November 9th 2019
November 9th 2020
And just for fun, here is November 9th 2015
We’ve come a long way 🙂 It’s supposed to be cloudy tomorrow. This will be a good test of the strategy that is trying to squeeze more amps with more panels from a non-optimal day.
Our demand for electricity surpasses our ability to produce it often these days. Between the fridge, working from home, kids growing up, and soon a water pump, we’ve expanded drastically but our solar setup has not. With Winter looming, it was time for an upgrade.
We can pick 2 strategies for an upgrade:
The former doesn’t make sense for us right now, battery lifetimes wouldn’t be in sync, and they freeze on the really cold days which is not advisable for their long term performance. Batteries are very expensive and we know that whatever we get will take a beating. In a few years, when we have a root cellar, we’ll also have an ideal place for batteries which won’t be subject to drastic temperature swings, then it will make sense to upgrade those. In the meantime, the only strategy left to to milk the cloudy days for more by buying more panels.
I couldn’t find the exact same panels so I bought some similar, and well, I had to get 9 for things to look symmetrical
I went vertical because I like where everything is now, I didn’t want to increase the panels’ footprint on the land.
I expanded on the existing frames made of pressure treated 2x4s. It looks a little eclectic and that’s ok, it works well :). We do get very high winds here so I have to build sturdy or I’ll be picking panels off the ground after a storm.
Now this is starting to be a serious array. I don’t think we’ll ever need more panels than this. Note that the top row looks a little different, as I said they aren’t the exact same panels.
Because we have more panels, everything downstream also needed to be upgraded. Truth be told, it needed to be upgraded a while back. I was definitely pushing the gauge of the wiring, and a lot of things I had done poorly as I was learning. I rewired everything with better gear, better knowledge, and dare I say better skills.
I started work on the control panel of my dreams inside. I’ve gotten to appreciate just how much time, and how much skill proper wiring takes.
Each solar panel now gets its own wiring, with an on/off switch and a diode to prevent electricity feedback. The panels have their own diode locally to prevent feedback damage, but between they and the control panel, there’s a lot of wire one could make mistakes with. Working together, they can produce 100 Amps and so you really don’t want feedback. I soldered heavily (and uglily) any connection I could.
The solar on/off button casing is an fork from the previous on/off switch casing but with room for a diode and made so they can stack.
Download links here:
solar_on_off_button_casing.stl
solar_on_off_button_casing.dae
solar_on_off_button_casing.skp
I’m also making the control panel fully detachable, anything connected to it has a plug. It’ll make it easier to work on down the road.
Now we’re talking!
Long story short, it took several days of work to rewire all 18 solar panels and create this awesome control panel. There are still a few things I need to polish or position better. I “reverse-engineered” what powers our fiber ONT so I wouldn’t have to rely on an inverter to power a UPS to power it (ouch for efficiency). Turns out it just needs 12V, guess what I have plenty of in this solar shed? I got a 12V power cleaner (the aluminum radiator looking square to the right) to at least give it a very clean 12V, the other pins are optional signal pins to take various UPS actions based on power scenarios. It really didn’t make sense to jump through all these hoops to have a 12V battery backup when my whole system is essentially a 12V battery backup. We’ll see if anyone comes knocking on my door :).
The smarts for monitoring and hosting this very blog are mostly untouched but I did re-arrange them a bit. I tried to fit everything on the control panel but it made sense to separate by function.
Robin enjoyed playing with the switches, including the big catchunking one. We experimented with various scenarios, compared panel outputs et cetera. This was a nice unforeseen side effect this design.
All in all I still have a bit of work, but I knew exactly what I was doing and didn’t make a single wiring mistake which is really nice. I used to be way more puzzled by how to wire something much more basic than this. The charge controller stopped working mid-day, that’s because it stops at 80 Amps and the panels had reached this. Fortunately, it was very easy to turn off 4 panels and the system worked again. It’ll be just as easy to re-add them on a cloudy day. The real solution will be to upgrade the charge controller, this will be left for another time. With the Sun almost gone well behind the tree line, we were still making 2Amps, this is now definitely a nice setup :). “Legit Brah” as Robin would say.
It’s a pretty bad apple year and it’s likely we won’t be making cider. However it is a mast year for acorns, filling up a bag is as easy a taking a walk in the woods. In the spirit of going along with what nature decides, we’re trying acorn flour this year.
In the newly reinstalled greenhouse
Acorns are drying
We have no idea what to expect from this.
It’s still fairly untested at this point but it’s a nice summary of the reasons behind the choices.
When we drilled our well 4 years ago, we didn’t install an electric pump, only a manual one. We didn’t have power we could spare, we didn’t know how to run power to the well, we didn’t know how to bring water inside the house, the house didn’t even have its final footprint. All these reasons kept us pumping water by hand and carrying it in the house for years. It’s honestly not a bad chore but it does add up with 4 of us taking showers, on top of the drinking and various other uses. If I had to guess, I would say we use about 20 to 30 gallons every day. Now with the Summer stream shower this goes down significantly.
