The new panels at the same place last week were $310!!! I was looking forward to at least another panel and maybe two in the near future.

With two more panels we'd likely not even need to run the generator if bad weather lasted only three days or so.

Ah well, They say when you're as purty as me you have to endure at least some sort of disappointment so you keep things in balance.

The sun's coming up here at PIR. The springtime flowers are Poppin' in Death Valley... and it's time to get packed up. Soon as we're loaded I'll make my parts phone calls and we'll figure out where and how's the best place and way to deal with this blip.

Stay Tuned... summer roaming is close to the start line!

Itchy and powerless ;)
Brian