Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after the other.
Walter Elliot
My new power panel is mounted and powered up. I am working on my laptop, which is charging, and my tablet is charging. It has taken a long time to get here.
A couple of years ago, I starved a bit and purchased a laptop. I am on solar power and the inverter and laptop chewed up a lot of power. A year later, I starved a bit and bought a tablet. The tablet saved a huge amount of power. I was able to run all day using the internal battery and solar power.
I missed using the laptop, but in winter with short days or extended cloudy days, it was not possible. Even using the tablet was putting a strain on the solar battery bank. Next, I gathered all the laptop batteries in the house. I had a few because I used to have a computer store. I broke apart the casing and extracted the 18650 batteries inside.
I had to learn how to deal with those, they needed testing and recording the values. I did that. It took weeks.
Next, I bought a battery bank shell on Amazon. It was cheap, I made a 30000 MAH battery bank. I could run my tablet for two days.
I still missed using my laptop. I surmised that the inverter was responsible for the huge amount of power lost. 115 volts AC converted to 19 volts DC was costing a lot of energy.
My next purchase was a 12-volt adapter for my laptop. This worked well, converting 12v to 19v was way more efficient. Even on dark days, I could run the laptop a lot longer.
I realized that sitting in my office chair was causing more health problems, possible DVT’s which can be fatal. I needed to work while sitting in bed.
Next, purchase a laptop table for my bed. That worked okay, but my broken back couldn’t handle the pillows I had. I purchased a husband pillow made for sitting up in bed.
That finally arrived, onto the next problem. My 12v port was too far away from the bed. So I found a 12v panel on Amazon. Yesterday I finally got that mounted and wired.
Today I am typing this on my laptop. In 27 minutes, My laptop and tablet will be fully charged, and I will still have power in my battery bank. It is a dark day as far as solar goes. I managed to do a little design work on my laptop while I was watching another episode of a forensic crime drama series.
This accomplishment took years.