In any case, I made it my mission this Summer to run water inside the house. I tried very hard to have a professional do the work on the well casing, but not a single contractor was interested in the work. As with roofers, they have a ton of work, they get to pick the easy nice paying jobs. I couldn’t even convince them to give me a high quote. I called everyone in the region, and they were honest in saying in a very typically Vermont way that it was just too much trouble to install a pitless adapter. I was very scared to mess up the well and would have been happy to pay someone with expertise to do it, but no one wanted to, so I didn’t have a choice.
I spent months researching it, talking to everyone, watching videos, and replaying in my head the motions for what would need to happen the day of. Until finally I felt like I had turned every stone and just had nothing left to inquire. It was time for action.
One of the complicating factors in this endeavor is the design. Most wells are installed with a pitless adapter under ground and a 110V AC deep well pump in the well itself. That’s what we would have gotten from a contractor and the easy, known to be reliable, choice. However, there are a few things about our situation which don’t necessarily make this the best fit. And so adding to my initial uncertainty about anything touching the well, was the fact that I evaluated designs which aren’t conventional. It’s a bit nerve wracking to question established wisdom having no practical experience on the matter. This is why it took me so long to get to a point where I thought I had it.
Here are the points which held me back from a conventional in-well setup:
Now our well has a very high static level, in fact water oozes out the top a about 4 gallons per hour which required us to create a whole way of disposing of it under ground bellow the frost line so it wouldn’t freeze and damage the well & pump. This seems to be true even today, after a whole month of no rain in Vermont. I cursed my well for having us do all this disposal apparatus for a mere 4 gallons per hour, but the other side of that coin is that it is unaffected by very dry spells when we hear of friends’ wells running dry. I realized that water pumps are rated for how many feet of height they can call water from. A super cheap pump I’ve been moving sap & stream water with can call up to 10′, better more expensive pumps can self-prime up to 20′, anything more than that starts to require specialty pumps. There is just about 10′ between where the well static level is (enforced by the overflow disposal) and where the floor of the house is. Could I have the pump in the house and call the water from the well?
I climbed up a 10′ ladder with the pump to test the assertion and sure enough, it pulls water up just fine. This meant we can have a super cheap pump right inside the house where we can work on it if we need to, with electricity right there. Even better, I can put a simple valve right there to let air in the pipe and all the water will go back into the well, leaving no chance of freezing on the super cold days.
That’s for the somewhat unconventional design, it remained to be seen if all would work in practice. It was time for action.
The backhoe is up for duty again, it has paid for itself many times over this Summer. I had to move the green house away from the well too.
I already have pipes in the ground from the well overflow disposal, and because I dropped the pipe to run in the house then for when I’d need it. I had to be very careful digging.
More work to get there than it looks, a lot is done by hand to not damage the pipes. It’s time to re-do the 10′ height test, the house is also 100′ away from the well, and the pipe a different size so I was ready to think it wouldn’t work.
It didn’t initially work which had me worried, stalled the project for a week as I was bracing for plan B. But I re-did it properly with hose clamps at every coupling and plumber’s tape and it worked like a charm. I will get into how I ran the pipe in the house later.
So with this successful test, I knew I could proceed with the well work. I removed the hand pump and realized I’d need to think about the logistics of moving around it more. I might need someone else, I might need to disassemble it, or I might need some sort of rig to hold it while I work on the rest.
After another week of thinking and preparation, I decided to go for the rig:
I really didn’t want to disassemble it, it just needs to be out of the way enough that I can work in the well. It does weight quite a bit with the 72′ of piping in the well.
Time to make a hole for the pitless adapter
I went in the hole, cleaned up a spot and started drilling. To my surprise, the static is barely above the overflow disposal outlet, and water came out. This meant I did the rest of the work in the mud…
The pitless adapter hole is complete. One of the scarier part of the project.
What the inside of a well looks like.
Time to put the pitless through the hole I just drilled (notice the T shaped metal pull pipe in the grass, I learned you want metal and not plastic for rigidity). Now, because I don’t have a pump sitting at the bottom of my well, I tried to feed the pipe already attached to the pitless adapter.
First the pipe goes in (it’s 100′ long)
Then you thread the pull pipe on the pitless and bring it down into the well, where the hole is. I bleached the ever living shit out of anything that touches the well.
Not the easiest operation but not the worst thing I’ve done either.
Inside the well, white is the hand pump pipe, it’s secured with a string. The pull pipe and the pitless adapter further down.
You do NOT want to lose anything in the well.
Outside the casing, this is starting to smell like success.
