With an avid little group of a half dozen engineers and ae-enthusiasts, John Robbins, AEA's CoChair and local award winning energy engineer, gave an intensive, yet very individualized tutorial on solar power for a home office that covered all the technical angles as well as a whole range of learning styles.

For those who thrive on hands-on hardware, John had all the boxes and cables, batteries and panels, gauges and all, right there assembled and functioning. If your tastes ran to diagrams, his finely drawn expositions of both the outdoor design and the indoor components gave all the details of grounding and amps, fuses and switches and sizes.

For those who want the "story", John told us how he measured his original office's demands for energy, researched his site's available sun and appropriate power equipment; then the tale of his yearlong quest to swap office hardware for more efficient versions, some even manual like the sensible basic pencil sharpener; his pursuit of logistics to minimize line loss and outlet strips to circumvent the elusive phantom-loads finetuned his designs until he arrived at his new ideal home office, customized to his work loads and patterns, even increasing his computing power and task lighting while reducing its power consumption by a whopping factor of 10!!

Phenomenal results like that deserve spreadsheets and graphs for the logic-minded and John had those analyses in abundance, showing peak and accumulating demands, progressions of improvements and their impact on the solar hardware needed, right down to the costs.

As John fielded questions on performance to-date of his design, now a reality, we got to switch things on and off, see how much energy the system itself used, appreciate the refinements that led to the elegant, all-encompassing simplicity and note the details of quality workmanship and safety.

Now if we had only videotaped it you could see for yourself!!