[cmell]

Hi everybody! thanks for your great feedback. it's been a beautiful fall, and we've been hard at work. I'll send some pictures soon.

We now have a cute 8x8 shed attached to the airstream, a huge 250 lb. propane tank out back, a wood crib full of free scrap firewood cut to the size of our future stove's 9" firebox, and we now finally have electricity courtesy of a 240 W solar array and a 660 Amphour 12V battery bank.

The shed is totally sweet, built all from scrap materials plus $5 for hinges. It will act as a mud-room/vestibule/storage/electricity control room. I found the floor pre-made, as well as a nice door with a window. Roofing metal, sawmill slabs, electrical wire, and tools were contributed by generous community members.

The one thing we're missing at this point is the woodstove. We were told in July that it would be here "before it gets cold" but the stovemaker STILL doesn't have the cast iron he needs to make our stove... it's been a huge headache. The people making our stainless steel heat shield have also been pretty incompetent and we have to go into town this afternoon to slap them around. We've had quite a few frosts at this point, but so far we've been cozy under the covers, just a little chilly in the morning before we leave for school. And now that we have the solar, we can run the propane furnace if we really want to.

It took me three months to get everything I needed to install the solar, and eight hours to actually do the wiring. talk about satisfaction!
The batteries are buried a foot deep in two rubbermaid containers under the trailer's fold-up stairs, in order to insulate them from extreme cold.
The two 12 V solar panels are wired in series to make them operate at 24 V because they are located about 90 feet from the trailer, in a spot with all-day sun exposure. I have 6 gauge copper wire going from the array to the charge controller in the shed, so there should be a maximum wire loss of about 2.5%.
I have an Outback MX60 charge controller that converts the array's 24V output into 12V to charge the batteries. I also have an IOTA charger that allows me to charge the batteries with an 1800 watt generator.
We're planning on using up to 500 Watt*hours per day, which means we have 5-8 days of reserve electricity (depending on battery temp.) until the batteries are 50% discharged. And we can be conscious and use less when we think we might not have sun for a while. In the doldrums of winter here it averages about 2 hours of cloudless sunlight per day, but even then we should get close to 500W*h per day. I'm optimistic about hardly ever needing to use the generator. Unless of course our woodstove never comes and we have to use the propane furnace as our main heat source for a while.