Off The Grid

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Learned something today. We have a commercial double sized fridge in our kitchen. Got it about 3 years ago and last week on Thanksgiving day it stopped reaching setpoint. I never heard of R290 refrigerant and could not find any HVAC guys to work on it. I assumed it had a slow leak. Called a commercial fridge place and they said they might get to me by this Friday. On a lark I called another commercial fridge place and the guy said he was out in my area anyway and he stopped by 45 minutes later. He installed a service port on the plumbing and refilled it and it works. He couldn't find a leak so it might have been in the crimped over stub of tubing he cut off to install the service port. Now on to the good stuff. R290 is simply a very pure propane. That's it. Friggin propane. It's not a controlled substance like other refrigerants. You can buy three 8oz cans of it on amazon with a fill kit for $60. My fridge holds 3.6oz of it... Turns out that propane is a very good refrigerant but R12 replaced it because it was flammable. But improvements in compressors mean it is not a fire hazard so it's making a comeback. Goodwe and Gee are making minisplit systems that use it. Apparently it's all the rage in EU and China.

But do not forget they decided to make all new cars look the same regardless of manufacturer and then they put in aluminum blocks and plastic manifolds and parts and places that are stupid like oil coolers under intake manifolds and starters under intake manifolds. Then they call it economy by adding twin turbos which will break and make the longevity of the vehicle even worse. If you can't get an older generation 3 Toyota tundra don't touch it if it doesn't have a V8 in it as a tundra and don't touch it if it's got a V6 in the Tacoma make sure it's not one of the newer ones. Because they are crap and pay attention to the four-cylinder twin turbo pieces of shit that burn out so fast.

Pistol troubleshooting target.

So doing a little digging on Amazon, I find that I can get similar motors with limit switches built in for $328 for two motors and a power supply (control box).

So my greenhouse comes with roll up sides that roll up from the middle. They supplied a pair of hand crank 13:1 ratio gear boxes, about $500 worth of gear boxes. So I asked the salesman today about what if I had ordered electric motors. Those are $570 plus $180 worth of brackets and a $2000 controller. (continued)

You can be glad its not these 2 : -everything you say -everything you do 🤣🤣

Wife says there are two things about me that annoy her. First, she said I don't listen. And I don't remember what the other one was.

So word on the street is that Tesla Powerwall Gen 2 has some sort of battery issue. Note that they use the flammible type of LiCoManganese batteries like 18650s. So Tesla recalled them and discharged them into the grid down to a low SoC and turned them off. They'll be replaced under a warranty but many of these folks' installers are out of business and in the mean time they have no battery backup that they paid for. This is why we home brew. Oh and don't forget that Deye bricked a bunch of gray market inverters in North America because SolArk has the exclusive rights to Deye (rebranded) inverters in NA. And EG4 inverters phone home to china if you use their wifi dongle. There are projects on GitHub to replace their wifi dongle with something that talks to Home Assistant. Victron will always work on your local LAN or by bluetooth if you are in the same room with the system. Connecting to their mothership is optional and they are quite clear about that. My SMA gear does not connect to the internet. I've had to jump through some hoops to get it talking to home assistant but it will not be shutdown by some remote party. So home brew your own system... understand that often conveniences come with a risk.

Well today Mrs Johnkowski and I got all the perlins on the green house and all but one truss. Gunna rain like hell tonight and tomorrow so it's a shame we didn't get the footings for the end walls done today too. There's always Wednesday.