Within a month or so of arriving in Argentina, I'd had a series of alarming clothes-washing experiences. Frequently, I'd get electric shocks while loading the washing machine. My Spanish was terrible at the time, so it was with some difficulty that I managed to get an electrician to come and look.
That difficulty was dwarfed by the challenges of making myself understood once he arrived. The first thing he asked me I didn't quite understand: "¿something something descalzo?". Seeing my blank expression, he repeated. And I went looking for my Oxford Inglés Minidiccionario:
descalz|ar vt [10] take off <zapatos>. ~o a barefoot
Knowing that he couldn't be asking me about shoes or bare feet, I asked him to repeat, and he started saying things like "something something zapatos something something".
Yes, he was asking me about shoes. Has I put shoes in the washing machine? Did the washing machine have shoes? Did I wear shoes while washing clothes?
After quite a lot of repeating, gesticulating, and miming, I managed to convey that I couldn't remember if I was wearing shoes, and I thought I understood that he was saying that I must where shoes while doing the washing. He also pointed a lot to the house-mat that I'd always been puzzled about being in the kitchen, seemingly saying I needed to wipe my feet before opening the fridge. He then went away without doing anything (and fortunately without charging me anything either).
When I told this strange story to a local friend, she was puzzled by my puzzlement, and asked me if New Zealand fridges and washing machines don't run on electricity. She then went on to tell me stories about people being electrocuted while getting their midnight snack. It turns out that in Argentina, most electrical installations have no connection to ground! I've since had actual electricians describe the third hole in the socket as 'decorative'.
So when my Solar Handbook highlighted multiple times the importance of grounding the whole installation, I realised that I would need some local knowledge about how solar installations are done in Argentina.
I discovered that there's a foundation here called Energizar, which promotes application of clean energy technologies in Argentina and other Latin American countries. They run courses on solar energy, so I enrolled in one to get some local perspective.
So far it's been great for reviewing and deepening what I already got from the book, and also picking up some Spanish terminology. I have discovered the following bits of important information:
- Yes, I need a connection to ground ("puesta a tierra") installed in my house.
This will probably be at great cost, but has the secondary benefit that I can stop suppressing my terror of my children one day being killed by Patrick. - As I already have power from the grid, I'm actual not allowed a "grid fallback" system like I want, I can only have a "grid fail over" system,
i.e. i can't generally use solar but use the grid on cloudy days, but I am allowed to use solar during power cuts.
To do that, I need permission from the city and from the power company, and a special tablero installed by a certified electrician who will presumably charge like a wounded bull. - Because the peak performance of a panel is at a higher voltage than a battery, the 'cream on the top' doesn't charge the battery, and lose about 20%. Unless I have a special, expensive regulator (called "MPPT"), which operates the panel side of the circuit at the peak voltage, and on the battery side, at the battery voltage.
So in my calculations, I need to either lop off another 20%, or get 20% more panels (and find somewhere to put them!), or save up and get an MPPT regulator that costs five times the price of an ordinary one.
No comments:
Post a Comment