Added 25 miles of range to my car's battery today on #offgrid solar power. Gonna be able to stop using public fast chargers except on road trips.

(in december, when maybe I'll want a little more power)

this is not the end of my solar install.. it's the end of the beginning. I have 20 more panels and the solar fence was designed to also be the backbone power distribution system for my ballasted ground mount arrays

so much wheelbarrowing gravel up a hill lies ahead

solar fence is fully working and charging my EV #offgrid!

oh the wires I've managed today

Completed connecting all wires for my #solar fence, which took 6 hours today.

I've only turned on 4 solar panels so far but already getting this interesting graph.

finished 3 days of pulling wire for solar array

soon my pretties...

wire pulling day to #solar array.

successfully pulled four 6 AWG guage wires thru a 1" PVC conduit with 2 sharp 45s (oops) and some other 90 degree sweeps

with quite a lot of difficulty, and help

my tasks for the day include reviewing some long machine-translated contracts, and fighting with tree roots inside a trench

which first? decisions, decisions

"A large, bright, white ball in the sky is providing warm rays of
light"

-- beginning of my current NWS forecast sums it up pretty well

Wired up the panels on the #solar fence up to the combiner boxes. And a little wire management.

Unfortunately before conduit comes more trench digging, since I am also running a power line to the woodshed to charge my EV, and its trench will fork off from the solar array.

Hung the last panels on the #solar fence yesterday. Conduit next.

My dad in South Carolina just got power back after Helene knocked it out.

5 days without power, and so without running water because they have a well.

I imagine it was especially grating that he had a 6 kw solar array sitting idle the whole time. Probably time to improve that so it can run offgrid.

First article I've seen on the #Helene flooding that mentions the catastrophic floods in eastern Kentucky in 2022. https://archive.is/5gSB0

I live halfway in between the epicenter of those of these climate change boosted floods and it's very hard to not imagine it happening here.

Bonus: Spot the nuclear fuel decommissioning site in the upper-right of the photo.

Ringing endorsements on google maps for it include: "Good employer, meets or exceeds National regulations concerning discharges into the nearby river."

If you wonder why they put that IN A FLOOD PLAIN, well lots of environmentalists in this area have been wondering the same for years.

Here's the destroyed bridge plus still good bridge for context.

TNDOT did suggest, in their news conference yesterday, that this is a major priority, and that they are doing some unusual things with contracting out the work to get it started very quickly.

This is interstate 26 in Erwin south of the destroyed bridge. TNDOT has not publically said how they plan to get 26 open again to #Asheville, but this work clearing a frontage road, plus the still usable bridge in the background suggests to me they'll detour it thru Erwin, over that bridge, and reconnect back to 26 just before it ascends into the mountains.

#Helene #NC

finished trench for solar array conduit

combiner boxes installed

getting real

been doing the #offgrid low battery limbo with Helene's weather system

finally seeing blue sky this evening and hoping for some more tomorrow

heard from family in Asheville, they're ok

Damascus, Boone, Elizabethton, and Roan Mountain (not on the mountain) are all towns I like to visit that have been seriously flooded.

Some of the flooding around here. This road to Asheville in Ewrin TN will be closed for some time.

Still waiting to hear from family in Asheville.

trenching in conduit for my solar fence this weekend

attended the Haskell Symposium yesterday, today will be All Systems Go

(in specific cases where it would be me vs a large corporation... such as Apple, which develops cups)

getting both a tornado and a tropical storm in the same week, while living in neither tornado alley nor anywhere near an ocean

gonna be day two mostly offline to conserve power, wish my solar fence were operational already, also hope it's not blown over by the 60 mph winds forecast for here

continuing to just not disclose security vulnerabilities I know about because the security community is toxic, "responsible disclosure" is a loaded term which demands work I refuse to do, etc

disappointed in the pileon over cups

not the memes, but the bad faith takes

tornado touched down about 3 miles from here yesterday in a big storm

I noticed all the leaves that blew down, it was like fall descended all at once here. But wow, I had no clue.

working smarter not harder today... made the #gitAnnex simulation be able to simulate the essential part of clusters without simulating any of the details of how clusters work

15 lines of code for the whole thing, nice

sleepy solar #caturday

taking a day off

I actually can't remember the last time I did this

(Ok, still gonna shuffle 10 solar panels around on the porch so I can set up the porch swing again, and gotta cover up the wires on the new array before it rains, still basically a day off!)

The US has 238 million square feet of billboards.

Anyway I'm just imagining if the 3/4th of them that don't face north were converted to solar panel vertical mounts.

That would be around 2500 megawatts of power. Around 5 coal power plants worth. Just sitting there built and fully ready to slap some #solar panels onto.

Seems like an eminently good idea to me.

feeling pretty freaking healthy right about now like these 40's are bananas

By the way, the work balance on this thing was 70% digging holes, 10% concrete, and 10% everything else. And I still have to trench in the conduit urk.

