Off-Grid Living

Trail camera solar failures in Ontario are invisible. I was asked to troubleshoot a trail camera setup for a deer hunter near Perth in Lanark County. The Moultrie Edge Pro cellular camera had been running on its internal AA lithium pack with a 6W solar panel since October. In late January the hunter found 847 […]

Solar security gate failures happen at the worst possible moment. The first hard freeze of November can turn a reliable system into a locked-out nightmare. I was called to troubleshoot a locked-out gate at a hobby farm near Fergus in Wellington County in early November. The property owner had installed a 20W panel and a

Mobile solar trailer projects start with a generator bill that surprises every project manager. I was brought in to review the power setup at a residential subdivision site near Cambridge in Waterloo Region. The site super was spending $1,140 per month on diesel for a 10kVA Generac running 24 hours a day. The overnight load

Remote radio station solar power failures do not always sound like static. (1) I was called to troubleshoot an audio quality problem at a volunteer community FM station near Haliburton that had switched to off-grid solar the previous summer. The station ran a 50W Inovonics transmitter, a small mixing console, and a computer playback system.

Modular housing solar fails before the unit leaves the factory when the panel specification ignores the roof load limit. (1) A modular housing solar installation sized from a residential catalogue rather than a structural drawing is a liability waiting for the first heavy snowfall. (2) I was called to inspect a modular relief housing unit

Solar weather station data integrity fails quietly in an Ontario ice storm. I got a call in January from a grain farmer near Palmerston in Perth County who had been relying on his remote weather station to trigger his grain bin aeration system. The station was a consumer-grade Davis Vantage Pro 2 on a 3-metre

Wildfire lookout solar systems fail when designers size the array for clear-sky production and never model the smoke-shading scenario. I was asked to review the power specifications for a lookout tower installation in the Temagami District north of North Bay that the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry wanted to upgrade with AI-assisted smoke detection

Solar research station power failures do not always look like power failures. Sometimes they look like bad science. I was contacted by a freshwater ecology research team running a long-term water quality monitoring station on a lake near Minden in Haliburton County. They had been collecting conductivity, temperature, and dissolved oxygen data via SDI-12 sensors

Community center solar sizing fails when designers use the building’s average daily load rather than its emergency shelter peak load. I was brought in to review the solar specification for a township community hall near Harriston in Minto Township that the municipality wanted to certify as an emergency shelter. The existing specification called for a

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