Success! Sort of ...

As of today, we finally have electricity at the property. Sort of. The meter's finally installed, and the electric company fellow this time was not the same dunderhead from last time. He apparently took one look at the splices in the meter box for the 100-amp breakers and said, "These need a bit of trouble prevention," got his black industrial heat shrink stuff, and covered three of the four splices. The fourth apparently was in good enough shape that it wouldn't need shrinky-dinking. The meter's digital screen says we've got up to 5822 watts available at a time, and knowing what we'll be running there, we know we can manage a solar setup that's probably half that and still have plenty of juice from the sun.

The sort of success is that once the main in the house was thrown, we found out just how bad the likely rodent damage to the house wiring really is. Outlets and switches that I know worked three years ago no longer work. So there is one light (master bedroom overhead) and six outlets (all three in the master and the three on the sink wall in the kitchen) that work, held on three breakers. Natch, nothing in the bathroom, hallway, small (storage) bedroom, living room or the front bedroom that is my office-to-be works. sigh The breakers that don't let anything work are shut off, so that IF the wires are mouse-chewed, we won't have issues with electrical sparking, thus starting a fire, which is one of my biggest fears. Sadly, one of the working kitchen outlets is NOT the one behind the fridge, but, hey, the $20 fridge works great.

So we'll be running 12-gauge heavy-duty indoor extension cords for everything so we have lights and such throughout the most important parts of the house and getting solar going ASAP. We've got to do a lot to make it work, including extension cords and etc to the house from the batteries/inverter/controller setup outdoors, and just wiring in new boxes and outlets and such as we need them. There are definitely going to be photos of that when we do it! The extension cords right now will allow us to run our basic electronics, and we'll be adding a lot of battery-operated flourescents and such as we go. Nothing like getting started the hard way, but we keep reminding ourselves it could be worse - NOTHING could work. At least SOME things work, and enough receptacles work on enough outlets to give us our basics.

So Friday is official moving day. We'll pack it all up the next couple of days, what little is left here (more than hubby really thinks there is), he'll grab some cords at Lowe's, along with some light sockets and cords for them, and head to the property. Then he'll get busy while waiting for me and the TV/internet installers so we don't miss too much of our entertainments. Oh this is going to be a busy BUSY weekend. And yes, Tina, I do plan on recharging the camera batteries - as soon as I remember to get them up there. Kind of hard to take photos when you have the camera and charger in one house and the batteries in the other one!

So no more posts from me for a few days while we get moved and settled. Once I'm back, I have a book review I promised to write and haven't finished up yet ... I'm a bad reviewer, lol. Talk to you all soon, Gentle Readers!