The Pain of Going Green

I've had the chance to play around with some solar cells I bought on ebay and charge up some car batteries that are no longer capable of starting my heavy old cars, but will still run a small inverter for a while. An inverter is a device that turns the 12 volts from a car battery into mains voltage. It won't boil a kettle or run a washing machine, but it will recharge my mobile phone, the batteries for my cameras, and quite a few other things.

This isn't going to make any real difference to my electric bill, because the amount of power I've saved is trivial. But it came for free, despite the clouds the past two days getting in the way. And if everybody did the same thing, the power saving switches from being trivial to being worthwhile.

Currently (sorry, that pun is even worse than the switching one I pulled off in the last paragraph); currently there is a craze for paying several thousand pounds to get large solar cells fitted to the roof that generate enough charge to possibly sell any sunny-day surplus back to the Grid. The trouble is, even if you are lucky enough to get the government grant to offset some of the purchase and installation cost, it is still going to take several years to actually save enough on your electricity bill to break even. The other big drawback, for me anyway, is that you cannot tinker around with large roof-mounted installations, (as poor old Rod Hull found out).

So I've opted for a cheaper, more affordable solution. Well, being honest, I didn't have an option, I couldn't afford the cost of the sort of installation that qualifies for a government grant. But I'm a born tinkerer as well as naturally impecunious. I've started my own path on the road to greener living, having been inspired by Dick Strawbridge's Cornish venture. (see It's not easy being green if you want to know what I'm on about).

Some lessons I have had to learn the hard way. Rechargeable batteries have a slightly lower voltage than the non-rechargeable types, and they also have a more rapid run-down time, but they also benefit from being completely run down before trying to charge them up again. I, putting all those facts together, decided that the best way to run the batteries down before putting them in my solar-powered charger would be to put them in my battery-powered electric shaver and buzz the remaining volts away.

Halfway along one side of my chin, in a particularly thick patch of stubble, the shaver got a good grip on the hairs and suddenly stopped. The pain of having the dead weight hanging from my cheek became excruciating, but I was too much of a coward to simply yank the run-down shaver off. I hurried through to the office and picked up a couple of batteries I hoped had more life in them, and then, fumbling awkwardly in front of the mirror, got the old batteries out and the replacements in. The satisfying buzzing noise began again and I could relax.

I bet Dick Strawbridge never had this problem. On second thoughts, looking at that moustache, maybe he did.