Off The Grid

Out of my state.... we created a voucher system to allow you to redirect money ear marked for your children in the public schools to a private school of your choice. Home schoolers got 10% of the claims. Now our magnanimous law makers are crying foul. They want to ammend the law to not apply to home schooling... but they'll still take your tax money and give to public schools. https://www.wltx.com/article/news/politics/proposed-bill-would-bar-homeschool-style-students-from-voucher-funds/101-6ad9b10d-a521-4ac6-bc92-74e264e476bb

Do you have a really small generator and want to use it as a backup power source? If you have an "off grid" type inverter, you may be in for a surprise. Inverters come in two flavors, Hybrid and off-grid. When an off-grid inverter is connected to a power source such as grid or a generator, it transfers 100% of the load to that source. It also connects a battery charger to that source. When you program an off grid inverter to only charge the batteries with 10amps in one of the menu settings, that is telling the inveter that if there's less than 10amps demand in the house, it can have the spare power for battery charging. if you turn on a coffee pot, that available power will go down and battery charging will slow. If the house is already using >10amps, battery charging will stop. The inverter cannot control how much power your house pulls. All it can do is allow the battery to charge at an appropriate rate. If you have a hot water heater running and the microwave, your house may pull 20amps and that 20amp must come from the grid or your generator.... and if you generator can't supply that much power the system will rapid cycle on/off generator. Hybrid inverters can be programmed to blend power from two sources. Let's say you have a small 2kw generator and set the limit to 8amps. If you run the microwave and hotwater heater at the same time, your power draw will certainly be higher than 2kw. So the hybrid inverter will pull 2kw from the generator and no more. it will provide the balance of needed power from it's internal circuitry and your battery. When the house loads go away, if the load is less that your 2kw setting, the unit will charge the batteries. The hybrid inverter will allow you to use a smaller generator. There is another way to use a small generator without over loading it. If you get a 48v battery charger like the EG4 Chargeverter, you can program it to the 2kw limit of your small generator and it will directly charge your batteries while an off-grid type inverter continues to power your house unchanged. Hope this makes sense. Now... more about the hybrid inverters. Hybrid inverters such as EG4 hybrid, SMA and Victron can be programmed with a utility/generator limit and will blend power as described above. The SMA and Vic inverters can be programmed if your house pulls more than XX watts for YY minutes, they will auto start the generator. The victron has an additional feature where it protects your generator from surges. Anyone who has been standing next to a generator knows that the generator will suddenly get louder when something big it turned on in the house. Fact is, the generator actually slowed down a bit before it responded and sped back up. if your generator was to be hit with a large enough load, it's frequency could drop below 59hz (49hz) and your inverter would see that as an error and drop the generator. Victron solves this by providing the surge power from batteries and then over the next few seconds, giving that power draw over to the generator. The result is your generator slowly ramps up and never deviates from its 60hz frequency.

Solar tracker. This man has created a huge tracking solar array that uses hydraulics and some well drilling pipe. He's made this so complicated that I'd like to use this as an example of how it's just easier to add more panels. I mean no disrespect to this guy, but this is a case of "when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail". More panels instead of maintenance on all these moving parts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVUam2V2H04

Soaker hoses aren't working worth a shit. Got a sprinkler out. The earth in here is hard and compacted, I tried to till it yesterday and the reverse tine tiller only gets down about an inch. So I'll be soaking it for the next few days to soften it up.

One of the neighbors moved his meter base last fall and when they hooked him back up, they gave him a new meter. The power company has a new batch of meters that they are now issuing. The problem is that the new meter publishes Wh instead of kWh. He's a trucker, so he's not been home... he used 1.6kwh for the month. That number was reported to the power company as 16000kWh. He's out of town so much it is difficult for him to get to the power company when they are open but after 2 or 3 visits and them shutting off his power for non-payment, he finally got the clerk to recognize the differnce between Wh and kWh. When everything was straightened out, the clerk said "do you realize it's going to take *me* 2 weeks to straighten this out for all the other customers with new meters?" Now I'm wondering how people have been paying a bill that is 1000x higher than it should be and how THEY Haven't been shut off. The intellect of this clerk is *amazing*... uggghhhh.... I think the smart meter is smarter than the clerk. Similar story... about 16 years ago a dear friend in Germany died unexpectedly. So 3 years after his death, I was able to visit his widow and the two boys. My friend owned a house in Florida and she was trying to get it transfered to her name so she could sell it and the Clerk of Court wanted a death certificate. She had sent it many times and the clerk wanted "something in english". The certificate that was being provided to the office had a paragraph in French, German, Italian and then English and some additional languages. The clerk was only glancing at the first paragraph and said "I dont read french". Had to send her a picture of my friend's wife holding hte document pointing at the 4th paragraph and hte issue was resolved in one day. ugggghhhhh....

🌒🌕🌘 Purim “Blood Moon is Rising” next week and it will be the last one for 3 years The total lunar eclipse on March 3, 2026, will be visible to approximately 2.5 to 6 billion people. This "Blood Moon" will be most visible across North America, South America, East Asia, and Australia, offering a 82-minute, safe-to-view total eclipse, making it one of the most widely visible astronomical events Follow @trumpetnews1🔥 YT BP News | BP Ministry | Donate

So during all this ice my place of work got a metric ton of salt in these buckets...... if you can believe it they were going to throw them away! (I cringe at the horror of it😂) I scored about 20 of them. I used 5 to make new nest boxes for the chicken tractor. Install will be at some point this weekend

Your Water Filter Will Clog — The Medieval Sand Filtration System That Purifies Forever Your water filter is slowing down. The ceramic is clogged with sediment. The carbon is saturated. The membrane is fouled. And you're looking at a $50 filter you can't replace. Modern filters assume clean source water. Real-world water has sediment, algae, organic matter. Your filter rated for "thousands of gallons" clogs after a few hundred. Now you need to filter water but your filter is done and you have no replacement. You're back to drinking untreated water or boiling everything, which uses fuel you might not have. Meanwhile, 1,000 years ago, medieval cities were filtering water through sand. Not just any sand — layered sand and gravel beds that purified water continuously for decades without clogging, without replacement parts, without maintenance beyond occasional cleaning of the surface layer. The same system is still used in modern...

Oh I almost forgot. Yesterday I hole sawed some holes in for uniseal to install 3 PVC pipes in an IBC tote to make a methane digester. I took advantage of having a dry empty IBC to shovel horse poo and the litter from one of the chicken coops into it. I'll think I'll make a wooden frame on top of it to hold the bottom of another IBC tote plastic liner. The plan is to use the top mounted extra piece to act as a tray to hold horse and rabbit shit in the future. So I'll use a heat gun to soften the plastic and smoosh it down over the pipe where we put in the poo. That way I can dump a tractor bucket on the top tray and rake it over to a funnel like area. https://t.me/OffTheGridOfficial/8580

Sunny day today, wife and I completed some more H braces on the fence beside the greenhouse. Ran out of the crossbars we use, so I gotta hit up tractor supply tomorrow. Need about 3 more bags of concrete too. So tomorrow all the wooden posts and h braces needed for this fence and the two gates will be done and I get to start driving in T posts. Hmmm.... 975' at 12' intervals.... only about 80 of them.... should be a lot of fun.