Along Came ....

I know I way past due for a blog entry. So many things have happened since my last blog it is hard to know where to start and also difficult to remember all the things I want to include in this entry. One of the reasons for the lack of blogging the past couple months has been because "Along Came A Spider", the first entry in my list of what has come along in the last few weeks. While the spider bite had me out of commission for a couple weeks, there is no excuse for the dry spell I have had on the blog other than once I get out of a routine, like regular blog entries, I often find it difficult to get back on track. So, lets start the list of "Along Came..."

1. ....A Spider
When we first moved to our property I was a bit paranoid about brown recluse spiders. I fear spiders in general, and the horror stories I have heard from people that have suffered through brown recluse bites made me very cautious when we first moved into the house. We bug bombed the house and also regularly applied 'spider spray' around the baseboards and window sills. And for a year we saw no brown recluse.

The site of the bite.

In the summer we have some harmless grass spiders make it into the house. These 'skitters' as I call them, are very similar in size and appearance to the brown recluse, but the grass spiders have two dark stripes going down the length of their body, while the recluse has the tell-tale violin shaped mark on their head. While I can identify brown recluse, you need to be fairly close to them to verify their markings. This August, on two occurrences, I found a spider in our home office that upon closer examination I determined to be brown recluses. So, after living in the house for over the year, I saw my first brown recluse in the house. So, we once again applied the periodic spider spray.

The spider bite on my temple caused
severely swollen lymph nodes .

About a month later. I woke up to find one side of my face was swollen and I could feel hard lumps that were my lymph nodes along my jawline. I also had a red lump on my temple on the same side of my face. There was no pain and I could not find a puncture from a stinger, so I did not think it was an insect bite or sting and I assumed was another swollen node. For a week, the swelling got worse but there was still no pain. I decided it was time for a trip to the clinic. The doctor was not sure what it was, but felt it may be shingles and prescribed medication that he said would take effect within 48 hours. That night  I had my first pain and discomfort and things went down hill from there. I had seen the doctor on Thursday, which meant the shingles medicine should have had me feeling better by Saturday afternoon. But, come Saturday, I was feeling even worse with body aches, chills and a temperature. I had a follow-up appointment on Monday at which the doctor stated that it obviously wasn't shingles, then consulted with another doctor in the office and they decided to send me to an ENT physician since my lymph nodes were so enlarged.

When I arrived at the ENT, he took one look at the spot on my temple and said it was a brown recluse bite. He put me on strong antibiotics and within a few days I started feeling better as the venom worked its way out of my system. Needless to say, I am once again paranoid about brown recluse spiders.


2. ....A Couple Horses
On a happier note, we did have a couple more friendly visitors one evening this past month. We got home after dark one night and discovered two horses in our yard. They were right next to our deck eating grass that had sprouted up from seeds the birds had knocked out of their feeders. These were probably two of the horses that had came out of the woods next to the houses and visited last year as you may recall from a previous post. I tried to entice the horses to stay the night by tossing carrots from the deck, but they moseyed on down the road, back toward their pasture. I guess this is an annual adventure for them.

3. ....Another Solar Panel

This is the first of the two Grape solar
panels now installed.

We are once again planning another upgrade (#6 below) and knew we should increase our solar power capacity to accommodate it. We are so pleased with our latest solar panel (the new Grape Solar we added to our array of Harbor Freight panels) we decided to add another Grape panel into our solar system. There was a friend in our Self-Reliance Group that was looking for a wood burning stove, and he happened to have a Grape panel he did not have in use. Since we had a 'spare' wood burning stove from our upgrade last January, we were able to swap for the solar panel. It was a breeze connecting it into the system, and with our current battery capacity we can actually utilize one more Grape panel which we hope to buy within the next few months.

4. ....A New Neighbor?

A new neighbor came to borrow a cup of wi-fi.

About a month and a half ago, I heard someone whistling and looked to see a man walking up the road in front of our house. I was not outside, so he did not see me, but he turned toward the house and said something that sounded like 'I helped build that house' and continued walking on. A couple days later, I glanced out the window and saw the same man standing on the road in front of or house. He kept glancing down at his hand and back up. After a few minutes we realized he was connecting to our wi-fi with his phone. (We had unlocked it when our kids were visiting and never bothered to lock it back up, because who wold be accessing it out here in the middle of nowhere? He then walked up the driveway and introduced himself .

He told us he was currently staying at the hunting cabin which is the next 'residence' north of us on our road. When we bought our property we had done some research and discovered that at one point two brothers split a 40 acre lot to create our 20 acres and the 20 acres north of us. One of the brothers built the house on our property while the other brother built the cabin to the north. He helped build our house (his uncle's at the time) and he had lived in the cabin on the property next door. He also said he was hoping to buy back the cabin which his father had sold quite some time ago. He told us the current owner said he could stay there while he, the owner, decided if he wanted to sell the property.

