how are my solar panels and batteries working?

don't forget to click the pic

Desert clouds.

The last two days have been cloudy and rainy, sometimes raining pretty hard. But there's been enough breaks in the clouds that the solar panels have still managed to keep my batteries filled up even though I'm living normal and not trying to conserve electricity.

My ability to keep the batteries charged up is partially because the sun's now higher in the sky so I'm getting a quicker charge during the breaks in the clouds. And I also believe that I'm staying charged up during marginal days like this because of the BattleBorn lithium iron batteries I'm using can accept all the amps the solar panels are putting out instead of the solar controller having to taper off the charge like lead acid batteries require.

So it appears to me that even though this winter has been very cloudy compared to normal for southern Arizona, I'm still managing to get fully charged by the end of the day and haven't had to use any electricity conservation methods like I have in the past and I'm attributing this to the abilities of the lithium iron batteries to charge faster than lead acid batteries.

I know It sounds like a small thing but what it does is allows me to live a more normal "home like" life when I'm boondocking because I don't have to worry about cutting back my electric use, or running out of electricity just because of a few rainy, cloudy days. 

Some of the people I've talked to say one of the things that keeps them from enjoying boondocking is the difficulty of having enough electricity for boondocking more than a few days without using severe conservation methods.

I've had people ask me how can I "stand"  boondocking for as long as I do? And the truth is I don't "stand it", I enjoy it, because my solar system provides all the electricity I need to live comfortably.

I can't run my air conditioner, which I certainly don't need in the winter. And I can't run my toaster oven, but I still manage not to starve. Other than that my boondocking life is hardly any different than being plugged in. If I had to suffer and find a way to "stand it", I would live my life a different way because I'm not living like this to suffer, I live like this to be as comfortable and as lazy as I want to be.

                     theboondork

Cloudless boondocking sunset.

Cloudy day in Ajo.