good morning

 click for video

 listen to me sing

After 9 months, I am back to filling ballasted #solar ground mounts with gravel. Half way done with them all at this point, and hoping my 4 ton gravel pile makes it to the end.

Only some minor leveling and I'll be ready to start filling my #solar ground mounts with gravel.

I started clearing this area to extend my solar field in the spring, it's been a long process.

my spring is running again, whew

 https://youtu.be/2aRTiVFQi9Mhttps://youtu.be/2aRTiVFQi9M

For #SunDay, I'm posting the design of my DIY solar fence

https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/cheap_DIY_solar_fence_design/

A year ago I installed a 4 kilowatt solar fence. I'm revisiting it this Sun Day, to share the design, now that I have prooved it out.

The solar fence and some other ground and pole mount solar panels, seen through leaves.

Solar fencing manufacturers have some good simple designs, but it's hard to buy for a small installation. They are selling to utility scale solar mostly. And those are installed by driving metal beams into the ground, which requires heavy machinery.

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. I combined the Ironridge hardware with regular parts from the hardware store.

The cost of mounting solar panels nowadays is often higher than the cost of the panels. I hoped to match the cost, and I nearly did. The solar panels cost $100 each, and the fence cost $110 per solar panel. This fence was significantly cheaper than conventional ground mount arrays that I considered as alternatives, and made a better use of a difficult hillside location.

I used 7 foot long Ironridge XR-10 rails, which fit 2 solar panels per rail. (Longer rails would need a center post anyway, and the 7 foot long rails have cheaper shipping, since they do not need to be shipped freight.)

For the fence posts, I used regular 4x4" treated posts. 12 foot long, set in 3 foot deep post holes, with 3x 50 lb bags of concrete per hole and 6 inches of gravel on the bottom.

detail of how the rails are mounted to the posts, and the panels to the rails

To connect the Ironridge rails to the fence posts, I used the Ironridge LFT-03-M1 slotted L-foot bracket. Screwed into the post with a 5/8” x 3 inch hot-dipped galvanized lag screw. Since a treated post can react badly with an aluminum bracket, there needs to be some flashing between the post and bracket. I used Shurtape PW-100 tape for that. I see no sign of corrosion after 1 year.

The rest of the Ironridge system is a T-bolt that connects the rail to the L-foot (part BHW-SQ-02-A1), and Ironridge solar panel fasteners (UFO-CL-01-A1 and UFO-STP-40MM-M1). Also XR-10 end caps and wire clips.

Since the Ironridge hardware is not designed to hold a solar panel at a 90 degree angle, I was concerned that the panels might slide downward over time. To help prevent that, I added some additional support brackets under the bottom of the panels. So far, that does not seem to have been a problem though.

I installed Aptos 370 watt solar panels on the fence. They are bifacial, and while the posts block the back partially, there is still bifacial gain on cloudy days. I left enough space under the solar panels to be able to run a push mower under them.

Me standing in front of the solar fence at end of construction

I put pairs of posts next to one-another, so each 7 foot segment of fence had its own 2 posts. This is the least elegant part of this design, but fitting 2 brackets next to one-another on a single post isn't feasible. I bolted the pairs of posts together with some spacers. A side benefit of doing it this way is that treated lumber can warp as it dries, and this prevented much twisting of the posts.

Using separate posts for each segment also means that the fence can traverse a hill easily. And it does not need to be perfectly straight. In fact, my fence has a 30 degree bend in the middle. This means it has both south facing and south-west facing panels, so can catch the light for longer during the day.

After building the fence, I noticed there was a slight bit of sway at the top, since 9 feet of wooden post is not entirely rigid. My worry was that a gusty wind could rattle the solar panels. While I did not actually observe that happening, I added some diagonal back bracing for peace of mind.

view of rear upper corner of solar fence, showing back bracing connection

Inspecting the fence today, I find no problems after the first year. I hope it will last 30 years, with the lifespan of the treated lumber being the likely determining factor.

As part of my larger (and still ongoing) ground mount solar install, the solar fence has consistently provided great power. The vertical orientation works well at latitude 36. It also turned out that the back of the fence was useful to hang conduit and wiring and solar equipment, and so it turned into the electrical backbone of my whole solar field. But that's another story..

solar fence parts list

$1100 total

(Does not include cost of panels, wiring, or electrical hardware.)

(he felt he needed it to get up here; I mars rover my car up the driveway these days thanks to EV torque and traction control)

yesterday: Sausage tteokbokki with lithuanian black rye bread

today: dude in a side-by-side offering his dog a sip of beer while parked in front of my woodshed/solar EV charging station

Drat, Amazon's supply of RS485 to USB adapters has been de-adulderated, so rather than the knockoff that works perfectly with in-kernel drivers, they are again selling the genuine part that needs an unmaintained out of kernel driver.