Well, we saw our new neighbor every few days for about the next month as he came and left from the cabin. We never heard from him on how the possible purchase of the property was going, but late one night there was a lot of yelling and commotion down the road at his place. We could not hear much of what was going on, but it did not sound good. Alan sat out on the deck in the dark with our shotgun in his lap for a couple of hours. The next day he stopped by to ask if we had heard the ruckus. He said some other neighbors had stopped by yelling, asking what he was doing on the property. We never found out if he actually had permission to stay on the property, but we stopped seeing him a few days after that and the owners came and locked the gate on the driveway.

5. ....New Shelves For My Canning Jars
I have been doing a lot of canning this fall and all my canned goods have taken over various storage areas around the house, both in the kitchen and in our guest room. I was working on some planes to build some sturdy canning shelves (remember my sturdy wood thingies from an earlier post?). Well, I am pleased to say I now have two very sturdy shelves for my canning jars and I did not have to engineer them from various scrap items.

I volunteer three days a week at a food pantry and they often get donations from various stores and business that are not food related. One day when I arrived there was a nice looking set of shelves that had been donated. My first thought was 'Wow, that would make a great set of canning shelves.' Before I said anything, the director asked if I could use any shelves, they had had quite a number of these donated from a local candle company that used these as display units in the stores that sold their candles. I explained how I canned a lot, and the director gave me two sets of the shelves. They were unassembled in boxes and very heavy, we had to pick them up in our big pick up truck to bring them home and then Alan graciously built them for me, which was not an easy job.

6. ....A New Refrigerator

The 'old' propane fridge.

Yes, we have performed another upgrade in our off-griddiness. You may recall that we were using a propane powered refrigerator. It looked like a small chest freezer and we hooked it up to a 40 pound propane tank which needed to be refilled about every 3 months. The fridge was adequate but had two downsides. (1) it was difficult to keep a steady temperature and it often became too cold and we ended up with a lot of frozen stuff in our refrigerator, including eggs. (2) We were dependent on going out to buy propane for its operation.

During some research time, Alan discovered information about using a chest freezer as a refrigerator. This seemed like a good off-grid solution because the freezer would be well insulated to hold its temperature and would run infrequently enough that we could power it through an inverter connected to our bank of batteries. Thus, we would have a solar powered refrigerator and would no longer need a supply of propane for refrigeration.

Our new fridge, powered by our solar system.
Note the clock in the upper right corner of the photo,
it is timing the actual 'run time'.

There were a couple of hurdles to overcome to put this plan into action:
(1) We would need more solar power being generated to add in the refrigerator. This was solved with #3 above.
(2) Chest freezers are not designed to be able to be set to temperatures above freezing. This was solved by adding in a brewer's thermostat which would control the power cycling.
(3) The freezer needed to run off the inverter (120 not 12 volt). This would mean the inverter would have to be on 24/7 to be ready for the fridge whenever it periodically starts up, which would be very inefficient. The solution was finding an inverter that remains off, but checks every few seconds to see if there is something demanding power (ie., the fridge), in which case it turns itself on.

With the new inverter and the added thermostat we now have a larger fridge that runs off our solar system. When we first set it up, we also installed a small clock in line with the fridge. This way, the clock only ran when the fridge was running so we could determine how much time the fridge was actually pulling power. At 8 AM we set the clock for 12:00. Throughout the day, we could check the clock to see how much time had elapsed on it, which was 3-4 minutes each hour. At 8 AM the next day the clock (and fridge) had run only about 1 hour and 15 minutes.

7. ....A Family Celebration
Once again we went back 'on-grid' for our annual Turkey Palooza - a fun, crazy time with family the week of Thanksgiving. I did enjoy taking some of my home canned meats and vegetables to include in some of our meals.

Thanksgiving Dinner with the family.

8. ....My Parents

My parents experiencing our off-grid life.
We moved their daily Yatzee game in front of the fire.

My parents came to Turkey Palooza and then came back with us to see our property and enjoy off-grid life. After a week at Turkey Palooza, they were able to stay with us for two weeks at our property. We had a great time, with only one slight damper, which brings us to...

9. ....A Winter Storm
I had told my parents that the average temperature for this time of year is in the 50s during the day and the 30s at night. Well, for the first two days we were in the high 60s, the next day was in the 50s and then we were hit by a winter storm. Freezing rain covered everything in ice, followed by sleet and 5 inches of snow. Normally all of this would have melted within a day, but we have been hit with another weather fluke and temperatures have not been above freezing for 6 days. As I am writing this we have been house bound for six days, schools have been closed since last Thursday and I just heard they are closed again tomorrow (Wednesday) so they will have been closed for an entire week.

Pumping water from the extra storage tank after
we shut off the gravity feed tank to the bathroom.
We had conveniently placed this extra water under
the storage room window!

There have been thousands of people without power, who have had no heat, lights, etc. for a week. One advantage to being off-grid is that nothing much changed for us. We went through more wood than usual for this time of year and we closed off our outside water tanks and carried water to the bathroom like we did 'in the old days' of last year so as not to have the water lines freeze, but we still had power for lights, TV etc.

Realizing that while the winter storm has thrown many people for a loop with the loss of 'modern conveniences', our off-grid life was barely impacted and this reinforces that we are reaching the goals we are striving for in self-reliant living.

