Swimming Like A Duck

Wednesday morning July 24, I woke up at 4:30 to discover that we had no power. But wait, we have solar, with battery backup, and a generator that all work in sequence. WE SHOULD HAVE POWER! I needed to get to the bottom of things, as I had to start preparing breakfast for my guests in less than one hour and cold cereal was not an option.

A quick inspection of the system showed that the batteries were at 100%, the generator was on-line, but one of the circuits on the inverter had clicked to the OFF position. I switched that to ON and still no power either from the batteries or from the grid-tie to PG&E. I manually turned on the generator and was able to restore power and at the same time provide my guests with an early morning wake-up call.

While I was doing this Cheryl had called PG&E about the outage and was informed that they could see our meter. That’s odd. I went back out, turned off the generator and put the solar system in by-pass. No power. I re-booted the display terminal and took the system out of by-pass and now we were working off battery power. Good enough for me to go get started on breakfast without the noisy generator doubling as an alarm for my guests.

Before each breakfast I am required by the county to shower and put on clean clothes before preparing meals. For those that may be concerned about my personal hygiene, I would normally do this even without the county regulations. However this morning I stepped into the shower and turned it on, and no water. Crap.

Getting dressed again I went back outside and checked the storage tank, it was full. I again checked the solar system and discovered two more circuits on the inverter had flipped to OFF. Turning these back to ON started the pressure tank thus providing water to the house. The display terminal showed that we were still working off batteries, good. It was now time for a shower and breakfast.

In the kitchen I turned on the lights and started the oven and within 5 minutes the lights began flickering and the power went out, again. Okay, there must be a good reason or I must have missed something in my haste. I went out and checked all the circuits and discovered that the main solar circuits had both triggered OFF. I turned on the mains and was excited to see that the grid-tie was working and we had full power, finally. It still didn’t answer the lingering question as to what initially happened to take the solar system off line. That however was a question for later as I had guests and a breakfast to prepare.

Back to preparing breakfast, I went to get some eggs and asparagus out of the fridge and discovered that our refrigerator light was out. No biggie, the fridge still felt cool. Wait, was that the high temperature light that was on? Yup. The refrigerator was out and not just the light. Crap. It can wait. I had to pretend that everything was fine and deliver on a great breakfast experience.

And that I did. Asparagus sautéed in garlic, oil, lemon juice and lemon zest, with homemade prosciutto, our farm fresh poached eggs, and shaved parmesan, pork sausage, homemade banana bread, fresh squeezed orange juice, and coffee and tea.

Queue up one sigh of relief.

So what happened? It turns out that PG&E had a power outage in our area and when the power came back on it must have created a power surge that knocked the solar system off line along with the controller board in our refrigerator. I did have to serve breakfast the following day without a kitchen fridge, but we had a backup in the garage, which we had moved everything to until our kitchen refrigerator was repaired. The fridge was repaired the following day and we were back in business.

And there my friends is how I swam like a duck!