The Egg Goes Solar

Salt Lake City, UT—After staying a night in McInnis Canyon National Conservation Area and the lovely (and completely desolate) camping it offers, we packed up the Egg and hit I70 west, then headed north through Price Canyon and the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest as we rolled along smoothly toward GoalZero’s headquarters just outside Salt Lake City.

In case you’re not familiar with GoalZero, they are an industry-leading consumer solar products manufacturer who have (in a very short time) revolutionized the solar landscape for consumers in the US and brought light to villages in Ghana and Indonesia (and others), as well as to victims of Hurricane Sandy. They’ve done the best job of any company I can think of to make solar power—in all it’s complexity—easy to understand as a regular, non-science-y consumer. They have done an excellent job distilling down the components required to get a solar system running for your energy needs by releasing products that are plug-and-play.

We arrived at GoalZero HQ and were enthusiastically greeted by their awesome customer service staff including Alex Bateman who championed our project and GoalZero’s involvement from the beginning. Next, we met their on-site (and often world-traveling) engineer and install guru, David Rosner. David helped us pick out the right equipment and prep it for installation in the Egg. After a few hours working in the blazing Utah sun, he was then kind enough to give us a tour of the GZ warehouse and offices, introducing us to staff like Andy Earl in Marketing (a stellar adventure photographer, too BTW) and others.

We are honored to be involved with GoalZero and had an great experience hanging out at their HQ for the day. Thanks to them, DesignEgg is now more efficient, mobile, and environmentally friendly. At one point during the tour, one of the employees called out across the room, “Why do you guys look so happy?” “Because we’re getting off the grid,” I replied…