We drove to Taunton on Thursday 3rd April for a visit to Solar Camper solutions. Here, Roger installed two solar panels onto our California (200 watts in total) along with a Victron MPPT controller.
The panels are a laminated ETFE design, flexible, very lightweight and the vehicle still retains a height of under 2.0 m. The installation was professional, quick and everything is well thought out. It’s not the cheapest of solutions (part California “tax” and part because many of the low profile fittings just aren’t available “off the shelf”) but it looks good and the panels are bolted to the roof rails so they can be removed for cleaning etc.
Since the weather forecast was for warm and sunny weather, we headed off to the north Devon coast for a couple of nights, staying at Sparkhayes campsite, Porlock.
Sparkhayes is a lovely grass site, in the centre of this rather pretty Exmoor village. The owner has a few reviews indicating he’s perhaps a little eccentric or “unfriendly”, but scroll past those reviews and have a chat with Phil – he was very friendly and helpful to us. He wouldn’t however, commit to which of the three pubs in Porlock served the best food – suggesting we visit each one for drinks first. Sounded like a plan.
On our arrival day, we drove to Lynmouth to visit a National Trust property. There are presently some extensive roadworks in the area with diversions of many miles and in the end, we never made it to Watersmeet and instead had a brief look around Lynmouth and a coffee.
If we had had a little more time we could have taken the funicular railway to Lynton.
We also passed this shop near the harbour. If you look closely, you can see where the high water mark was in the great flood of 1952. This is described as the worst river flood in English history when a storm with heavy rainfall, combined with already saturated soil and flood debris led to the flooding of the village and the loss of 34 lives.
In the evening, we did go to each pub in Porlock, but the first on our list, the Royal Oak, was empty and lacking staff to serve food. Hence we gave the Royal Oak a wide berth, had a pint in the Castle before dining at the Ship Inn, also known as “The Top Ship”.
Friday was a leisurely start but we had pre-ordered sourdough dough bread from “Bake Me Crazy” in Porlock. The shop is owned by friends of our daughter and Moe couldn’t resist buying cakes as well. In the afternoon, we walked along the coastal path from Porlock to Porlock Weir.
Later in the evening, we ate at the Ship Inn (Porlock Weir), known locally as “The Bottom Ship”. It’s also owned by the same people as The Top Ship but the menus are different. However, new owners will be arriving in September.
Saturday we headed back to East Devon via an Aquatic centre near to Crediton. We needed to stock up on plants for our pond.
The solar panels performed exactly as they should.