Ali

This is Ali who came to talk with us about installing a back up battery for our solar panels. He certainly knew his subject and it turns out we have managed to learn quite a bit ourselves. It is not a simple process and will be quite expensive, but it will give us some peace of mind in case of power outages which seem to be an inevitable part of our future.

We all agreed that the most complicated and impossible to decipher thing about solar systems are the PG&E bills, for we will never get away from the power company altogether. Ali, who has an electric car says his PG&E bill is 17 pages long!  That makes our 7 page one a piece of cake...if only it were written in a linear fashion and in decipherable English!

Our son-in-law Jim is planning on replacing his roof and getting solar panels this summer so he came along to hear what Ali had to say. When he arrived, he recognized Ali as someone he worked with back in 2008. It was a gathering of engineers around our dining table today...mechanical (Ali), electrical (Jim) and chemical (John).

I sat on a  stool and looked over their shoulders as they pored over flow diagrams and charts. Explaining the fine points of solar batteries and wiring to a bunch of engineers is definitely work, so I am entering Ali , surrounded by some tools of his trade (sunglasses, gloves, holstered phone and specs which separate in the middle and hang around his neck) in the Blipfoto Community challenge, people at work.

I think we will be seeing quite a lot of Ali in the future.