Off-Grid Living

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

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

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

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