Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

Same Subwoofer, Same Morning Super Shake, Only Danced To And Blended (Respectively) Via The Sun

With the flip of a two-foot metal arm on a control box outside my house – something out of Frankenstein’s laboratory (from which the Silver City, New Mexico electric supply store still apparantly stocks some of the parts) – the Funky Butte Ranch went solar yesterday.

This eight-panel installation, (for solar geeks this was the second involving silicon photovoltaic panels on the FBR), was smooth almost to the point of anti-climactic. At some point I’ll reveal the literally shocking details of my first attempts at homemade solar power, and probably in the next dispatch I’ll explain why 70 gallons of mucky water emptied on to my new bed during my solar hot water installation a couple of weeks earlier. But this one was like butter, except that the sun was so piercingly bright as CW’s crew and I bolted the panels on the ranch house roof, that I became a literal redneck. (There’s more on my angelic solar electrician in the Feb. 1 Dispatch.) Nothing like mirror-esque metal roofing to brush up the old tan. Luckily it’d been a cool early May day, so temperatures remained in the low three digits.

Solar power actually has several off switches (among them clouds and nighttime), but I only have control over one of them, going inside. Which wasn’t an option this May afternoon. My job was to try not to fall off the aggressively pitched roof while holding the panel rack as CW’s crew bolted it to my aged roof. Each rack, with four panels attached to it, weighed about as much as Bolivia. And the roof top surface was slippery in the way that only smooth, rain-worn metal can be.

Then a freak and violent rain and hail storm moved in overnight, which really tested the system. Both I and Sadie the Hound kept waking up expecting the panels to somehow implode and melt through the ceiling and on to my laptop or tomato plants. But in what I consider a “flag was still there” moment, the panel installation only caused the roof to leak in two places, so I considered the installation a success. This is why one should use professionals. Fewer than three leaks in your roof when the job is “complete.” Seriously, it wasn’t CW or her crew’s fault. You have to wait and see on this stuff, and take care of it if you notice porosity. Anyway, they were small leaks and easily caulked with icky fossil-fuel based toxins.

The solar system works great (it’s an inverted 24-volt set-up, for the experts in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle) — I can even use my blender and washing machine at will, all powered by the sun. Bass-drenched music at admittedly excessive volume as well. And it should pay for itself in less than 71 years.

The issue I have to work out now is: what to do about the remaining two items on the coal/nuclear grid at the FBR: namely, the electric range and the electric water heater? The water heater is hardly ever in use anymore because of the now-repaired solar water collector system (its victim the mattress has been cleaned and dried as well). But what to do for cooking is a tricky question. A solar oven, being outside, isn’t really fun in wintertime, and propane, well, propane’s a fossil fuel. I’m just starting to hear about this methane harvesting technology that’s evidently the rage in India – you basically harness the gas that your own poop produces, pressurize it, and cook with it. Sounds, well, sounds gross to me. But also like a possible route toward my ultimate goal: selling electricity back to PNM, my utility company.

Here’s a couple of shots of me and the crew on the FBR ranch house roof. On one of them we’re using CW’s cool and analog Solar Pathfinder to figure out where to place the panels (we had three compasses and two GPSes between us, and no two devices gave us the same reading for south). In the other shot, obviously, we’re slinging the panels up.

The eight panels charge my 12 golf cart batteries. This is the environmental weak link in the system. When you consider the nickel and lead in the batteries, well, if you listen carefully on a quiet evening you can hear the Earth screaming. At the Canadian nickel mines in particular. It’s causing me so much guilt that at a couple of speaking events I did for high school students recently, I urged them all to go into battery improvement research. The teachers were all looking at me with “What is this shaggy guy talking about?” expressions on their faces. There’s got to be a cleaner way to store energy. Everybody with 126 times more science savvy than myself got their thinking caps on?

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