LandfallVoyages

We finally got our solar panels installed last week and they rock the house! Well the house battery bank anyway. The funny part is that it was just in time but we didn’t know that.
Unbeknownst to us we had been stealing our electricity from the City of Alameda previously. The only electricity available on the dock was from outlets in the sides of the street light poles on the pier above the docks. The power only flowed at night when the automatic streetlights were activated by their light sensors and that was all fine, we could charge our batteries all night and have enough juice to do whatever we needed during the day and our inverters could provide any AC that we needed.
Well…
The piers are city property, formerly Navy property. The docks are Nelson’s Marine property. The piers are controlled by NRC, an environmental company run by unkind men with chips on their shoulders. From time to time we’ve had our electric cords unplugged from the poles during the day and sometimes it was every day for several days in a row but we didn’t think too much of it and we’d simply plug them back in at night. No big deal. One of the other boat owners had complained to me that “they” had unplugged his cord and thrown the end into the water which saturated the cord with saltwater and killed it but we hadn’t had that problem.
A couple weeks ago the guys at NRC came over and asked the boatyard if they could use the dock for a day to drop off some passengers from their sixty five foot boat because their piers are too high and they didn’t want their muckey-mucks in fine clothing to have to climb the rusty ladders. The boatyard agreed to relocate several boats to make enough dock space for the sixty five footer to land. NRC asked if there would be any charge and the boatyard declined to charge them anything but simply asked if they could stop unplugging our electric cords. NRC agreed that it was a fine deal and said that they’d tell their people to leave our cords alone.
The big boat came and went and the fancy people in their finery were able to embark and disembark unstained.
Two days later my boat neighbor came by to talk and he was just livid! Somebody had cut the end off of his new $150.00 electric cord and thrown it in the water again.
The next day I saw 2 NRC executives (you can tell by the slacks) and 2 city employees (you can tell by the cars and the clipboards) walking around on the pier taking pictures of our electric cords and all of the light poles.
We still had only had to contend with a simple unplugging and we decided that this wasn’t our fight to fight.
I installed the solar panels because it was time, both because I had reached that part of our project list and also because I wanted to stay out of the fray. I was actually motivated that day and I worked way past dark to finish the installation.
The next morning I went outside to check that my wiring was all correct from the panels to the boat and I saw and NRC truck up on the dock welding lock boxes over the outlets on the light poles.
JUST IN TIME!
BTW, Thank you, NRC, for keeping your side of the bargain, you guys are great!