For those of you who have been following, I’m sure you remember the saga of getting on municipal power. We will always remember the months of living out of coolers. NEVER FORGET! This will be the first truly joint post from us as this saga has mostly been Switch’s journey – although I do benefit from where we’ve ended up.

On reflection, the electricity situation has been a relatively steep learning curve. Originally we had wanted to go all solar, but got a bad quote and bad advice in the beginning which internet research couldn’t really fix. We’re all set now (finally), but I’d like to take you through our somewhat convoluted journey, because, porque no?

Originally, we were quoted something like $60k for a solar set-up to power everything. The reasoning for needing all those panels was air conditioning – or so they said. The quote included something like 30 panels – which was not only a lot of $$ but also a lot of needed space! We had our suspicions that it was overkill, but couldn’t get a better quote out of the solar guy. Deciding to go with municipal power, we threw in a small system. We knew our original set-up was insufficient because we knew we would get hooked up to the grid eventually and just needed a stop gap. Here’s our original set-up.

The two 320 watt panels powered lights/fans/laptops in the daytime, but no AC/water pump/refrigeration.

Then we got the grid tie-in. Woohoo! It’s like a real house! …until we got the monthly bill. That ended up being around $200 – a bit steep for our anticipated fixed income.

So we added 6 more 320 watt panels (in the back) – gotta spend money to make money!

Look at our sweet 4400 watt sine wave inverter and giant lithium batteries. OOOoooooOOOooooo…

This new, shiny, set-up was working great and no need for grid power. Surprisingly, the AC worked fine on the solar, but the batteries were going dead every evening. On closer inspection, the pool pump and heater were sucking all the juice (and propane!), so back to research. I felt pretty stupid when we found that a cheap, low tech bubble-wrap pool cover heated the pool up to hot tub temps (gah!). This may not work as well in the winter with a lower sun angle, but I’m willing to give it a try. No more heater, but just using the pool pump for a few hours in the afternoon was still killing it. So we upgraded to a solar pool pump. Now everything works great. 

We still have the old pump in there for backup. And that gas pool heater is just trash in [Switch’s] opinion. It uses 1/2 of our propane tank (1 year supply) in a few hours. Not worth it when you can just put plastic bubble wrap on the pool.

So, we spent several more grand than we planned through trial and error, but not nearly as much as the original solar quote and we have a pretty sweet set-up now. We really don’t have to use the grid power unless it is cloudy. This is good because #environment and convenience. The municipal power comes from a nasty power plant in La Paz. It is getting stressed and goes out frequently, so it is great to not have to rely on it, but nice to have a back-up on the handful of cloudy days we have a year.