Little House Off the Grid by Cam Mather

Author:Cam Mather
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Our Family's Journey to Self-Sufficiency
Publisher: Aztext Press
Published: 2011-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

The scary beast that sits in the garage waiting for cloudy weather.

12 The Batteries

by Cam

* * *

Over the years we’ve met people with some unique ideas about what living off the grid means. There is often the perception of dirt floors, outhouses, no running water, and kerosene lamps. The other misperception is that you simply go to bed at sundown when it gets dark. When I presented my fall workshops across the province I often invited participants to come for a short tour of my place so that they could see that I do indeed have lights, TV, internet, and I encouraged them to flush the toilet, just to assure them that we have running water.

Having these incredible luxuries is made possible through batteries, and like all things here at Sunflower Farm we’ve have our share of stories to tell about our batteries. Some good, some bad. Always challenging, usually humorous.

Most off-grid homes use deep-cycle, lead-acid batteries. These are different from car batteries, which are designed for “cold cranking amps”, or a momentary burst of energy to turn over your engine and get it running. Then the battery rests and is recharged by the alternator. Deep-cycle batteries on the other hand get a slow long charge during the day as the sun shines, then have a slow discharge as the stored energy is taken out during the evening, or on cloudy days.

When we bought our place it came with a very large set of ni-cad or nickel cadmium batteries. Most manufactured products are offered at three levels of quality; household, industrial and then military, with military being the gold standard, top of the line level. Well, these batteries were military quality. They had in fact been taken out of a government bunker, one built during the cold war in case of nuclear attack, where the government would have been sequestered in an underground fortification, powered by batteries. Jean, the previous owner of this house, was able to get 60 of these ni-cad batteries when another local off-gridder was getting them. Each cell was worth about $700 new, so we actually had $42,000 worth of batteries. Of course they weren’t new, but it still represented a pretty good find.

The beauty of ni-cad batteries is that unlike lead-acid batteries you can’t overcharge them, or undercharge them, and they won’t freeze. So we were pretty excited about them. And it was a big bank, so it looked like we’d have a good storehouse to get us through cloudy periods. While the batteries were old, they were expected to have a 70-year life. We assumed they went into the bunker sometime in the late 50’s, so we hoped to get another decade or two out of them.

There were 5 strings of batteries in the battery room in the guesthouse. Each battery was 1.2 Volts, so when you wired 10 together in series you got a 12 Volt system, then the 5 strings were wired together in parallel to increase the storage capacity. Jean had

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