A Day in the Life of SolarTown
A day in the life of SolarTown is never boring. We field calls all day long from people all over the country, some who are interested in purchasing some of our solar energy products, and some whom simply want to talk solar.
This past week, an owner of a guest villa in Baja California purchased a solar refrigerator to provide off the grid electricity for some of her guests. If you want to supply soft drinks in an idyllic setting, you don’t want to have a noisy generator in the background. Do you want your guests to hear the sound of a diesel generator or the sound of waves crashing against the rocks? Well, if I’m the guest, a solar refrigerator sounds like exactly what I would want. And if it is in the single digits where you are, Baja California probably sounds pretty good right now.
We did not receive a lot of calls this past week from those folks in the big freeze. I didn’t hear from anyone in Minnesota this week who planned on installing home solar panels in the next couple of weeks. We did hear from one of our customers in Michigan who is planning a large off grid system for one of his customers in the fall.
More common were calls from warmer climates like this guy from the Virgin Islands who was looking for a load of panels. Have you been enticed to get out of your igloo and move to the Virgin Islands? Well, at least in the summer you can put a solar panel on your igloo to generate some electricity. In Mongolia, where it gets really cold (like Minnesota would be like Palm Springs if you live out on the steppe), it is definitely the fashion to put a solar panel on our gur.
My favorite call this past week was from a guy who plans to buy the new Tesla Model X next year and wanted to find out about our portable solar module kits. I was intrigued why he would want to buy or even consider a solar module kit. He told me that he planned on keeping it in his “frunk” (for those of you not in the know, the front compartment where the engine should be is empty and can be used for storage).
Source: Ford Motor
Then if he drove too far off the beaten path, or in the case of electric cars, too far from the nearest power outlet, he would have a spare in his storage compartment. It didn’t make much sense to me because the supercharging network of Tesla is ever expanding. This past week, a Tesla S owner and his daughter made the first cross country trip using this supercharger network. It may not be the same level as the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1869, but considering that five years ago, you could only dream of such a feat because of the infrastructure and investment required, it was a remarkable achievement.
Which brings us back to our Tesla owner who wants to buy a portable solar module for his car. I liked the idea and the ingenuity but had to tell him that it didn’t seem practical to haul around at least now a huge solar battery. If he wanted a solar car, then he might have to wait until next year, when Ford is debuting its solar car, the C-Max Solar Energi. But it wouldn’t be a Tesla.