Power…

An early morning news bulletin and overview of the past few days…..  

We have brakes, all pesky rubber seals replaced, system clean, ready to screech to a halt at the first given opportunity!! Well that’s the theory!! As yet I haven’t had a chance to investigate said theory as Oso has been blocked in by buses all weekend!  In the meantime  myself and my good friend John went on a 2 day mission to enable the solar, charge the battery bank and therefore achieve electricity. 

It’s   not as simple a system as one might like, especially when someone else has done the system to suit their own personal logic. There are brown and blue cables tied off everywhere; a mysterious control box; a circuit breaker panel that any first class Guatemala penthouse would be jealous of; all of fine German quality and none of which have any instruction manuals! Help? Oh and best not to forget that for that extra challenge some other cunning fellow has been playing with the wiring!

Needless to say on day one of our mission, Saturday, we didn’t acheive much save to  ascertain that one solar panel out of the 3 is corrupt, the other 2 are kicking out 9 volts and did not manage to get power past the breakers? It’s  internet research time but even this proved unfruitful as I was unable to locate info on the 8 year old system. We eventually got the basic idea from following other solar/ independant power wiring diagrams.

On Sunday after breakfast in Oso with our first guests, we re-wired strange control box, checked batteries, breaker panel, shook our collective heads a lot and tried to stay focused on issues on the charge side of the breaker circuit….At last we attained electrical power!  What a pleasure to finally have the lights, fans and  water pumps functioning however we are not necessarily getting charge from the solar panels, further research required to which we say” poco a poco” (slowly slowly..)