 

A Trip Around Our Solar System

Our first solar panels, set up the day we moved onto
our property for charging our phones and laptops.
The Geek's Quad's first power station.

Our solar system has evolved and expanded over the past few years. We have added several panels to our solar system and have not downgraded any of them to non-panel status, although now I have the strong urge to name one 'Pluto'. While many readers know our alternative power source here at the Geeks' Quad is solar power, what many probably do not know is that, as with many projects we approach, we do not have your 'typical' solar system. The main differences are (1) we built it ourselves, component-by-component, at a fraction of the cost that solar companies sell installed systems for and (2) rather than convert the generated/stored power  to the standard 120 voltage used in houses, we set up our house to use 12 volts for almost everything. More on that later, let's start at the center of the solar system - the sun.

Our Harbor Freight array

As long as we have sunlight shining on our panels we are generating electricity. Solar electric panels are made up of numerous solar cells. A solar cell converts photons into electrical power through a chemical reaction. All light consists of particles called photons. When the material used to build a solar cell is hit with the photons that make up sunlight, the photons are absorbed and through a chemical reaction they release electricity. Each cell produces 0.5 volts of direct current (DC). Since each cell can convert 0.5 volts, a 36 cell panel can output 18 volts, and a 60 cell panel can output 30 volts.

Our first Grape Solar

We started out, 4 years ago, buying solar panel kits from Harbor Freight. At the time, these were the most cost effective. Each kit contains three 15 watt panels (45 watt total) for about $130. All solar panels are rated at how many watts they will produce. This rating number is based on a perfect test condition scenario, and you will not see your panels reach this perfect world production, but it is a good number to use when comparing panels. Divide the cost of  a panel by its wattage rating and you will have a cost-per-watt comparison to use when comparing panels. Back when we were buying the Harbor Freight panels they were $2.88/watt. Then, about 18 months later, another option became available from Grape Solar. The Grape Solar Panels are 265 watt panels that can be ordered at Home Depot for $370 ($1.39 per watt). We still use our Harbor Freight panels, but to compare them to our newer panels - all 18 of our Harbor Freight panels produce just slightly more power than just 1 of our Grape Solar.

Another Grape panel is added

With multiple panels (called an array), you need to decide if you are going to connect them in parallel, series or a combination of both. The deciding factor, especially in our case, is if the panels have any shadowing throughout the day. If all the panels are connected in series (one long chain) and a shadow falls on one of them the entire array stops producing power. If, on the other hand, the panels are connected in parallel and a shadow falls on one, the others will continue to produce power. At this point, you may be asking 'Why not always connect them in parallel?' I am not going to go into all the science, but in parallel, the current from each panel gets added together - more parallel panels means higher currents which means heavier wiring is required. Each parallel set also needs a pair of wires going from the array to where your system is being set up in your house.

When the array grew to four, we rotated the panels
so we could fit two vertically for a 2x2 grid.

Back to our specific situation. Our original Harbor Freight panels span the entire length of our south facing deck, about 30 feet. The length of this array and the fact that we sit low in a valley caused us to connect these panels in parallel. As the sun comes up in the morning the panels on the west side of the array can be lit for an hour or more before the panels on the east side of the array, and in the afternoon as the sun dips behind the mountain to the west the opposite shadowing occurs. If these panels were wired in series we would lose about 3 hours of power production from them each day as either end was still in shadows.

Our Grape Solars, which sit in our south garden (connected to the south deck) are arranged in a more compact block. We started out with just a single Grape panel, when we added a second we wired it in series because of the smaller footprint east-to-west, we did not need to worry about shadowing. When we expanded by adding two more Grape Solars we mounted the new ones below the two existing ones so the east-west footprint remained the same. We then had the opportunity to purchase two panels similar to the Grape's at a great price and those two made a third column of two which we added to the east side of the existing block of four (2 panels wide by 2 panels high became 3 wide by 2 high). 

With this third column, we started to notice a bit of shading on the newest column when the original four were fully lit as the sun topped the tree tops in the morning. I broached the question with Alan that we should experiment to see if there would be less shading if we moved the new panels to the west side of the original panels and thus it would catch shade in the afternoon rather than the morning. We mounted a panel sized piece of cardboard to the west of the panel array so we could compare the time we had shadowing on the new panels to time there would be shadowing on them if we moved them to where the cardboard was located.

While running the experiment, Alan came up with a completely different solution, since we had room for both the new panels as they were currently positioned on the east side of the array and the cardboard as a placeholder for panels on the west side of the array, we should just buy one more set of panels! (He had already done the calculations to determine what we would need to do to expand our system to handle the additional panels). At our next meeting of our self-reliance group, I was sharing this story and I just got to the part about how we were running the experiment to determine which side to place the panels on and two other guys, both with solar set-ups, said 'just add two more panels'. to which my reply was - it must be a guy thing. My experiment was to determine the optimal arrangement of our existing 6 panels, but somehow all three men, with no collusion, decided we needed to instead add two more panels.

Now there's a bunch of Grapes!

