u/jazzbiscuit

I'm currently sitting in the middle of a wonderful heat wave. Since the air conditioner was going to be kicking hard all week, I decided to offset a bit of the added electric bill and do some real world testing by running the A/C blower off of a 6 kWh battery stack & the solar panels. I try to exercise my batteries at least every month or so, and this seemed like a good time to do it.

The good - my rough calculations put the blower using about 5-6kWh per day - I've successfully offloaded that on to solar for 6 days. I never ran out of juice and I never had to switch back over to grid power.

The not so good - solar panels really struggle when the temps are rocking the mid to upper 90's. Like 50-60% efficiency struggle. Also the blower runs a whole lot more for cool than for heat. During the winter I can get 80-90% efficiency out of the panels, 800w of solar panels is enough to keep the gas furnace going indefinitely if the weather is reasonable. In a heat wave - not so much. Sunday - Tuesday I ran the normal 800w and the batteries steadily lost ground every day. Wednesday I broke out another 400w of portable panels around mid day and they slowed the bleeding, but couldn't catch up. Thursday I switched the portables out for 400w of rigid panels starting first thing in the morning thinking surely that would take care of it - but again, nope. 1200w of panels still couldn't recover the batteries to 100%. Today I added yet another 400w - and finally was successful. The batteries topped out just before 1:00 pm this afternoon and have been running at maintaining since then.

1600w of panels never pushed more than 1000w today with clear skies and mid 90's temps. Mostly I was getting around 900w after about 9:00 am.

I also tried throwing a 100w panel outside with a smaller battery. The panel was on a picnic table with the battery underneath in the shade. That panel never topped 45w, and I eventually had to give up because the battery overheated even in the shade. The big stack lives in the basement so that wasn't an issue with them.

If your backup power plans include solar panels in an area that can get hot - factor in high temps degrading their output, and if you'd need to take the batteries outside, you may not be able to charge at all.

I picked up my brand new Guerrilla last week and pulled my title out of the mailbox yesterday. I endured a small panic attack when I see the model description listed as HIMALAYAN (that's what I started out looking at). Happy to say the VIN on the title matches the bike, so that ended that panic attack. However, when I do a lookup on any of the VIN decoder sites, they all come back saying it is a Himalayan. Anybody else? It's not my first bike, but it is my first RE - is this normal or is there something odd going on that will become a paperwork nightmare?

I'm in the US if that matters. I have contacted the dealer, but I'm still waiting for them to call me back with more information😞