Karma!

So...yesterday there was a power cut in town just before I left work in the early evening. I drove home in the twilight realising that even the outlying villages were affected too. All the houses I passed on the 17 km drive home were in darkness until I got to ours, fairy lights twinkling and the internal lights glowing through the windows.

Why do people around here rely so much on the grid? Surely if you have solar panels, get a battery so you can save some of the power for yourself, to use when the grid fails rather than always feeding your solar energy back into it.

Anyway, I gloated a little too much that we had power and most of the area around us didn't.

We are once again in debt to our neighbours and are 'piggybacking ' off their power supply by way of a string of extension cables.

Today, we lost our power. I put the washing machine on. I had waited until the solar panels had gone onto 'float', meaning the battery was full and the panels were no longer needed to top it up. Still, something went wrong and the power went off.

Will couldn't fix it when he got home from work. At first he suspected the batteries were dead, which would be a nightmare because replacing them is very expensive but now he thinks it is a simple problem with the inverter being confused by the readings from one of the charge controllers.

The electrician has been contacted and we wait to see if it can be fixed.

The moral of this story is....Don't Gloat!