So, our most recent expansion, which was a few weeks ago was the addition of two more of the Grape panels. At this point, the east-west span of this array has expanded to the point that we decided to re-wire the panels in a combination of parallel and series connections. The eight panels are in a grid - 4 across by 2 down. Each vertical pair is connected in series and then each of these pairs is connected in parallel (from left to right) since we can have shadowing on either of the end pairs just as we do the Harbor Fright panels. In this way, as shadowing disables one pair of the 'Grape' panels at the beginning or end of our day the other 6 are still producing power. I can now run two dehydrators on sunny days and still have a fully charged battery bank by sunset. We still have a bit of tweaking to do with balancing some power draws, but we have been experimenting and we can even run an air conditioner on sunny days!

The beautiful MidNite Classic
with the amazing Whizbang Jr.!

Enough about solar panels, now that they are wired together, where does the wire go? The wiring is connected to a device called a charge controller. In our case, it is a thing of beauty called the MidNite Solar Classic 200.The charge controller is responsible for protecting your batteries from damage during charging. The batteries must not be charged with too much current, too much voltage, or over charged. The charge controller is also responsible for charging the batteries in the most efficient manner, wasting as little power as possible. And some charge controllers also protect the batteries from being too deeply discharged by automatically disconnecting the loads (lights, fans, radios etc.) when the voltage gets too low. The MidNite Solar charge controller has an optional accessory called the Whizbang Jr. (yep, that's its real name). Every amp of power that flows in or out of the battery bank goes through the Wbjr. The Wbjr measures all the current going into the battery bank during charging, and out of the battery bank when it's used, and it acts like the gas gauge in your car. Put gas into the tank at the gas station and the gauge goes up. Drive around and it goes down. That way you know how much gas is left in the gas tank. The Wbjr does the same for your battery bank, letting you know how much capacity is left at any given time. It has tons of features and Alan has access to all the data from his smartphone so we can check in on it when we are gone. 

The battery bank

From the charge controller the power can go directly to power devices we are using or into the battery bank to be stored for future use. Our battery bank consists of eight 6 volt 208 amp/hour golf cart batteries.Golf cart batteries are designed for slow power draws over long periods of time, which is what we are looking for in household use. If you connect batteries in series you increase the voltage (two 6 volt in series produce 12 volt). If you connect batteries in parallel you increase the amperage (those same two batteries connected in parallel would still produce 6 volts but for 416 amp/hours). With eight batteries to connect together in our battery bank we had a lot of options. However, the best choice is to not exceed two parallel strings of batteries.  Two will have a good balance when charging and discharging. Batteries have slight internal differences, called internal resistance. As you add additional parallel strings, these differences cause problems with equal charging and discharging. Therefore, we have two parallel strings of batteries - each string is 4 batteries in series. This means we have a 24 volt / 416 amp/hour battery bank. (6 volt x 4 batteries in series = 24 volts and 208 amp/hour x 2 parallel strings = 416 amp/hours).

Where it all comes together!

Enough of the math, actually there is never enough math, but that's my personal opinion. Here is a quick review: sunlight hits the solar panels and is converted to electricity, that electricity flows through wiring to the charge controller, from there power can be used directly throughout the house and all excess power is stored in the battery bank. If you have been following the numbers, you may have realized that something isn't right. In the beginning I said our house was wired for 12 volts,  but our battery bank is 24 volts. This is where the buck-boost converter comes in to play. The buck-boost can be set to a specified voltage to provide a more regulated service, or in our case it it can be use to step down the voltage from 24 to 12 volts. 

There is one other major device in our solar system - the inverter. This takes 12 volt DC from our batteries and outputs 120 volt AC. We only use this for one appliance in our house, the refrigerator which is a converted chest freezer but I will leave that story for another blog post. You may be thinking 'Wouldn't it be easier to run everything off the inverter, then the house would have normal 120 volt wiring?' We chose not to do this because of the amount of loss during the inversion process. You may recall that I stated we do not take the typical approach, the typical approach is to build a larger system, purchase a larger inverter and connect the inverter into you house's 120 electrical system. We wanted to change our lifestyle, design a system to meet our needs and realize one of our goals of self-reliance without breaking the bank.

So, how much did it cost? Ours has been a learning experience with several upgrades along the way. Below is an itemized list of the main components of our current day system. I have not included the Harbor Freight solar panels as they are such a small portion of our production capability now.

6 Grape Solar panels @ $370 ea. - $2200
2 Canadian Solar panels @ $232 ea. - $464
MidNite Solar Classic 200 Charge Controller - $695
MidNite Solar Whizbang Jr.- $45
8 Energizer GC2 232 amp hour 6 volt battery, four batteries at $85 ea  - $680
Samlex PST-1000-12 Pure Sine 1000 watt 12 volt inverter - $380 
Misc wiring, connectors - $500
Total= $4964

Our original system was under $2000 and was very adequate for meeting our needs, but as we have found with other areas of self-sufficiency, like water consumption, if more is available you tend to use it. One of our goals in setting up our own solar system was to provide an alternative energy source that did not require the sales pitch that every solar company out there seems to include include, which is 'and we'll provide the financing'. We proved we could set up a system for under $2000 and then over a few years expanded it to a more robust system for under $5000, not the typical cost of an installed system ($25,000-$35,000). 

