KEY POINTS:
Last month I decided to be "part of the solution" and had solar panels installed on my roof.
I have had nothing but problems ever since, and envy those people destined to have large electricity pylons dumped on their lawns.
Stage one meant attaching the large solar panels
to the roof. I only had half of them up before a television company approached me and pressed me for an interview to be included in the show Neighbours from Hell.
I refused, but the slow motion footage they captured of me smacking my child for licking a power drill was fairly damning. The episode is expected to go to air in October.
Once all the panels were securely attached to my roof, transforming this beautiful 1920s villa into something more familiar to the movie Logan's Run, they needed to be wired up to the control panel.
I won't bore readers with the actual terminology and technical specifics because I don't really know them.
I misplaced the instruction booklet and pretty much winged the installation, much like I did when I put our four-burner barbecue together, and the wooden computer desk with the strange but handy pull-down aluminium hood.
Most half-competent males will tell you that instructions are for losers with too much time on their hands.
I am of the opinion that if you can get a big picture view in your mind of what the finished product should look like, you should be able to work backwards from there and put something together without instructions. That's why jigsaw puzzles usually have a big picture on the box.
Once I had wired up the unit, I switched it on and was promptly electrocuted. The force at which I was thrown backwards through the closed ranch-slider gave me an immense sense of satisfaction, as I could tell immediately that I had harnessed an incredible amount of power. Then the panels on the roof started glowing red hot and pulsating in time to a low frequency hum that you could feel, far more than you could actually hear. The whole house seemed to be electrically charged, with bolts of electricity shooting towards the heavens like the Ark of the Covenant in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Some neighbours captured this phenomena on their handicams. No doubt the footage will be used as visual testimony in my episode of Neighbours from Hell.
I was simply amazed at how much raw electricity my system seemed to be generating.
I noticed that my power meter seemed to be spinning faster than ever before; the sonic boom that cracked the glass was testament to this.
Then it dawned on me, I had wired the unit up backwards and my solar unit had turned into a super electricity conductor and, rather than supplying electricity, it had sucked out about a year's worth of power from the national grid in the five or six minutes I had had the system running.
A couple of days later, I had managed to re-wire the unit so it was drawing electricity from the panels as opposed to out of the national grid, and the effects were far less dramatic to say the least.
Now I clearly had too little electricity to play with, meaning I could run little more than one appliance or light in the house at a time. Anymore than that and my mini power station would shut down.
Like the crew of the crippled spacecraft Apollo 13, we needed to go through a complicated checklist procedure to simply hang a towel on a heated towel rack or turn on a light at night. Ironically, having the lights on during the day wasn't so much of a problem.
All my wife's sex toys that ran off mains power were simply off limits, and I took to removing things such as the little lightbulb in the fridge butter conditioner in an effort to give us more power elsewhere in the house.
Although as a family we gained a small warm fuzzy feeling from the knowledge that we're making a contribution towards saving the planet, we would have preferred to have had the warm snug feeling we used to get whenever we turned on our heater.
We tired of looking out the window, hoping to spot a clearing in the weather whenever we offered somebody a cup of coffee. I spent more time looking for shifts in the weather this month than Team New Zealand and Alinghi combined.
The fact of the matter is that the system I installed won't work properly until the planet has heated up sufficiently through the very global warming it is attempting to off-set.
I set out to be part of the solution but I now want to be part of the problem so that being part of the solution isn't so much of a problem. I face a moral conundrum.
I removed the system only to find that much of the house's internal wiring has been damaged from power surges, but I suppose one small consolation is that we don't actually own the house. In retrospect, we probably should have checked with the owners prior to installing a solar solution but when you are trying to save the planet, common sense doesn't always come in to it.