Secured
Which means we can unscrew and remove the pull pipe. Again note that I did this all in one operation because I could get away with it. In a lot of cases, with the pitless secured, it’s now time to separate it and retrieve the section to attach pipes & pumps to. Then you lower it back down in the well.
Getting ready to receive the pipe which goes all the way inside the house.
Hot water helps with tight fits.
Looks a little funny but it doesn’t matter, and yes I later clamped the coupler.
With all this done, I went back in the house and ran the pump one last time. I pumped 15 gallons at the press of a button. It’s exhilarating to think of our lives getting better, and relieving to feel the stress of months of apprehension vanish.
I filled the hole back up, and of course the kids showed up to play in the dirt.
On to the second phase of the project, which actually happened before: bringing the pipe in the house.
Years ago, when we ran the overflow disposal, I added another pipe in the trench, from the well to somewhere near the house. It was tricky to find it again, a vertical post in the ground helped a lot.
Connected to the pipe that’s been sitting in the ground, waiting patiently for 4 years.
I made another hole in the house and ran the pipe through it.
I attached 3 temperature probes on the pipe at different levels to have the ability to keep an eye on potential freezing. If I learn that we don’t get anywhere near freezing on the super cold stretches, I won’t ever have to worry about it. Otherwise, I’ll be able to flush the water back into the well, maybe even automatically so.
Then it’s one layer of insulation & vapor barrier after the next.
Finally, I used a culvert going 5′ in the ground to not only insulate, but provide a rigid conduit inside the house. I’ll be able to further insulate it if needs be, there is plenty of space left in it.
That’s all 🙂 we are now ready to bring water to various places in the house. It’ll be cake compared to this.
The one serving as lunch for parasitic wasps which are more than welcome in the garden. We discovered a new technique for finding hornworms: go in at dusk with a UV light, it’s so much easier to home in on them.
The chicks have 2 moms now. A few weeks after they were born, they awoke the motherly instincts of another chicken. They now sleep cozily under not 1 but 2 warm fluffy chickens. Honestly it’s kind of nice to see mom get a little help. There was very much a “her Vs the world” dynamic for a while.
Year 4 of the blueberry orchard, the plants finally look like more than a twig in the ground. The first year going from 1 branch to 2 isn’t particularly exiting even though the plant doubles in mass, this year on the other hand was remarkable in the growth they took. We pick up a large bowl every day, we eat berries copiously and have some left. Next year we’ll have enough for this and canning.
We had another brooder this year. Instead of letting it go by, Nicole got fertilized eggs from a neighbor and 3 chicks were born without any need for incubators. This is the second time we get a brooder (who could very be the same as last year), and the first time we get chicks this way. It’s quite cool to see her introduce the chicks to the flock, she was extremely defensive the whole time, barely getting out to eat. Now that the chicks are out and about, she cuts us some slack and lets us get close while most definitely keeping an eye on us. She lost them in a thunderstorm when they couldn’t get back in the coop, I’d like to think I scored some chicken esteem points getting them back in.
Also interesting, while the rest of the flock is usually a source of danger for young chicks. In this case, they seem to not push at all and leave mom completely in peace. Even going as far as defensively joining a ruckus we caused around the little chicks.
Kind of gets you thinking about the reputation for being dumb we give chickens so that they’re easier to justify mistreating and eating.
Tall grass & Dirt Baths, a chicken paradise.
We updated our outside shower to something honestly quite amazing. It’s missing finishing touches but we have most likely found the final location and configuration.
Quaint! And private, I don’t care if a coyote sees me bare assed.
Now before I get into the details, the one big gain here for us is infinite hot water, at will. I know it doesn’t sound like much but believe me, to us it’s the most amazing thing in the world.
First of all, this is water we do not move by hand, which is a first in 5 years. How does it works in the middle of the woods? Well we improved an abandoned beaver dam to buffer some water in the stream. Stream water can be murky so we made a siphon between the beaver buffer upstream and a giant tub downstream. The tub is one more opportunity for sediment to settle. I tried to make the water run down a long hollowed out pine tree but we couldn’t get the level quite high enough. Turns out a siphon is a thousand times better anyway.
From the giant tub, a simple 12V pump pumps the water into a tankless heater.
The water pump, some things still need proper places.
I had enough spare parts for a whole other solar setup. 1 charge controllers, 3 super dead lead acid batteries I revived with the water trick, and finally 1 charge controller. It’s not much of a solar setup, it’s what we started with years ago, but it’s perfect for 1 water pump in the woods.
It remains to be determined if we’ll consume more electricity than we’ll produce with this 1 panel in this 1 spot. We used to have a second extra panel but I tractored it by accident :\.
This pump is setup to stop when a certain pressure is reached. So it keeps the line to the tankless heater pressurized and then stops drawing power. When you call for water, the pressure drops and it starts up automatically. The tankless heater lights up and you get hot water.