And, in writing this post I have determined who Pluto is in our solar system. It is the Harbor Freight array. Now that we have eight of the Grape Solar style panels, and all of the Harbor Freights together equal about one more Grape Solar that would make them the 9th!

The Haves and the Have Nots

As we were returning from our trip up North I had a lot of questions, and a few anxieties, running through my mind about how the property had fared while we were gone. We have now been back just a bit over a week and I have put together a list of how things stand since my last post.

1. We have a new grandson.
We traveled to Wisconsin for the birth of our grandson, Connor. I have had the immense honor of being able to witness the birth of all four of our grandchildren. As Connor, like his sister, decided he was way to comfortable and did not want to go through the birth process, he was a born a week past his due date. This gave us about 10 days up North to visit with friends and family before we got to meet him. We then stayed another couple weeks after his birth before making the long trip back to the Ozarks. While I loved all that time playing with grandbabies and being able to visit with friends and family, there are always little niggling thoughts about things going on back at the property - bad weather, deer ravaging the garden, raccoons taking over the house....

They may not have taken over, but this raccoon
seems to think he is now part of the family.

2. Raccoons have not taken over the house.
Yes, my war with raccoons continues. We do not put out suets or bird feeders in the summer, but we did need to move the hummingbird feeders out of the trees and up onto the hooks we placed under the eaves this winter. The raccoons were imbibing on nectar each night, maybe we should have added some alcohol to see if they would get tipsy and fall out of the trees.

The south garden upon our return.
There was a couple of inches of water in the
pools holding the tomato containers.

3. We have had a lot of rain.
Right before heading North, I placed the items in my container garden into kiddie pools in hopes that any rains that came while we were gone would not only water the plants but also partially fill the pools so that the plants would also have water during dry spells. I avidly checked the weather conditions while away and was pleased how many times rain storms were forecast to pass over the Geeks' Quad during our hiatus. When we returned everything was well watered and had grown quite well in our absence. Unfortunately, since our return we have continued to get rain daily. This tilts our balance of sun to generate solar power and rain to replenish water supplies off kilter. Our water storage tanks are now full and we are 'throwing away' water with each new rain, while our battery banks are not getting completely recharged each day as they do in sunny weather. We did go three days in a row with totally overcast skies and our batteries were still not depleted to the point of having the charge controller shut down our power to protect the batteries from over-discharging, so it has been a good test.

4. We have a lot of ticks.
With all the wet weather we had this spring, we did not get to treat the property around the house with tick repellent before we left. As soon as we returned I made a quick trip around each of the three gardens to see how everything had survived (or if it survived) and just while walking through the 'yard' to the north garden I brushed two ticks off my arms. Ticks like to lay in way on weeds and trees and then drop onto you as you walk by. The two main gardens, North and South, have landscaping fabric completely covering the ground, so once inside the fences I am fairly safe against tick attacks, it is just the trips made to get to the gardens that are rampant with ambushing ticks.

The north garden also had lots of growth and few weeds.

5. We have a lot of plants growing in the gardens.
Yes, our gardens have done quite well while we were away. There were very few plants that appeared to be dug up and/or missing, so something must have crossed the barrier of putridness we had sprinkled around the garden fences, but it seemed to work well over-all. There were also very few weeds and they were easy to pull, that is one advantage to planting in raised beds. A few of the  vegetables are not as hardy or as plentiful as I had hoped. In particular, my pole beans are a bit sparse. I had started these indoors along with my tomatoes, cabbages, peppers and what-not, even though beans do not tend to transplant well and should be direct planted into the garden. However, with the time it was taking me to construct the North garden, I made the decision to try starting them inside and transplanting. While the beans that sprouted did seem to handle the transplant process, there was a very low rate of germination of the seeds compared to the other vegetables I started indoors. As I was planting the garden (transplanting everything) the day before we left, I decided to plant the little seed starter pots even if the beans had not sprouted yet. By the look of my bean beds, none of these late bloomers ever really bloomed, or sprouted for that matter.

Our first produce of the season.

6. We have not had much produce from the gardens...yet.
I have been able to pick a few handfuls of English garden peas. I was trying to time their maturation so that they would be ready to pick when we returned. The only problem is that this meant I planted them about a month later then is recommended for this area. They do not grow well in hot weather, so it is best to plant them in either early spring or late summer for best results.

Alan installing the ceiling fan.

7. We have a ceiling fan.
With the entire house being wired with a 12 volt system, it is on rare occasions a challenge to find electronics that are compatible. In most cases, as long as the appliance has a 'wall wart' - that little box at the end of the cord that has the electric plug built into it - it is a very easy conversion. The purpose of the wall wart is to step down the voltage in your typical home (120v) to the voltage the appliance actually uses, which in most cases is 12 volts. For example, we bought our television at Best Buy, it is meant to be plugged into a 120v wall socket. It had a wall wart at the plug end which then sent 12 volts to the television. We simply cut off the wall wart from the end of the cord and attached a typical two pronged electrical plug so that our 12 volt house system feeds directly into the television.

