Off The Grid

By the way, if any of you have a remote cabin that you need to keep a very few things running at, consider a dedicated low power inverter. This one idles at 10w and can be used to run a fridge or keep a wifi camera going. Compare to a 10kw quattro invertter from victron that pulls 120w at idle. This little guy sells for about $350.

The neighbor's large system.... making 34kw, 2.7kw into the house, 10kw into the car and still has 21kw into the battery.

My kid sister is in the restaurant business. She called today and told me she's stumbled into a walk in cooler and freezer. You have to go through the fridge part to get to the freezer so you don't loose much cold air when you go into the freezer. wow... As stated before, we have an outer ring around the basement that's 8' wide and 9' high... I've been cleaning out the basement for just such a happy "find". woooooo.... have to see how this plays out. Imagine having a walk in cooler to hang meat on in your basement.

One of the locals here has finalized his system. 10kw diesel gen. 45kwp of solar panels. 36kw of 120/240. 80kwh of battery. He installed a wifi board in the generator for remote starting and data collection. The board is not directly compatible with home assistant but he wrote a screen scraper to import data into HA.

Well my "companion" dog, the stray that wandered up.... has always been really good with the chickens and goats. Today a goat got it's head stuck thru the fence and I saw him tugging like crazy on the goat's head. Now we have a goat with a bloody ear. Frankly I'm surprised the ear is still attached. I don't know if the dog was trying to pull the goat thru the fence to help it (ie misguided help) or was being dangerously helpful. I had a come to Jesus with the dog and just told my wife that no matter how much we love that little dog, if he does that shit again he's dead.

So today was warm and sunny. I spent the day moving dirt. trying to make a managable slope from teh field beside the greenhouse to the swale beside the greenhouse. I'm going to soon be putting up a 975ft 290m lenth of fence fabric. I needed to remove a lot of dirt today so I moved it down where the pasture has eroded into my pond. I put a 4" drain pipe in a little ditch I dug and built up about 30 tractor buckets of earth to fill in the grade around this drain. It'll drain into the pond now without eroding the earth. We'll get some rain this weekend and that should pack it down a little for me. Sorry, no pics today.

So... how good does solar work? That system we placed in service recently just had the power company come out and do a "wellness" check. The meter was read on the 8th remotely and 4 days later the power co comes out "randomly" to check on him. "How good does your solar work?" they sent a guy out to check my system 4 days after the monthly reading.

https://youtu.be/7Wr3iEAkB30?si=2i0-HDmbjSVpbjQ2