Ticks cannot fly, they cannot jump,
and they crawl slower than a snail.
Yet, they somehow “outbreak”
across thousands of miles of
different states in the exact same
week.
They aren’t migrating through the
woods; they are being delivered.

When we built this ICF house, we used a bunch of 2x12's for walkboards on the scaffolds. We also had a bunch of concrete blocks left over. Turns out those make great shelves. We put a set of concrete blocks every 6' and made shelves that cover the length of one basement wall.

Poor fella....

I'm about to have a change of heart on something. Two houses around here are overpaneled by 3x. My system is overpanelled by 1.7x. The other two systems have routinely hit 100% battery each of the past 4 days. My system has NOT hit 100% in 5 days. Love the rain, but it's keeping me from charging. My battery has been anywhere from 20% to 60%.

My change of heart is this: The solar panels are the cheapest part of the system, get lots of them. You simply can't have too many. One of my inverters is rated at 6kw and I've got almost 11kw of panels connected to it. That's fine because it only takes what it needs. And if it is cloudy, it still makes full power.

So... I've played the math where you have more and more batteries so you can make it thru the poor production days. As you approach 99% uptime the number of batteries you need to get each 1/10th of a percent goes up exponentially. On the other hand if you have an overwhelming number of panels and you can hit 100% battery each day, who cares how much battery you have!

The rule is you put panels in series until you reach your inverter's Voc limit (450v...500v...600v). For most 550-600w panels that will be 8 panels. Now you just add groups of 8 panels in parallel. If you have two strings of 8 you simply connect them in parallel. If you have 3 or more in parallel, you must fuse each string. A side from that, just add panels until your system can't help but make 100% each day.

Here is my SoC for hte past 5 days or so.

and for comparison here is a neighbor's system with 200% overpanelling. He hits 100% every day so it doesn't matter that he doesn't have as much battery as I do.

If you're not growing, breeding, or putting away food already, please go buy food sooner than later. Like today.

Seriously. Go buy food. Cans, bags, whatever. Just go buy food.

Sell things if you need to. Trust me. Get some food put away.

For your information. Tune in next week when we discuss green tip 556 and blue helmets.

Well it's finally happened. The NRCS and USDA have decreed that round hay bales will be illegal to make. They will no longer provide farmer's funding for any round bale equipment. Colton L. Buckley, Chief of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service issued a statement On April 1, 2026 saying he was concerned that livestock could not get a square meal.

So for hte last several days wife has taken off work and we're cleaning out the outer ring of the basement...... and a juvenile hawk has been killing one chicken a day. I can't sit outside and watch them becuase i'm in the basement. Damn it all.

I bring this up periodically. We're all adults here and that often means adult oriented topics. Ladies, how are you prepped for your monthlies? What about your daughters? Have you looked into silicon menstrual cups? Or do you have other solutions?

Consider me "Sgt Schultz"... I know notzing... just bringing up a topic that probably needs brought up.

The neighbor with a victron system built it into a shipping container that has a roof over it. Problem is that the afternoon sun shines on the walls and heats it up. The inverters are rated to run at upto 120F and the room was getting into the high 90s. He installed a small window shaker airconditoiner inside and we noted that the air cond setpoint was 75 and the temp in the room was 64. So the temperature probe for the victron was off 10F.

I had him soak the probe in icewater and at 32F it read 26F. I was able to calibrate it remotely by adjusting slope and offset at 32 and 98 (temperture of his mouth).

Lesson learned... not all temperature probes are calibrated correctly. The other 3 that he was were fine. Also, since the victron is natively in celcuis, it's best to do calibrations in C and then switch back to freedom units.