Oh yeah, the fence is gonna be 2 panels longer than shown, but I seem to have had a well, a fencepost error. I am short 4 bolts needed to mount the last 2 rails.

End for now.

9/9

These panels cost $100 each. The fence costs about $110 per panel. It is very hard to get mounting for solar panels cheaper than panels these days. Even in America with our inflated solar panel prices.

I have 20 more panels that won't be on this fence. Some will be on powerrack ballested ground mounts, in the area in front of this fence. Those cost around $110 per panel too. They will be pointed more at February than December.

8/

Worst case, I can repurpose most of the Ironridge hardware for a roof mount or some more conventional ground mount if this experiment doesn't work out. That's one benefit with going with that system for this.

I did look at using eg unistrut, and it was just about as expensive, and the panel fastening options are much less good.

This costs about the same as a roof mount, obviously. Gound mount designs I tried came in considerably more expensive (and used considerably more concrete).

7/

Other major design concern is that the Ironridge fasteners are not really designed to be used vertically, though they surely are designed to prevent panels from sliding out at a 45 degree angle. I added some additional support brackets at the bottom.

6/

Using treated wood plus aluminium was a major concern for this design, since they don't mix well. I used hot dipped galvanized bolts of course, and I flashed in between the posts and the brackets, and I hope that will be good enough for it not to corrode.

The fence is not currently braced, but it will need to be, and my plan is diagonal bracing in the rear going down to some short posts. Maybe in the front too, TBD.

5/

I found 7 foot long Ironridge rails for cheap, and shipping those is much simpler than regular length 14 foot rails. Also the shorter segements allowed me to navigate the uneven terrain better, and angling segments will increase the duration the fence is gathering some good light.

The rails were however, just barely long enough to fit 2 panels. Panels keep getting bigger..

These are Aptos 370 watt panels by the way, up 480 watts bifacial. So it's a 4kw array.

4/

And while my panels are bifacial, the fence is south-southwest facing and a mountain will block morning light too, so I didn't care about blocking the back of the panels some with rails and posts. Which simplified the design.

(The fence is aimed straight at December, about which more in some later thread..)

Treated wood posts in concrete in a sunny location should last 25 years I hope? If not, it was only a week of pain to dig the 3.5 foot holes.

3/

Solar fencing manufacturers have some good simple designs, but it's hard to buy for a small installation. They are selling to utility scale mostly I think right now. Also those are installed by driving metal beams into the ground, which requires heavy machinery, which would be quite hard to get to this location.

So, since I have experience with Ironridge rails for roof mount solar, I decided to adapt that system for a vertical mount. Which is something it was not designed for..

2/

Put up most of the panels on my #solar fence!

This is an experimental diy design, for my offgrid house. Thread will have some of the design details.

1/

The car sales company contracted with some other company to handle fullfillment of this plate. Their communications were careful to never mention the name of that other company.

The American corpo-religious-state has issued me this license plate for my new car. I did not ask for their "god" to be included, indeed I think this inclusion of it violates some of their founding documents. But presumably the corporate charter decrees otherwise these days.

Anyone have a "$$$$$" decal I can use?

Solar fence getting there. Last post.

Almost tempted to spend $35 to get home depot to roll a truck in order to drop off 8 small nuts and lock washers as if it were a load of construction supplies. Which for some reason unknown to anyone their website refuses to ship in a regular parcel. It would be an interesting conversation that's for sure.

In reality: Local family run hardware store wins again.

digging last hole for solar fence, nicked my buried water line from the cistern. yaaay

all fixed now, glad I have cutoff valves, pity I didn't label anything

My #gitAnnex simulation now supports concurrent actions, which uses the random seed so the result is deterministic even when conflicting actions race.

Hmm, "action foo dropunwanted while action bar getwanted foo" is getting a bit more like a programming language than I really planned for.

Back to work on solar fence today, got up 2 more posts and 1st two solar panels. 3 posts to go.

It has a pretty nice syntax for specifying how repositories are connected:

connect foo <- cluster -> bar <-> foo
connect node1 -> cluster <- node2
connect node3 -> cluster <- node4

I really like how this allows you to visit a simulated repository and look around. Of course no files are actually present even if git-annex says they are.

My first real use case for the sim is to build complex networks of repositories with different preferred content settings, and simulate how files will flow between them.

I've built a simulation of #gitAnnex in 1000 lines of code, or about 1% of its total size. It can reproduce a lot of git-annex's behavior, without actually bothering with real files.

Lots of uses for this, even if just to see what it would be like to have a repo with a very huge file in it.

On my 1st real electric road trip and it has turned into peak america road trip.

After stretching from home to a 11% battery arrival at the 1st charger, it turns out London KY has an active shooter manhunt situation.

Had to charge tho so dropped a quick 50% in the battery and headed up to the next fast charger..

At Buckees, and yes this is a tour group to this massive gas station.