Solar, one small step

After my earlier post about energy production in Hawai'i.  The cover story on the March 21-27 Honolulu Weekly was "Will HECO Break Us?: Conflicts with HECO, our electric bills and renewable energy" (HECO is the Hawaiian Electric Company).  In that article it discussed the 15% cap per neighborhood on home solar electricity production.  Also, the article confirmed that 49 out of 465, over 10%, of O'ahu's circuits are at that capacity, blocking solar additions.  It also said that there was a process that can be enacted to do a study to allow additional solar, but it did not say if this has actually been done for any of the circuit neighborhoods.  The article has some great statements, the title of the actual article is "Energy Vampire" and says "The PUC has had a very cozy relationship with the utility for 99 years." 

In O'ahu electricity is 34.6 cents per kilowatt hour; triple the mainland US average. We pay over $180/month for electricity.  This is without a clothes dryer, dish washer, microwave, TV, or air conditioning.  To top it off the power has gone out about once per month after moving here.  Yesterday, it went off in the middle of the day and didn't come back until long after dark.  We broke out the candles, which can be fun, if we were not paying so much for electricity to begin with. 

I have had it.  We can't really afford solar panels but we went out and bought some anyway.  We got three Coleman panels that generate 18 watts each (54 watts total) and they were just over $200 for all three--they were on sale--which isn't that much more than what we pay for electricity in a month anyway.  We also can't legally connect them into the grid, because of the moratorium on solar, etc., so I am planning to set them up completely off the grid as an independent "emergency" power supply. Also, we are renting our house, so I am not really making any permanent fixtures, these will remain portable so we can take them with us when we move.  Also, I have been wanting to do something like this with photovoltaic solar for a long time... 

The three panels came with a frame, which initially we set up on the roof of our garage.

However, after looking at it and thinking, it is too easy for someone to steal the panels and the angle is too steep.  In Hawai'i the sun is directly overhead in the summer.  This frame angle is designed for farther north in the mainland US. 

So I decided to lay the panels flat on the back of the roof of the house.  Here V is handing them up to me.

Below a tarp over our back porch is pulled back and the cables from the panels are hanging down. 

Below you can see the three panels on the back of our roof. 

I reattached the tarp and wired the cables together (with twist-ties) then drilled a small hole to feed them inside.   (Later I can caulk and paint the hole if needed.) 

Inside I just needed to strip some wire and connect with them with wire nuts to a charge controller that is hooked up to a 12 volt battery.  In the picture the panels are charging the battery.  This is just a temporary setup without everything "packaged" yet.  I picked a battery that is the same as the type used by our van, so we can just change it out if we need to. 

Next I need to hook up a power inverter to run a night light, or anything, to make a small dent in our oil electricity dependence.