The majority of people who set up solar power systems actually use an inverter to boost their battery output (12 volts) up to the typical 120 volt household rating. In doing this they loose at least 20 percent of their power just in the inversion process. Then, by using 120v appliances they also use much more power inefficiently, especially since many items in the house need to have the power stepped back down, just take a look around and see how many items in your house have wall warts attached.

Okay, after that short digression, let's get back to our new ceiling fan. Our first summer here we picked up some table fans at Walmart that were actually stepped down to 12V in the manner I described above. We lopped of the end of the cords and replaced them with plugs we could plug directly into our wiring. These fans work great for an up-close breeze as we sit and work, but we have been wanting to get a ceiling fan to circulate the air in both the summer and winter. In the winter, the air near the ceiling is probably about 20 degrees warmer than that down where we are sitting, so it would be nice to be able to mix that in using the ceiling fan. Alan spent quite a bit of time searching and found ceiling fans that runs directly on 12V. It is extremely energy efficient and pulls only half an amp, which is very similar to what one of our light bulbs pull. The fan has summer and winter settings which change the direction of the air flow and it also has variable speeds. The speed control uses a nifty idea. Remember my discussion about how most people use an inverter to boost their power back up to 120V? Well, the speed control has a mini inverter, basically a circuit board on the back of the wall switch, that varies the power between 9V and 25V. By turning the speed control dial on the wall switch, you change the voltage which changes the speed at which the motor is rotating the fan blades.

8. We have not crossed everything off our to-do list.
When we first moved to the property, we had so many projects we had to prioritize them as to what needed to be done first. Now, we tend to add projects to the list as we discover new ideas and products that will enhance our off-grid life. When most people first learn we are living off-grid, they envision a glorified, or not so glorified, never-ending camping trip. As we describe to them all the amenities we have in our home they are usually surprised. Our original goal was not to be able to simply survive off grid, it was to set up a comfortable home in which we choose to be as self-sufficient as possible. That means providing power for all of our needs and desires, having a water supply that provides enough water to live comfortably, etc. Yes, some people may think we are roughing it in some aspects of our life, but it is always a challenge we enjoy. When we come across something we want to improve in our 'quality of living' we see that as another adventure in problem solving. It has been enlightening to look back and see how far we have come from that first night in the house with oil lanterns and just two solar panels providing power to charge our computers.

9. We have not missed the on-grid life. 
In all honestly, if you asked me at the beginning of this adventure if I was going to miss any creature comforts, I probably would have come up with a list of things I thought I would miss. Maybe a washer and dryer, possibly a freezer or my KitchenAid mixer, but after over two years, I must say I am totally content. In fact, when we do have to jump back into the grid life when we makes trips to Wisconsin like this spring, we actually find ourselves homesick for our off-grid life.

We are truly blessed to have this quirky life and to have not felt the need to lead a normal life.

It's BeginningTto Look A Lot Like Christmas

In my last post, you learned that for many years Thanksgiving is the holiday that we put all of our effort and enthusiasm into. However, with this being our first off-grid Christmas, and being down in the Ozark Mountains, Alan and I decided it deserved some effort as well. OK, to be honest we were just excited to see what we could come up with.

First, we wanted some outdoor lights so that all our neighbors could 'ooh' and 'aah' at our glorious display as they drove past our house. We found solar charged Christmas lights at Big Lots, one of our favorite shopping destinations. To the right is a picture of one of the chargers. Each box contained a 12 foot string of 50 LED C6 multi color lights, a charger and both a yard stake and a mounting clip for versatility. We chose to use the mounting clips to attach the solar charges to the deck rails. We purchased three boxes, so our outdoor display is an amazing 150 lights which stretch into a dazzling 36 feet of luminous beauty along our front deck.

The outdoor display during the day...

... and at NIGHT!!! OOH!!!!   AAH!!!!

Next came the tree. I had heard on the radio that there was a person that came to a nearby city (an hour away) every year to sell Christmas trees and I told Alan we should go there to buy our tree. Why there you may ask.... because this person brought his trees down from Wisconsin each year to sell them here in the Ozarks. So off we drove in Truck to get our Wisconsin Christmas tree. We pull into the the parking lot of the mini-golf course, which is where this tree sale is set up each year, and by the looks of the trees on display, you would have thought we had arrived on Christmas Eve rather than two weeks before Christmas. The available choices consisted of  four scraggly trees leaning up against each other in the middle of the lot and the workers were packing up their gear. They had sold out of trees already. So off we went to Lowe's to buy a tree from who-knows-where. While we were 'in town' I also stopped at Hobby Lobby to get some supplies for some special ornaments I wanted to make, more on these later.

Stringing the lights

We get the tree home, and first come the lights. We had also previously purchased Christmas lights for the tree at Big Lots. We had a box of 120 (two 60 light strands) of the small Italian style lights and a box of 60 larger lights that were the same conical shape as the lights in our wondrous outdoor light display. All of these sets were LED as well. Now these strings of lights were designed to be used in 'normal' houses with 'normal' outlets so we needed to plug them into one of our power inverters. Our wall outlets are 12V DC, the power inverter is plugged into the outlet and provides a 'normal' household voltage for the lights to plug into. Plug the first string into the power inverter and then add each string to the previous one just as usual.

