One of the great things about something like Burning Man is that you can use the time to live your life in a way that you feel is right, but that you just can't manage year-round. For me, this meant meeting our energy needs with renewable power. For that purpose, I had purchased all the components to build a solar power setup for our camp. I had never made one before, but I figured it would be fun to learn, and it was. Over the course of a day, I spliced, stripped, wired, and kludged together a working electrical system, with one afternoon break due to a stab wound which resulted in a trip to the medical center (don't use a sharp knife to strip wires, and if you do, be really careful). We had 120V AC and 12V DC, charged by solar panels. All our 12VDC appliances had power cables which terminated in a male cigarette-lighter end. Since I was planning a hacked setup, I had just figured on our 12VDC system being a couple of wires.

Rob & Anna, however, conveniently had an old car with them, with an ashtray and cigarette lighter that they never, ever use. So I disconnected the tray from their cars electrical system, yanked it out, and connected it to our rig. Thus we had, sitting there in the desert, an ashtray, with a female cigarette lighter socket that was connected to our electrical "grid" (this is probably too fancy a word for what we had, but allow me my illlusions). All the electrical equipment was inside a small dome tent that I set up, and I kept thinking that someone would bump the wrong thing and it would all go up in flames, but it survived not only the week but even the rains which beset us. We powered a small pump for inflating matresses (particularly useful since Carl & Chiara's leaked), and charged radio's, walkie-talkies, flashlight batteries, and even a little electric scooter that some random guy brought by because its charger was broken.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun, and we'll definitely be bringing an expanded setup next year. There was unfortunately a lot of rain and clouds, and so the people who had wind turbines as well as solar had a lot more power than us. Next year we'll get a turbine, and some sort of electric transportation as well. Either a little scooter, or some kind of larger project car.

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