08/25/2025
It's the end of an era. After over 10 years at 200 Millennium Blvd, this location is now closed. Unplugged Power Systems is moving to a new location outside the city.
As some of you know, we sold the property on Millennium Blvd in favor of a safer location outside of town. We will be moving the last of our stock and tools over the next week. The Moncton location is now permanently closed. This was a hard decision and we will miss the regulars who dropped in for a chat, but in the long run it was necessary and a long time in the works.
Reasons for the move:
Those of you who have met me know me to be rather blunt. With that in mind, my reason for selling the property and getting out of the city are simple. Moncton's love for homeless crackheads. The city invites them in with free crack pipes and narcan, and when they commit crimes, as they invariably will, if they are even arrested, they are quickly released. With no consequences for their actions they have been stealing just about everything that isn't nailed down. We have lost over $78,000 in the last 10 years, much of it in the last 4. The crime spike accompanied with the lack of enforcement has cost us enough. Add to that the cost of property taxes (Based on our markup, we need to sell $55,000 in retail sales just to pay the city their land tax, let alone water tax), it doesn't justify putting up with the never ending theft.
We will lose some walk-in sales, but to be honest, we have become somewhat of a destination type store and people will likely still come and see us. The city traffic are typically small ticket sales and usually people who have house or camp systems are willing to travel for the technical and after sale support. This is the hope, but we will see.
The new location:
Over the last few months we have been building a new store and warehouse. The address is 4 Pitfield Road in Anagance. This space is 30 seconds from the highway just after Petitcodiac. We are 100% off grid and will be running a convenience store as well as the main shop from our power system.
The power System:
The power system consists of a ZL Power 10kW hybrid inverter capable of delivering 10kW nominal and 20kW surge power. It has a built in pair of solar charge controllers allowing up to 11kW of solar input. It currently has 9x 550 watt Bauer bi-facial solar panels (single series string) on a wooden ground mounted solar rack totalling 4950 watts and we will be adding an additional array on one of our profesional ground mounted aluminum solar racks towards the end of September. The 2 types of racks are because we have many people asking how they can save money by building their own ground mounts, and with an example here, they can take pictures/better understand the DIY rack system. We hope to also have our 7kW wind turbine up and running before winter. The battery system will consist of 10x 100aH 51.2v LiFePO4 rack mount batteries. In a worst case, if the batteries are depleted and an alternate source of energy is required, we have a 5kW diesel electric start generator also connected.
Looking Forward:
As this project is somewhat of a work in progress, I would ask for everyone's patience for another few months while we continue to build. The retail operation will be disrupted for at least a month while we continue to work on the store. During this time we will do our best to get you what you need,
but it may take a bit longer than usual. With any luck, the bulk of construction will be complete by mid September and the store will be open by the first of October. Feel free to drop in at any time though and see us.
If you have read to the end of this post and haven't fallen asleep, thanks for reading my ramblings. I'd like to offer you a bonus for your loyalty. Anyone who mentions this post can purchase our 250 watt used solar panels for $100 each, tax included, for as many as are available.
