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Hey fellow graybeards, At this point I can offer no follow up on the ten batteries. The customers canceled the service call. $250 (by their reckoning) was too much. I had sent them my Rates, which included $250 for a site visit but T&M for a service call. They were 70 miles and 1 1/2 hours' drive time away, so I certainly didn't argue. Rather, I wrote the reply below. I would have charged well more than $250 for the service call, given the distance. If I get the chance to learn anything more from this, I'll post it to the List. Allan Hello, I have canceled Friday's service call. Please call when you are ready, if you see it as worthwhile. Please note that a visit to your home to review and possibly adjust system settings on previously installed equipment would be a service call, rather than a fixed-price site visit, and would thus be charged as such on a time-and-materials basis. As such it may prove to be more than $250 and a larger investment than you wish to make. I had hoped to meet you, and to see your successful homegrown system. I would have asked to measure voltage and specific gravities of your ten batteries. This would be on my own time and nickel. I had found your use of paralleled L16 batteries at the positive pole quite intriguing, as I had never heard of that approach. I had imagined it as possibly a valuable solution to a problem I had not seen in my customers' systems, but figured I might have simply missed. So I posted a description of your approach to a respected national PV installers' technical forum, to ask what other long-time installers of off grid systems thought of your approach. As it turned out, none of the other graybeards had ever heard of this solution, and several offered sound rationales for why the details outweighed the potential benefits. If you're curious, let me know, and I'll send you excerpts of some of their responses. Thank you, Allan --
Allan Sindelar Hi Allan, The $250 consulting trip fee has us pausing. At that rate, I would prefer to bring you up when we have everything installed and you can go over it and make sure it is all functioning and connected correctly. So, at this point, we would like to cancel. We will contact you again when we have the generator and system ready for you to look at. Thanks, Talia |
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