06/20/24

Since returning from our air-conditioned vacation, we’ve had cloud cover most of the week. On some days the battery can only charge up to 50-60 percent, which means our 5000 watt battery only has 2000 watts available to us when you factor in only being able to run the battery down to 20%. And of that 2000 watts, 133 watts per hour is used by the inverter and 45 watts per hour is used by the ceiling fan, and about 10 watts per hour is used by the exhaust fan we put in the bathroom. So, roughly 200 watts per hour to just run the fans, and after 10 hours we have to shut down the whole system.

We also like to use our Starlink, so that’s another 50 watts/ hour, meaning we only get 8 hours of battery before we have to shut the system off.

So it’s back to austerity measures: Lurko reads books that he already downloaded on his Kindle, and I use up the 3g/ month data I bought for the Mexico phone. Google Fi international data shuts off after 3 months of not being in the states, but calls/text still work better here than Verizon.

I am surviving with the battery powered Opolar portable fan that I use for camping. I have another one that I keep offering to Lurko but he refuses. Finally I realize that he didn’t know I had two fans and he thought he was taking my only fan. So I have now given him the fan and maybe he will survive.

We learned that during the morning while we’re eating breakfast or running errands, if we shut the inverter down we have a good chance of charging the battery up to 100% by noon. Thankfully it’s not been so hot. Just humid.

Considering getting a portable dehumidifier, as the dehumidifier on the AC unit pulls 800 watts/hour and doesn’t really work effectively. It gets up to 95% humidity here, so opening the windows may not be our best strategy for staying cool at night.