Alan adds the tree top...

With the three strings illuminating our 7 foot Frasier Fir, we turned off everything else in the house (two ceiling lights at the time) and ran into the laundry room to see what the reading was on the charge controller. We wanted to know the amount of power our tree lights were pulling to determine how long we could bask in their beauty each day. I actually jumped for Christmas Joy when the load indicator displayed just 0.8 amps, which is less than running two of our overhead lamps. We can keep the tree lights on all evening - even all day if we do not have too many overcast days in a row.

A second rows of batteries (top shelf) have been added.

You may be familiar with the various television programs that are televised each Christmas season, the ones that show extreme Christmas light displays that people erect each year. Many of these shows include information on how home owners have had to re-do and expand the electrical feeds in their homes to be able to power these holiday monstrosities. Well, Alan must have had preconceived notions of our glorious display because the week prior to our Christmas decorating free-for-all he added four new batteries to our solar system which double our storage capacity.We now have just under 1,000 amp hours at 12 volts.

Earlier I mentioned the special ornaments I wanted to make for our tree. We had decided the tree itself should have a theme that reflects our new lifestyle, so I will finish off this blog with a display of photos of some of the ornaments on our tree. All of these represent various things that have entertained us here in the Ozarks:

Praying Mantis	Roadrunner
Deer	Walking Stick
Blue Tailed Skink	Pileated Woodpecker
Armadillo	Another Armadillo (we are partial to them)
Hummingbirds	Lantern that Alan creatively 'lit'

Our Tree At Night

Mr. Wizard's Workshop

Hello to all of Arlene's faithful readers! Let me introduce myself, I am Alan, Arlene's husband and partner in our off-grid adventures! First, let us apologize for it being so long since the last blog entry, we have been busy since that post, but with larger projects that take awhile to complete, such as painting the living room floor. Not very exciting to blog about. Plus, we have both been busier than usual with client projects.

Right now Arlene is busy getting ready for our annual 'Turkey Palooza'!!!! Each year, for quite a few years now, we have rented a large house for the entire family to gather for Thanksgiving. Often friends join us for at least part of the week's events, which includes LOTS of board games, 'Cheese Races', and an annual Food Network style cooking competition. We leave tomorrow morning to head back north to finish preparing, and won't be back 'off-grid' until the end of the month. So, with much to get done before we leave in the morning, Arlene asked me to take over the blogging for this entry. Without further ado, I give you Mr. Wizard's Workshop!

This entry will be some of my geek exploits, some successful, some not so much, but hopefully all entertaining.

What Lassie? Alan's phone is down the well?!!

 Ever since we got our well operational, I have wondered what was down there. Visions of giant caves, perhaps with dark unseen creatures, or veins of gold or diamonds ran through my head. Each morning I draw 3 to 5 buckets of water from the 120 foot well, and one morning something grabbed the bucket on its way back up! Shivers ran up my spine, expecting at any second a tentacle to writhe up from the well. Like a good fisherman, I lowerd the bucket a bit, then rapidly hoisted it up, trying to 'set' my catch. But alas the bucket rose without further problem, guess it just snagged on the side of the well casing.

So my curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to take my brand new Samsung Galaxy SIII phone and strap it to the bucket and lower it into the depth of the well while in video record mode. Yes, a risky plan, but the rewards could be astronomical! Arlene thought it brilliant too (once she stopped laughing), or at least that is how I interpreted the look she gave me.

The video is long, about 10 minutes, just to get to the bottom. I shot a faster descent, but it was just a blur. I believe that the resulting video would be fascinating to a geologist, but not so much to the rest of us. The first few minutes is a nerve rattling view of the sides of the plastic well casing, such drama! At one point you will even be gifted with a view of a seam where two sections join together! And then, oh my goodness, its hard to speak of it, ROCK! In all its hideousness, the rest of the video looks just like I imagine my colonoscopy  would look like. Unless I had told you where I had actually sent my phone, well, you would think it was someplace else. Watch for some of the denizens of these depths; at one point I thought I saw some yellow snails, probably poisonous, and I think a dead fly too. And once you see the ooze pouring down the sides of the well, like some beast leaking its life fluids, you will wonder how we drink this stuff. The answer is lots of filtering.

My dialog has to have your anticipation at an all time high, so here is the video!

 Oh, did I mention the bucket spins a bit?

I rode my bicycle past your... well, nowhere actually.

Do you remember this  from Gilligan's Island?
The professor built a stationary bicycle connected to a generator so that Gilligan could pedal and make power for their radio.







Well, we have one too! Bought a kit from pedalpowergenerator and a cheap 15 speed bike from a thrift shop. And then made a fun video:

Notice how my new bike was going nowhere fast, on a trip all by itself? You have probably seen electric powered bicycles for sale. Sort of like a battery powered moped. Just add an electric motor, connect it to a battery through a throttle, and viola!, you have an electric bike! But in this case that does not accomplish much, I want to put power INTO the batteries, not take it OUT! If I could jump on the bike quickly enough, and get my feet racing fast enough to catch up with the pedals, then pedal faster, well then all would be good. More likely I would kill myself. So a trip to civilization and a Radio Shack was needed to get a hefty sized diode.

