My kid sister is in the restaurant business. She called today and told me she's stumbled into a walk in cooler and freezer. You have to go through the fridge part to get to the freezer so you don't loose much cold air when you go into the freezer. wow... As stated before, we have an outer ring around the basement that's 8' wide and 9' high... I've been cleaning out the basement for just such a happy "find". woooooo.... have to see how this plays out. Imagine having a walk in cooler to hang meat on in your basement.

The neighbor's large system.... making 34kw, 2.7kw into the house, 10kw into the car and still has 21kw into the battery.

By the way, if any of you have a remote cabin that you need to keep a very few things running at, consider a dedicated low power inverter. This one idles at 10w and can be used to run a fridge or keep a wifi camera going. Compare to a 10kw quattro invertter from victron that pulls 120w at idle. This little guy sells for about $350.

Well it is a beautiful day and we got one of the neighbor's sons to come over and help put cover on the greenhouse. First thing was the wind started blowing the plastic against the side of the house increasing friction. Several trips up and down the center line of the green house in the tractor bucket and we go it.

So now I'm trying to square it up on the green house and stretch end to end before we pull teh sides down taught. ...and a long sustained gust of wind rips the plastic right out of the wiggle wires on the ends. We managed to shift the fabric around a little and got the wiggle wire back in the ends. Some more of neighbors sons showed up to help.... and we got it pinned down good enough to hold until there's no wind this evening.

So my wife is looking at something stamped on the plastic flim... it says "this side to inside" and thats on the OUTSIDE. So now we get to take it off again and flip it over. arrrrgghhhhh.... So just like this bottle of earthquake pills.....

I always do the actual calculation but here's a handy dandy chart for calculating the increase in voltage (Voc) of solar panels. It is important to recognize that cold panels make a higher voltage than warm panels and when figuring out what voltage the array will make when the first beam of sunlight strikes the panels on a cold winter morning.

Example: you have a panel that says 45.5Voc and the coldest record temperature in your area is 5F (-15C). Multiply the panel voltage by 1.16. 45.5Voc becomes 52.78.

So if you thought you had 45v panels and could put 10 of them in series to your EG4 inverter that was rated for 500v, you'd be wrong on a cold winter day.

More infrastructure failures. The colgate penstock failed yesterday in Yuba County Cali. I guarantee you that an engineer told some manager at the county that pipe was failing from corrosion and they said "we have no money for that, we have homeless who need clean needles".

https://www.kcra.com/article/new-colgate-powerhouse-damage-assessment-pipe-failure/70360683

This is the last day of my electric company month.... my meter is read on the 16th.... and I'm soooo close to breaking even this month. We had a lot of cloudy day and snow and I'm within 15c of breaking even (1.088 kwh).

You can just do stuff. Spike strip

Normal life Off Grid in Ireland.
The idea of living Off Grid can be very different to a lot of people. For some its a cabin in the woods, for others it may be a rustic Homestead in the American wilderness.
For us its just everyday modern life on our little property in the south east of Ireland.
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