Rain rain go away.

The day has come that everyone dreams of.... No pics to click.

My blog sure looks weird with no pictures in it, but my Internet was too weak to upload a picture today for some reason. Maybe it was all the rain, maybe because I moved a mile away from my location yesterday, whatever it was, I tried to load a picture but it was taking so long the Internet would kick me off. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

I moved from my boondocking spot last night to another spot closer to the water; it's a little more scenic over here.

It's been cloudy and rainy since shortly after I got here, and the clouds are thick enough that I'm not getting hardly any charging from the solar panels. Sometimes I forget that the Arctic Fox has seven 140-watt panels on the roof, and the Lance only has four 100-watt panels, so the Lance doesn't have anywhere near the charging capacity that the Arctic Fox has. I built the Arctic Foxes solar system to last for several days with little or no sunshine, but there is simply not enough space on the roof of the Lance to have that many solar panels.

I'm not the only person living in a tiny home with that problem; and there are a few ways to solve it. One would be to buy mobile solar panels to sit outside the camper. But, unfortunately, I'm not seeing that working very well for me because it's too annoying to unpack them all, set them outside, and then pack them all back up if I want to go to the store. Plus, I don't have any room to store solar panels in the truck or the camper.

The other way would be to tilt the panels on the roof instead of laying them flat like they are now so there more directly pointed at the sun and have a higher charging capability, especially in the wintertime when the sun is low on the horizon. Unfortunately, laying flat on the roof the panels lose much of their charging capability when I need them the most. But putting a bunch of panels up and down every time I go somewhere is beyond annoying and could be downright dangerous to anyone driving behind me if I forget to put them down.

 The last way I can think of to solve the problem is to add more batteries. The more charged-up batteries you have, the longer you can live a comfortable life before you need more solar charging. Unfortunately, that method doesn't always work very well with the various types of lead acid batteries because it takes so long to fully charge lead acid batteries. But Lithium iron batteries charge so quickly that adding more batteries to your battery bank will enable you to go longer without charging and still live a comfortable life.

But for me, in my particular situation, even though lithium iron batteries prices are going down, they're still very expensive, and I don't have the room to store them or the weight-carrying capability to tote them around even though there half the weight of a lead acid battery.

So what's a po-boy like me to do? I think I will add another solar panel to the roof, cut back on using my 17-inch Asus laptop when it's cloudy, and use my 13-inch Asus laptop most of the time when I'm getting very little charging. My big laptop uses three times as much electricity as my little one, and nothing else in the Lance uses anywhere near the electricity that the computers do. So it looks like it will take a minor change in my lifestyle to get back to normal.

Theboondork