Off The Grid

Well today was the winter solstice for the northern hemisphere. My system made 124.9kwh on the shortest day of the year!! My summer time record is 162kwh. My intent was to make the same amount of power each month of the year instead of lots in summer and none in winter. So this is 25% less in winter.... not so bad. Also it takes about 55-60kwh just to run the house, so if I can make more than this on the shortest day of the year, that's a winner for the long haul.

3d print insert lol

Today I helped the same guy as yesterday... we pulled two 1AWG, two 2AWG, two 6AWG from his meter base on the house out 125' to the shipping container that will have the inverters and batteries. What a booger. We eneded up pulling the straight section 100' under ground and then feeding it thru individual 45's and 90's in teh conduit to get to the wall connection on the shipping container. No way we could have pulled end to end thru all those bends. He's using two 10,000kva victron inverters, so that's 10kw of reactive power, but only 8kw per inverter of "real" power. So his maximum current will be 83amps @ 240v. We're using aluminum wire because it's so much cheaper. Since the standard length used in electrical code is for 100' runs and we are at 125' I had to do a separate voltage drop calculation. We were right on the hairy edge for 2AWG so I opted for 1AWG for the L1 and L2 wires (ie the two hots) and 2AWG for the neutral and ground. The two 6AWG wires are for a 50amp feeder to the inverters for emergency charging of the batteries on cloudy day. Here's a voltage drop calculator for wire runs longer than 100'. https://www.southwire.com/calculator-vdrop

Though I never saw it done.

Deuce and a Half's were designed to run on thinned paint as well.

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Not the best way you check the battery in your laser.

Can you use low volume compressed air?

Went over to local farmer doing the $24,000 system today to help him reroute a conduit out into his yard. He ran power "almost" to his shipping container and we needed to jog the conduit to one end of the container and extend it a bit. At the house end, we installed an additional panel box next to his primary and needed to move that same conduit over to the new box. So the whole time I'm carping about how you need to glue all the joins in the conduit under ground so it doesn't fill up with water.... and the far end that stubbed up near his shipping container had the last elbow broken so the conduit was full of water. If you can't lick 'em , join them.... So I drilled a weep hole in the bottom of the conduit and we will fill gravel around it. I don't know how to get all the water out except to tie a rag to the pull string and use it like wadding.

A little parable about solar.... Once upon a time there was a twilight zone episode where an astronaut was to trave to another star. It would take 70 years. He took off and humanity kinda forgot about him. In the mean time, scientists developed a faster way to get to this star. When he arrived 70 years later, there were already people coming and going to from this in a day's travel. Such is the tale of the Ivanpah solar plant. It was created when PV solar cost a lot more than it does today. It would have been profitable if the cost of PV panels hadn't come down so much. Like our 70 year astronaut, we never imagined the price would drop so much in 15 years. Everyone crying about the US solar tax subsidy going away.... the price of panels has come down so much that the project can be done cheaper today for cash than it could 10 years ago with the subsidy. The panels are the cheapest part of the system and also the most visible. Panels are usually 40c per watt give or take. You'll spend as much on racking as you do solar panels so those two a tied for cheapest part of the system. Next is inverters and MPPT chargers. Plan on spending anywhere from $1500 to $6500 for inverters. And the most expensive part of the system is the batteries. Plan to spend between $5000 and $12000 for batteries for a serious system. It is 100% possible to run a heat pump heated/cooled 1600sq ft house for $24,000 worth of solar equipment.

Heat water with spinning magnets. A poorman induction heater. Now imagine this on a windmill??? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZAsmNeREXA

Rainy day today.... I figured out how to attach the 2" square tubing on end wall of greenhouse to the round tubes that are not straight up and down. And since I had dusted off the lathe, I turned two axel stubs for my future combination grocery cart bicycle cart. I'm going to put wheel chair wheels on a grocery cart to make a utility buggy for around the property.