Off The Grid

Conduit bodies

I of all people should have known better, but I left 8 or 10 of these kobalt 80v batteries on the shelf and allowed them to run down completely. Two had to be jump started so the charger would recognize them... briefly connect the dead one to a full one to boost it's voltage up a little bit. For the last week I've been cycling thru charging them. What I find is that they'll charge to "two bars" and stop. Well if you let them sit for 24 hours, the internal BMS balances the pack a little bit. Several iterations of this and I now have almost all of them showing 3 bars. It sure would be nice if they had a little bluetooth connection inside so you could see what's up with them, but for now, this is working. Charge, rest, charge, rest, charge, rest, charge full.

I still can't believe this.... 36kw available but not used.... 36kw... that's 150amps at 240v... just sitting "on the table".

One of the neighbors here is pulling a well pump today. Over winter the cabin wasn't in use, so his bro in law shut off the pump but didn't drain pipes. Recently bro in law turned on the pump and said something about hte water pressure was low but didn't check anything. Turns out a pipe had frozen thru the winter and hte pump was pumping 100% of the time. Now the pump burned up. So... replace your pressure switch with a low pressure shut off switch. As long as water pressure in house stays above 15 psi, the switch will cycle pump normally... but if pressure falls below 10psi, it trips off until manually reset.

This post is just for people using the mesasurement system that faked sending men to the moon. You SI people will roll your eyes I'm fencing and my rule is a post every 12ft or less. I've got to span a distance of 159ft... so 159 divided by 12ft between posts is 13.25. Lets round that UP to 14. I need 14 posts in the run. Now lets start over... 158ft / 14 posts in the run is 11.35ft . So space them about every 11 feet... what about the 0.35 portion? multiply that by 12 inches in a foot and you get 4.28inches. Good enough, call it 4 inches. So we should space the posts out at 11'4". In metric we'd space the posts at 3.5m and divide the run by 3.5.... and we'd already be putting posts in the ground. In the above example, the run is 48.6m / 3.5m gives us 13.88posts, round up to 14.... 48.6m/14posts = 3.47m between posts. done. By now I'm sure all the SI people are laughing the asses off. To my American brothers and sisters, gosh metric is too difficult.

It was finally time to take down those "temporary" shelters that we put up for the cattle this winter for the bad NC winter storm. Took us forever to put up, but they worked well to give the cattle some comfort and break off the wind. Now we need that space back for pasture. The tarps came from Harbor Freight and they were the biggest disappointment. Even though we got thr heavy duty version... they were not high quality at all. They were trash in just a few weeks out in the sun. Won't buy those again. Otherwise... the design worked really well and only took a few hours to disassemble. Of course... we had all 4 kids and my wife out helping... so that made it a lot easier.

If you are going to spend money on panels, which one of these would be there when you needed it after a storm? I am not a civil engineer... rule of thumb is you need 13lbs / sqft (60kg/m^2) to hold down panels. That weight includes the panels and racking... and the additional weight will be concrete.

How NOT to run conduit into your house. If you want water problems, do this. Water will run down that pipe and into you wall. You need a trap or drip loop... or a conduit T or L. Never directly in like this .

Public schools teach kids obedience to authority. Authority is often, but not always, a proxy to Truth. Truth is Truth even when it is diverges from Authority.

Ill fill up the last two totes tomorrow. Today's task was spreading the last of the lime all over thr yard nad running drip irrigators to stuff on other side of the greenhouse. So anyway, here's how we did the arches with cattle panels.