I used yesterday’s story as the basis of my speech at the Silver Tongued Cats this morning; it went over pretty well, but I think I’m finished telling it.

This afternoon, the installer came out to provision and commission the solar system. It took a while and several firmware updates, but after a couple of hours, we were running the house on solar power instead of drawing from the grid. The system also had enough oomph to completely charge the batteries and send excess power off to PG&E (as a donation to their stockholders).

The town Building Inspector came out, and I was not surprised that he didn’t approve of the battery installation – it was, perhaps, 18 inches from the nearest window, and the code requires 3 feet for safety. So the installer spent the afternoon moving the batteries to the other side of the garage; he ran out of time and energy before he was able to reconnect them to the system, but that will happen in a day or two, and then the inspector will approve the installation and then, in the fullness of time, PG&E will give us “permission to operate” and we’ll start receiving credits for our excess production.

So much paperwork….

I had to install smoke/carbon monoxide detectors near each bedroom in the house to be able to pass inspection; as long as I had the stepladder out, I thought I’d upgrade the incandescent light bulbs in a couple of ceiling-mounted fixtures to LED (the bulbs had been there since the electricians installed the fixtures 10 years ago).

The only way I could see to remove the shade was to unscrew the screws in the recessed holes you can see in the photo above. And naturally, I dropped one of the screws and couldn’t find it. But I was able to take everything apart and replace the bulbs.

I took the remaining two screws to my nearest hardware store, Los Gatos Ace Hardware, to get a replacement. But they didn’t have it (it apparently is an odd size); the salesperson, Zach, told me he could use a tap and die set to change the hole in the fixture so I could use a normal machine screw, but he couldn’t do it until today.

We did laundry this morning and Diane found the missing screw in the lint filter, so I decided to try to put things back together myself. I couldn’t figure out how to reassemble everything – back to Ace and Zach.

He spent 15 minutes reassembling the shade – for free. And I discovered what I should have done in the first place – all I needed to do was use my finger to loosen the finials on each of the clamps holding the rings together and the shade would come down easily.

I also discovered that I’d made a mistake by buying non-dimmable LED bulbs and putting them on a fixture controlled by a dimmer switch. I thought about changing out the switch and decided it was much easier to buy dimmable bulbs (which I did get at Ace, of course).

I guess I’m not completely out of the Covid brain fog. :-)