Friday, May 14, 2010

Experiment successful

I got ready to run the generator late this morning to fill the water cistern, and then thought, "Screw it. I want to just plug the well pump into the wall and see what happens."

What always used to happen when I tried this was that the whole system got the vapors and collapsed on its fainting couch after about fifteen minutes, and I had to unplug the pump and re-boot the inverter and charge controller. W has been reluctant to try this experiment, but today he finally went along with my lunacy. I ran the pump for two hours and nothing bad happened, even in cloudy weather. (It wasn't cloudy when I started.)

This is pretty cool. Even with the clouds the voltage dropped into the low 24 volt range but never into danger. With the sun shining, it never got below 26.2 volts while I was watching it. The electrical system upgrades are sufficient for the heaviest single load I can put on the system. Though I don't think I'd dare run the well pump and anything else big, like the washing machine, at the same time.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very cool. Nothing quite like having enough power to do the job.