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Off Grid and Free: My Path to the Wilderness

Practical advice for off-gridders, homesteaders, preppers. 44 years off-grid homesteading experience.

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What’s That Burning Smell?

Posted on February 16, 2026 by Ron & Johanna Melchiore

As many of you know, we’ve been off grid for roughly 46 years now. Seems like yesterday that we were jumping up and down when we put 2 amps of solar charging back into our car battery which was our “system”.

And if you read any of our books, you would know I started my career as an industrial electronics technician. My last electronics job was designing and building test equipment for circuit boards used in robotics. Yes, even back in the stone age, there were rudimentary robotics that would mechanize certain elements in manufacturing. They were called pick and place machines.

Solar Array for Energy Independence

And all of that electronic stuff used standard alternating current we use in our houses today along with low voltage direct current gadgets. Hopefully, my dear readers clueless about electricity will still find this of interest. Anybody with some electrical knowledge will find this an invaluable education.

Electronics and Electricity

I understood electronics and electricity so it wasn’t hard to make the leap to designing and wiring up my solar electric systems for our home. And as mentioned, the first system was ridiculously small so we were always power starved even when we added some additional solar panels to our Maine homestead.

When we moved to the wilderness of northern Saskatchewan, our system became much larger. For 17 years we lived out in the bush with a trouble free solar electrical system.

Then we moved to our current location in Nova Scotia and built an even bigger solar array and system. Now we are talking some serious power. Remember I was happy with 2 amps at the very start? Now our system can push 100 amps into the batteries. That’s a big jump!

And along with that jump in power, electronic components and wire size get bigger and connections become more critical.

Up until last year, we had 7 years of trouble free service. I have a remote meter here in my office. It allows me to see many metrics including how many amps are going in and out of the battery as well as tracking my amp hours used and battery state of charge. Consider the meter my fuel gauge much like in a car. How much gas do I have left in the tank? How much energy do I still have left in my battery?

Nova Scotia, We Have a Problem

A while back, I noticed my meter fluctuating wildly when solar power was coming in on a sunny day. My meter might read 40 amps then jump to 600 amps going in. Well since my system can only deliver 100 amps, something was surely amiss here. This was clue 1 that something was wrong.

I changed meter cables, checked wiring etc and everything looked good. Since everything electrically seemed to be working, I chalked it up to a bad meter or perhaps bad shunt sending unit. Since everything is networked together, the bad meter readings were distorting what my charge controller was doing. In other words, my charge controller didn’t know what to make of these numbers and somewhat shut itself off since it thought the batteries were full when they really were not.

Meter Shunt

So I just disconnected my meter and made a judgment call from experience what state of charge my batteries were. I ordered a replacement meter as the first obvious thing to try.

A week later, I noticed the smell of something getting very hot. This was clue number 2 something was really wrong. I looked at the wiring in my power box but couldn’t see anything wrong. I didn’t take the cover off the solar charger since there’s only 5 connections and surely everything is fine in there.

So I went downstairs and noticed a big red light on my solar charge controller. The display showed a fault code. In essence, these components are pretty smart and know when there’s a problem so they alert you to it.

I couldn’t get rid of the code. Clue number 3! Then I took a closer look at some of my wires in the power box which were obviously discolored with melted insulation. I took the cover off my solar charger and by golly, the battery plus wire was discolored and obviously had cooked as well. I had 2 locations essentially in the same line that had seriously over heated.

This was a real head scratcher since one would think extremely high current went through those heavy wires to cause insulation discoloration from heat. More than they could possibly handle. And yet, those wires were sized to easily handle 100A current and I had a circuit breaker in line too which would have tripped if I exceeded a current limit.

Toasted Wires

How...