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| The Solar Panels Are Tilted |
Happy 12th birthday to my granddaughter Valerie!
The coldest night since I arrived at Quartzsite. 29°F by morning. Lots of furnace time, in fact after breakfast I was down to 73% (54 amp hours) on the batteries. Since I can safely go down to 10%, no major problem, but I like to fill them up each day, and with my calculations for today's clouds, I decided tilting the solar panels would be a good idea. It took around half an hour with two loops of the trailer on my folding step ladder and made a big difference. The average peak solar here has been around 175 watts before tilting, 306 watts (from 2 160 watt panels) after tilting, and that is with partial clouds.
Not much else going on today. I spent much of the morning & early afternoon reading. Still too cool to sit outside in the partial cloudy skies & 11 MPH average wind. Around 2:00 I Skyped my granddaughter to wish her a happy birthday. Only a fair connection. I don't know what has happened to the Quartzsite cell service, but it is much worse than last year. While there were a few times it was slow, until the week of the Big Tent show it worked fine. This year I haven't seen either Verizon or AT&T faster than 4Mbps down, and most of the time under 2Mbps. Upload speeds are faster and quite usable at 10 - 12Mbps. Since there aren't all that many RVs here yet, I don't think it is overloading, but who knows.
Verizon & AT&T also behave differently. While Verizon often tests out as a faster connection, when using it for a constant connection such as Skype or internet radio, it inevitably drops the signal long enough to require reconnecting. This afternoon Verizon dropped my Skype connection to my granddaughter. AT&T tends to be a bit slower, but once connected, holds the connection, rarely dropping out.
Dinner was the last of the meatloaf. There is still quite a bit left, but I'm done with it!
Until Next Time -
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