The really incredible device tying all together: an outside tankless heater.
There is literally no work to the whole operation, no moving water nor applying heat with a fire like we did before when we wanted hot water.
The whole setup
Now the one imperfection of this system is that heating is done with propane: a fossil fuel not from our land. I’m sure no one in the family will dare disparage the approach given how much time we all spent taking hot showers. The kids especially spend extra long in a small tub, toys have been replaced with various forest things we find and throw in the water (ferns, sticks).
It’s worth mentioning that hot water is a mixed blessing. On the warm days, there is nothing better than being forced to take a uncomfortably cold shower. It really cools you down for several hours. With this luxurious shower it’s impossible to resist the temptation of comfortable warm water, this does nothing to help you bear the oppressive heat of a Summer day. I’m sure there’s a moral in there about easy choices not necessarily being the best ones. I choose to ignore it from the depths of my steaming hot water.
Funny language anecdote: shower is quite funnily “douche” in French, and so when we used solar heated camping water bags years ago, we inevitably called them douche-bags. This new one’s been dubbed mega-douche.
It doesn’t look like much, but it took a lot of moving big rocks and big trees to get to this little bridge:
Ever since we moved to the land, we’ve tried to get access to beyond the stream with the ATV, and later the tractor. A good 70% of the land is beyond the stream and it’s the 70% with the most trees. Being able to get there with the ATV means a lot of easy pickings for firewood. We also would like to build a little retreat of a cabin up there, far from everything.
This little bridge allows for glorious moments of trail blazing such at this:
We are actually very close to being able to close a nice loop of trails around the land. We’ll try to make a push for it this year but they will take several more to be nice trails, most are currently pretty rough.
Adding a few every year, I didn’t see it coming. But it turns out we planted our 100th blueberry plant this year for a grand total of 107. They’re all still fairly small but they’re growing exponentially and it’s clear that we’ll have an overabundance in a year or 2.
We just received a massive pile of compost, behind this is a massive pile of wood chips. Both of which are gold for growers, and so we get to be generous with our plants.
We ordered 18 yards of compost, I learned another completely insane measure: the yard. The amount of hand waving I see when talking about yards is peculiar. Trying to make sense of it online yields the same written hand waving. A cubic yard is a cubic yard, let’s consider ourselves lucky it’s cubic and not using the 11th dimension.
Here’s one thing I love about the U.S. system of measures, it encourages generosity. Because no one has but a vague idea what a cord, a bushel, or a yard is, we over-give to make sure we gave enough.
We received the plants we ordered this year. As always we’ll grow our operation a little. They’ll go in the ground as soon as tomorrow. 7 more fruit trees and a bunch more berries.
I built more proper shelves in the green house, Nicole is growing the garden significantly. Everything is about to explode in growth.
In preparation for a fiber drop, I buried conduit from the pole to the solar shed. I had never done anything like this before, adding to the long list of skills I’m happy to have.
The part in the woods was super hard, I tried to do it by hand but there was no going through the roots. I ended up chainsawing a path for the tractor. With this and some crazy maneuvering, the trench was dug. 
The tractor was invaluable to the operation. It always blows my mind how hard it is to move dirt by hand.
We just acquired another cookstove. It is in excellent shape for a stove built in 1905, so much so that we couldn’t let it pass. Like we did with our Sweetheart, it’ll sit unused for a couple of years, and we’ll use that time to give it the bit of TLC it needs.
It’s quite beautiful and has many bells and whistles.
Our 2nd year making hard cider, we skipped one last year when the apple trees didn’t produce anything. Such are the whims of mother nature.
We did this one a little more “right” by transferring to a 2nd fermenter after a couple of months and by letting it age for 5 months total. It definitely helped refine the flavor and remove some of the less desirable tones.
As before we used our maple syrup to fuel the fermentation. It’s kind of a shame because the taste of maple syrup is completely lost in the process, I would love to have something mapley left. At the same time, it’s completely awesome that we are able to make hard cider with 100% local ingredients. And by local I mean right from our backyard. It may seem completely absurd to use maple syrup like this, we could sell it and buy many times its weight in refined cane sugar with the money. This isn’t what we’re after though, closing cycles as locally as possible is the end game, not making money. And so using maple syrup is the most sensical and harmonious thing we can do.
I commissioned labels from Robin, I would like to build up a portfolio of labels made from people I love to satisfy any future circumstances. This year we had deer go through apple trees during a ghost moon, and we had a press day heavy on yellow jackets.
Overall it’s really super nice that all these projects are well established these days. We are so much more relaxed going through the motions with experience under our belt. It’s still a lot of work, but at least we’re no longer worried we’re going to majorly fuck something up and ruin everything.
We’ll be sugaring soon, and we’ll have cider to drink while we boil the maple syrup we’ll use the make the cider. It’s the circle of life or something.