Solar Panel Woes
A beautiful though partly cloudy day today, and it appears like there are some low 60s, high 50s temperatures coming in this week, accompanied by more clouds, so it looks like I'll be putting my new solar panels outside every day.
I had my first problem with my outdoor panels yesterday when a gust of wind blew them over, and they landed face down in the dirt where I'm parked. A quick inspection showed that there was no damage incurred, but it looks like I'm going to have to find a convenient way to tie them down to prevent that from happening in the future.
Anyone who's spent time in the West can tell you that some days can be pretty windy, and other days are perfectly calm, but a gust of wind may come out of nowhere and quickly remove your awning from your RV. So it looks like a gust of wind was the cause of yesterday's problem, and even though I heard the panels fall, by the time I got outside, there was no wind.
The solar panels blowing over or blowing away is one of the several problems that ground-deployed solar panels have, which is why I never used them in the past. Up until now, my solar panels were always mounted flat on the roof, and even though I knew that was inefficient, I just used more solar panels than I actually needed to make up for the difference. But unfortunately, with an RV as small as my teeny tiny home currently is, there is simply no room on the roof for enough panels to do the job.
So it looks like my happy and lazy days of having roof-mounted solar panels that I never even had to think about again once I screwed them to the roof are over, and I now have panels that have added a measure of complication to my life, but it's a complication I have to deal with if I want enough electricity to comfortably live on after four or five days of mostly cloudy weather.
Theboondork
These four pictures were taken with my 800 mm telephoto lens; these F-35s were so high and far away I couldn't see them with my eyes.
So how did I get their picture if I couldn't see them? I followed the contrail. But you can't see the contrail because the contrail doesn't start at the airplane's engines; it's way back behind the airplane, so it doesn't show up in the pictures.
An 800 mm lens is great for taking pictures of things that move very slowly or not at all. But finding something in the viewfinder while traveling at almost supersonic speeds is almost impossible with a lens that big... A lot of luck is involved in taking these pictures.
I was hoping to see some markings on the aircraft so I could tell if they belonged to the Air Force or Marines, but so far I haven't seen any.
Maybe it's a big secret...... which might explain the black helicopters circling my boondocking spot.