Buying from Aliexpress instead..

Sad to see that http://bugs.debian.org/773619 has been closed unfixed with a bullshit reason of a package being supersceded (by a new package with a different name but same code base).

Fixing this bug would be a quality of life improvement even for people not cooking cornbread over wood coals.

Anyway, message received, I'll limit my bug reports on firefox in Debian to things that full-on violate the social contract.

Confirmed no leak in my buried water line with a pressure test.

So I have two water tanks, each 6 years old, each leaks about 7 gallons/day. At least removing 1 tank solved half the leak..

Starting what I hope will be my last water leak test. Draining the water tanks, then I will check water pressure in the house, which will be the water pressure of the pipe going up the hill. If the pressure stays the same for a day, the pipe is likely not leaking.

Took me too long to think of this easy test, I even already have the pressure guage in place for it.

(A leak near the very top of the pipe run or in the manifold connecting to the tanks won't be fully ruled out.)

After removing one of two water tanks from my water system, the leak seems to be about 7 gallons a day. It was 15/day before.

So possibly both tanks are equally leaky? But I have not been able to rule out a leak in the buried water line due to a bad valve.

seeming very possible I have both a leaking water tank *and* a leaking buried water line. aaaaagh

I should probably not be able to dig sand out from under my water tank and make a sand ball it's so wet, huh

Confirmed my water system is leaking. 10 to 15 gallons per day, which is eating through my water reserves pretty quick.

I've turned off the valve to the underground pipe to check if the leak is in the 550 gallon water tanks or the pipe. I'm pretty sure it's one of the tanks, which has noticably damper ground around it than the other.

contemplating bisecting a problem... but the problem is possible water leak in my water system

AI generated make uninstall target guy has made a blog post about it, so I guess I'll stop obscuring his identity. https://therealtruex.com/posts/Dont-use-make-uninstall

(the blog post was almost certainly composed with AI and is likely incoherent)

What could possibly go wrong

firewood delivery day!

wood guy complimented my solar fence and I told him about offgrid EV charging

My guess is that's a case of is people badly explaining things on social media and not very accurate.

The Author's guild describes the reason for needing registration as this being a statutory damage award (since this is a class action), and the Copyright act only allowing that for registered works. https://authorsguild.org/news/what-authors-need-to-know-about-the-anthropic-settlement/

copyright question: Apparently the Anthropic book piracy settlement only applies to books whose copyright has been registered with the copyright office. And I've seen that explained as copyright registration being required in order to bring any court action against infringers.

AFAIK most free software copyrights are the automatic kind, not registered. Which would be a problem if this were true wouldn't it?

"I will talk to the grass and the rock. They stopped here too." - JS

I'm 99% sure that the script he used to do it was generated with AI. It was buggy as well.

astonishingly, the AI spammer guy then proceeded to add me to his mailing list

domain killfiled

I've been checking github to see how other projects reacted to the LLM generated Makefile uninstall targets.

2 projects rejected the patches so far.

One of the patches was merged so far out of the 16 I found. Rest TBD.

33% success rate spamming unreviewed code that deletes whatever random files a LLM hallucinates is pretty good odds I guess if your goal is to get your name out there.

wrote back linking to my update to my global gitattributes file, which will now flag every commit from this person as likely LLM slop no matter where I stumble over them

For what it's worth, the make uninstall target is unncessary in any project that supports DESTDIR in its Makefile. Even w/o a package manager, you can use `make install DESTDIR=foo` and then list the files in foo, and delete the same files from the root filesystem. This could be automated by a small shell script. (And then you have a package manager.)

I would refuse to add such a target on that basis alone, since it adds extra maintenance burden.

received 4 different versions of a patch by email adding an uninstall target to the same Makefile.

When I wrote back, it became clear they were polishing their response via a LLM. And at the end, they outright admitted this:

> I used AI to automate adding the uninstall targets for hundreds of repos. So sorry about the problem and extra email.

went to put on my boots and there was something in one

shook it out, and out came an hourglass

message received!

CW 11

I like to wake up early and listen to the crickets out my window

I relish the silence, even the sound of a car going by seems somehow natural

at this time of day. People may be rushing to get started but the sounds

feel more calm but still electric in their exciting possibility.

The air smells crisper.

It is during this time when I like to sit and write.

How is the meaning of Contemplative Writing different for me this morning?

The sense of wonder is alive.

Knowing I don’t know, but wonder means I still pursue the wisdom.

CW is meaning the process for me.

It finally sinks in that it is not a style of writing but a way.

oh bother, little bobby tables vibe coded a git clone again