If you’re a boater or caravaner, or like us live off-grid, you might have come across these fine pieces of electrickery.  For those of you who still feel clueless I’ll explain as best I can.  My apologies in advance if you are a physicist.      DC or direct current is the sort of current you get from a battery, picture it like a straight line please.  AC or alternating current is the current that feeds all the electrical appliances in your house, this is an altogether more wibbly-wobbly affair – o.k just picture a wavey line, or sine wave to give it a proper name.  What an inverter does, is to convert that straight line of current stored in batteries into a wibbly-wobbly current that can power household appliances such as lights, TVs, and computers.

This is something that revolutionised  our quality of life. You might remember my post on how wasteful our generator is, (see Genny Tales: The Dark Ages) well the good news is that now we can do our housekeeping at a sociable hour.  When the generator is running the inverter is busy using all that excess energy that might other wise be wasted to charge up our battery bank consisting of twelve two-volt batteries.    This means we can arrange our lives a little more conveniently, no more traipsing to and from the genny room with washloads at ten o’clock at night.  We can run the generator for a couple of hours during the day if we need to and make use of high draw electrical appliances such as washing machines and dryers during this time, knowing the batteries are charging up for the rest of the day when we might only be using a few lights, a TV or a computer.  Most people can no longer tell that we don’t have mains electricity, there is some minimal tell-tale light flickering when we change over from genny to batteries.

We are of course, still using the genny as much as we used to, but we are getting more out of it, it is less wasteful.  The important thing is we now have some of the equipment in place, batteries and inverter, needed to make most forms of renewable energy work on a domestic scale.  For many domestic settings, the cost of  wind turbines or electric solar panels plus the inverters and batteries, means that  householders could wait years to recoup their expenses.  We are already half way there however, and when we last made enquiries, about a year ago, it was estimated it would cost us £45 000 to have mains electricity installed.  Time to research wind and solar power I think!   

I’m gradually getting over my allergy of candles and learning to love them again.  I’m getting much better at looking pleasantly surprised when people who don’t know about my days in the dark ages buy me a candle as a gift!