ROBERT BERTRAND

Solar gas station projects fail at the cash register before they fail at the pump. I was called to diagnose a power quality problem at a rural service station on Highway 6 north of Fergus that had installed a 15kW solar array and a 30kWh LFP battery bank the previous spring. The owner had been

Solar security camera systems fail at the worst possible moment and the failure mode is specific. I diagnosed a construction site security failure at a townhouse development in Milton where the site supervisor had reported that the PTZ camera was rebooting every time it attempted to track movement after midnight. The camera would detect motion,

Solar repeater station failures in Ontario happen in December and they are invisible until the internet drops at 4 PM. I commissioned a point-to-point relay station on a ridge north of Guelph in October for a valley property that had no line-of-sight to any tower. The station was a Ubiquiti airFiber 5XHD drawing 13W continuously,

Maple syrup solar changed how I think about farm power after a producer in Puslinch Township called me during the first week of March. He had been running a 5kVA gasoline generator to power his AC vacuum pump through the peak sap run. On the fourth day of an unusually warm and productive run, sap

Ice fishing solar failures are brutally simple to diagnose and brutally expensive to discover at 6 AM on Lake Simcoe in January. I helped a client troubleshoot a diesel heater ignition failure on a portable ice hut on Kempenfelt Bay during a February trip. He had a 100Ah sealed lead-acid battery that he had charged

Hobby farm solar fails differently from residential solar because the consequences are biological. I got a call at 6:30 AM from a heritage breed poultry farmer near Fergus who had lost a 42-egg incubation run overnight. His solar system had hit low-voltage cutoff at 2:47 AM. The incubator had been running on the same battery

Home office solar fails professionals in a way that nobody talks about because the failure is invisible. I audited a home office setup for a software consultant working remotely from a property near Orangeville who had been complaining that his 400W solar array was not lasting through the work day in October. He had a

Solar remote monitoring saved a cabin owner in Muskoka from a complete system failure last February. I got a call on a Tuesday afternoon from a client who had installed a 600W system on his seasonal property north of Bracebridge the previous summer. He had not been up since Christmas. The Victron VRM portal on

Hunting camp solar systems fail in one of two ways and both happen while the owner is at work. I drove up to a deer camp near Bancroft in November with a client who had installed a 200W all-in-one solar kit the previous spring. He had not been to the camp since September. We arrived