A diode is an electronic valve for DC circuits, it will allow electricity to flow only in one direction, apply positive voltage to the side without the band, and it goes right through. Apply it to the other side and it is blocked. Adding this between the bike generator and the batteries prevents the battery power from getting to the generator and running it like an electric motor. You see, there is no difference between a DC motor and a DC generator, same device; apply power and its a motor, spin it manually and its a generator. So here is how it is supposed to work!

 A Watched Pot DOES Boil!

Now that we have a propane stove, it is very convenient to boil up water for coffee or tea. But we still need to be economical on our propane use. So I decided to compare our options to see which used less gas. We have a tea kettle, a basic pot with lid, and a Kelly Kettle.The Kelly Kettle is an aluminum chimney with dual walls that operates like a rocket stove.As the heat is drafted up the chimney, it gets lots of contact with the aluminum and heats the water. While designed for use with an open fire, I had high hopes it would work well on a stove top. 

Now for the results:

Even using a tin cup to trap the heat in the chimney, the Kelly Kettle was a poor choice. The pot was almost as fast as the tea kettle. So, if inquiring minds wanted to know, tea kettles win!

Side note: I also tested the Kelly Kettle using its intended open fire (wood scraps) against the tea kettle that was being heated with another small rocket stove. The Kelly Kettle again lost the race.

Eureka! A light goes off! (or on...)

Most solar electric systems that you may come across have a common feature; the storage batteries connect to a device called an inverter, which converts the 12 volts of DC power into the same thing you find in most homes, 120 volts of AC power. The reason for this is that most people really like all the AC devices and appliances they grew up with, and do not want to give them up. 

But... inverters are very inefficient. A lot of the solar power that was stored is lost in the conversion process. So Arlene and I made an early decision. While we do also have an inverter, it is for extrememly limited use, only for situations where we can not find an alternate means of doing something on 12 volts DC. Otherwise, every electrical device we have runs on 12 volts DC, directly off of our batteries (well, okay, through our charge controller to protect the batteries from being depleted too far). Our television runs on 12 volts. Our laptops, printer, and computer monitors all run off 12 volt DC-to-DC power converts. And, the point of this section, all of our lights run off of 12 volts DC.

We wanted to use the existing light fixtures and wall switches in the house, so we needed 12 volt DC light bulbs with standard screw in bases. Fortunately the RV industry comes to the rescue, since RVs are all powered by 12 volt DC batteries. There are three choices: incandescent, compact florescent, and LED.

Obviously we want our stored power to last as long as possible, nothing worse than suddenly finding yourself in the pitch dark because you used too much power. That brings us to the topic of power vs. light.

Most people think of the brightness of a lightbulb based on its wattage. This is because during the majority of the life of electric lighting we only had one usual choice, the incandescent  lightbulb. The amount of power that a bulb used, measured in watts, is what your electric bill is based on, the more watts you use, the higher your bill. And the more power, or watts that are used by a light bulb, the brighter it shines. So people got used to measuring the brightness of a light bulb in watts. Technically wrong, but it worked for so long.

Now that we have options, we need a way to compare apples to cumquats, of incandescent  to LED or compact florescent. Next time you are at the home improvement store, look at the package on a compact florescent bulb, you will see it hyping how few watts it actually uses, and then say its brightness  as compared to an incandescent bulb. Notice that the bulb in this pictures is 'as bright' as what you would expect a standard incandescent 100 watt bulb to be, but it only actually uses 23 watts.

So, for our 12 volt solar system, we know that we want the brightness to be what we are used to, but we also want the actual power consumption to be as low as possible. 

While we could use 12 volt incandescent bulbs, we won't because they are so inefficient and use so much power. Leaving us to choose between compact florescent or LED. LED have a few advantages; they are not fragile, contain no mercury, last very long, and light instantly and do not need to warm up. Turns out they are also much more efficient in power usage.

Now, not all LEDS are created equal. We visited a few alternative energy shows/expos and researched a lot. Early and easily obtainable 12 volt DC screw in light bulbs pull almost the same amount of power as the compact florescent bulbs. But, advances in LED design have resulted in some very efficient  products. Finding them is the hard part, so let me save you some time... LCLED.com sells two bulbs that we highly recommend, a 75 watt equivalent bulb and a 50 watt equivalent bulb.

 Here is how they compare:
   Compact florescent - 60 watt equivalent uses 15.6 watts of electricity.
   LED - 75 watt equivalent uses 7.2 watts of electricity.
   LED - 50 watt equivalent uses 4.8 watts of electricity.

On our single bulb fixtures we usually go with the 75 watt equivalent bulbs, and on our 2 and 3 bulb fixtures usually the 50 watt bulbs.

Well, I hope you have enjoyed your visit to Mister Wizard's Workshop, thanks for letting me be your guest blogger today!