Solar panels are getting cheap. If you’re like me, then this is all the incentive you need to think about buying solar panels. Sure, there’s a lot of other points that appeal: reducing your dependency on fossil fuels, not leaving free money on the ground, sticking your middle finger in the general direction of the power company. The core rationales for me, though: cheap and new toy. Also, the power company cut me off a few weeks ago. It’d be nice to charge my phone without having to go to the library.
Of course, I don’t exactly own an intact-enough house upon which to put heavy solar panels on the roof of. And, legally, the landlord’s next of kin could figure out where he went to and seize the house along with my panels. So the next best thing was to tek-screw them into the roof of an old Dodge Caravan that I found in the airport parking lot. Insurance doesn’t even blink paying out for thefts from there, and to be honest, anyone with a 1993 Caravan who also engages in long-term international air travel is up to something anyway.
Once the immobilized Caravan had been hooked to my house’s electrical system through a series of illegal and highly dangerous male-male extension cords, I was in business. The sun beat down upon the van, and started to fill up my crappy old phone battery. Excellent!
Unfortunately, that’s where things started to go wrong. You see, my yard is already full of broken cars, which left me with no room for the Caravan. As such, I parked the stricken Dodge in the alley, and had to run the extension cords back from it to my home. The natural place for these cords was underground. With a copious amount of swearing, I pushed them through the trenches that the phone company had abandoned when they fled my neighbourhood.
What I didn’t expect was that the presence of electrical current inside the trenches would soon attract a backhoe. My lights all blinked out, and I came outside to find a group of confused construction workers who had accidentally dug up my previously perfectly good extension cords. It’s for the best, anyway: sooner or later I would have forgotten to unplug the van before moving it, and then we’d have a fire on our hands. The water company cut me off, too.
Tags:
#unreality cw #storytime #I’m aware that OP is fictional‚ but in all seriousness: #you do not have to resort to a fancy five-digits-expense fixed-address solar setup to charge your phone #a Ryno Tuff 21W camping solar panel costs ninety-five CAD‚ weighs one pound‚ and #can keep *several* phones charged if you rotate them out regularly #there also exist pocket-sized power banks with integrated solar panels‚ which are nice-to-have though I wouldn’t bet my life on the quality #(plus you shouldn’t leave a lithium battery baking in the sun repeatedly anyway‚ because it’ll eventually swell up and burst into flames) #(I have a solar power bank but I’d only use that panel if I were caught without my main panel) #(thus far I’ve never been that desperate‚ so I’ve just been using it as a regular power bank) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #PSA #tag rambles #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
Brinens and Things 