Day: February 10, 2013

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Hey, Look At What I Have!

Can you see that box protruding from the left side of the fridge vent cap where the wire is going in?

I’ve been thinking about adding a solar panel and trying to figure out how to daisy chain it into my existing system. Research brought me across ‘combiner boxes’, which take the connections from solar panels, combine the current, and send it all to the charge controller. So once the original panel is installed with the controller and wiring, adding future panels is just a matter of plugging them into the controller box.

Damn, why didn’t AM Solar sell me one of those? 🙁 Or maybe they did? I should go up on the roof and check! Oh, wait, I took pictures of my installation. Ah ha! Oh, wait. That’s the vent cover. Hmm… I’m not sure. I need to get on the roof after all. No, stupid. They gave you a detailed invoice! Check the invoice and sure enough, I was billed for a ‘refer C-box.’

So adding a new solar panel will just be a matter of screwing and Dicoring it to the roof and plugging it into the combiner box! The job doesn’t seem as scary now! And I’m further motivated to buy from AM Solar, even if I won’t get the lowest price, since I’ll know for sure I have the right connections.

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Dancing On the Pier

Last night, social director S rounded up just about everybody on the beach plus some friends from Port Lavaca and got us all down to the Indianola Fishing Marina for an evening of live music on the pier to sort of celebrate Mardi Gras (I spent two weeks in New Orleans and I got Mardi Gras beads in Indianola, go figure!).

The marina is a tiny building that serves a small menu where you can grab beer ($1.50 a can!) from the cooler. It costs $5 to fish all day (and night) from the pier. I really want to go back there one afternoon. S and I can’t decide which place is cooler, the bar in Chicken or the marina in Indianola. It’s awesome to meet fellow travelers who have been to the same places you have!

Even though it had been kind of wet and gross all day, the temperature on the pier was very comfortable. Our food came quickly and then the music started.

We were being entertained by a local band, Highway 316, and they were good! They had people dancing almost immediately. S got me to join her, then a new neighbour, L, asked me to share a few dances with him. We must have looked like quite the pair, him who hadn’t danced in 20 years and me who has the rhythm of a stick! It was a lot of fun!

Another member of our group were a couple from Germany who had their RV shipped to North America and have been traveling for the past 10 months. They are heading home in March. They said their night in Indianola will make the top of the list of most memorable moments of their trip.

We didn’t stay too late, leaving around 9:30. I somehow got lost on the way home (how you can do that when the marina is literally at the end of the street from which one accesses the beach is beyond me), so by the time my GPS got me turned around and home, it was 10:00.