Camping at Salt Springs

My lovely wife and I moved to the other side of the Ocala National Forest to Salt Springs. It's an amazing natural spring. Due to its salt content there are salt water fish in the middle of the Ocala. Looking forward to snorkeling the springs.

Before we left Clearwater Lake a guy came over and practically begged me to look over his trailer's solar electric system. He'd bought a small home built trailer. It was a neat little rig, well put together. Unfortunately, the new owner had no idea how the solar electric stuff was supposed to work.

His wife was particularly worried about it. It was a small system, but pretty well installed. It had a weird little charge controller/DC power center that took me a moment to sort out. Outside of that it was very straight forward. In fact, for a small system it had a couple of safety shut offs. That was part of the problem. The new owner would actually disconnect the solar panel from the battery because he had figured the switches wrong.

I assured the guy's wife that the system was very safe. She made her husband write down all my instructions. While I was at it I suggested a couple of easy upgrades if he was so inclined. It was fun to figure out the electrical set up. It really only took me about 10 minutes to sort it all out.

We've been having a great time and meeting people. I think we meet more people at the campgrounds without electric power. That gets people out of their campers more. They seek out conversation instead of watching TV or surfing the net.

That being said, we are staying at the section of Salt Springs that does have electric power. I'm using the opportunity to top off my off-grid batteries. Also, I can run my power hog of an electric cooler. With that in mind I picked up some fresh food. Even with fresh food, we decided to have a Mountain House meal for dinner due to the ease of preparation.

-Sixbears