Pro Solar Engineering

It's hard to believe that our electrical problems might be over.  Marco, of Pro Solar, and one of his technicians spent the morning here, installing our new batteries and going thru our system.  One problem they found right away was that one of our DC breakers was broken, thus cutting down the actual amount of power coming down from the panels.  Duh!  Not sure why no one else discovered this.   Some of our wiring was confusing and they changed that and then spent a lot of time monitoring the system and adjusting the settings on the inverter and the charge controller to the limits dictated by our temperatures here in Belize.  Within a couple of hours, these changes had already doubled our input over all of yesterday.  There were several components that hadn't been installed that will help us monitor our usage.  He'll send technicians back in a week or so to check the wiring of our panels, wire in a battery monitor and redo our racks to allow us to raise and lower the panels to better track the changing sun during the year. 

It is such a blessing to feel that we have finally gotten the help we desperately needed.   We are still thrilled with solar and our decision to live off-grid.  Even with our problems, we've had power when the folks using the electrical system haven't.  My main advice to anyone coming to Central America is to get help from a qualified solar engineer.  We've faced huge, unexpected expenditures because of well-meaning, but poorly trained installers.  We even found that the incorrect settings on the inverter could have damaged our new generator.  We're both sitting here breathing a cautious sigh of relief.  Thank you Marco.