Off The Grid

For what it's worth, there is no requirement to run your water supply lines level although many people will do that. Something to think about... if you slope the water supply lines it makes it easier to drain them if you should need to winterize your tiny house. So when drilling holes thru wall studs to run pex tubing, consider a valve at the high end to allow air in, a drain valve outside and slope all the pipes inside the walls Also keep in mind that you want pipes to be biased toward the inside of a wall not against the outside wall. And be sure to stuff insulation between the pipes and the outer wall.... And... be sure to drink your ovaltine.

Worked on the neighbor's solar arrays today. A week or two ago, we build one array out of three just to make sure I didn't miss anything on the CAD drawing. Yesterday we augered and installed 8 posts so the ends of the two additional arrays would ser firm today. Today we augered 28 holes and set 7 posts. Now the perimeter posts are done and we can eaily "grid off" the interior posts with a couple of string lines. 21 posts let to set and we are done with concrete. For those playing along on the home game, each 60' long array holds 16 panels. These panels end up being just under 45" wide and once we add the gap between for panel clamps they are almost exactly 45". We put down 9 pairs of posts on 7'6" centers. The two rows are 4' apart. These panels are quite heavy and we're using 2-3/8" sched 40 fence posts which are also quite heavy. we are using 240lbs of concrete per leg as ballast. So thats 72 forty pound bags of concrete per array.

I just watched a video on Sodium batteries. There's a lot of hype about them right now. They are good for low temperatures down to -20F but look at their discharge curve. The company making them even said the voltage range is so wide that they have to sell them with special inverters that can operate over a wide range of voltages.

I mentioned this system yesterday. Its 288kwh battery system. The array is 100' long. Here's a tour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WySi9cdRg4g

Making a saddle for welding pipes.... the magic angle is 32degrees. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L77I6b68uI0

Annnnndddd. I just laid all the perins for the green house along it's length to mark them for the hoops and it just started raining.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O78ZCcaKzy4 30kw array, 216kwh battery.

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