Hail to the Hive!

Today is a glorious day. It's glorious for many reasons. The sun is out and everyone is walking about in shorts and T shirts and smiling, the sun does this to people (especially in the UK where there's no guarantees you'll even see it for months on end!).

But for us living offgrid on a little boat like Badger the Narrowboat, the sun shining means something else that makes us smile.

The sun means.......

FREE ELECTRICITY !

You got to love it. When the sun is smiling so are we cos we get to recharge everything! and believe me we do. Living off grid you can't have the mindset that power and water are limitless as you are literally not plugged into the grid.

Now our little Badger the Narrowboat has 4 batteries like this bad boy below. 3 of them are what we call 'Leisure Batteries" as they are for powering all the stuff like fridge, lights, water pump, whale gulper (sucks the water out when we are showering) and any power points.

The lights,fridge,water pumps and USB sockets all run on 12v. With the USB ports we can use for charging up all the daily stuff like phones,

internet dongle (as this is how we stay online and keep on Hiving!

I pads ( yeah yeah I know the screen needs cleaning err and the keyboard)

cameras etc. You get the Idea so we tend to do that during the day when the sun is out. Even on cloudy days we get enough to charge most things.

If it's dark and cloudy alot though the engine must go on for a few hours to juice em up but seeing as how that's how we get our hot water they always get at least a 90 minute top up in the early evening anyway. On cruising days it's no problem as the engine is charging them up nicely while we slowly chug along.

We also have an inverter that will allow us to charge other stuff that needs to be plugged in to 230v like my drone batteries and controller

and our laptops as both myself and @millycf1976 do a lot of work on our laptops so they always need juicing up.

So on a day like today when I don't intend on going anywhere and the sun is blazing away it's a good idea to take the opportunity to power up everything, power banks the lot so as not to drain the leisure batteries as that's bad for them.

and mother nature is doing us proud as we are charging up almost everything and because so much solar is coming in the batteries are remaining at optimum.

Now if I can get the drone all juiced up and there's no rain later (please please no rain) then I might be able to put my first post in @ksteem' new #drone community. Fingers crossed I'll get it done......maybe 😉

We also never leave the boat unattended with all our gadgets onboard as a day out for both of us would mean computers and cameras coming along as we would inevitably sit ina cafe and upload and prep some posts during the day (or pub 😉).

and if anyone breaks in when we are actually on board

sucks to be them !