The F-350 fired right up because I’d plugged it in overnight and it was happy. The Freightshaker, on the other hand, was its usual bitchy self like it always is on cold mornings, and required that I put a heat...Continue reading
A Day in the Life of an Off-Grid Solar Installer
This is our project journal — field stories from off-grid solar installs around Northern Arizona. The 4 a.m. starts, the parts that don't show up, the problems solved on the fly, and a behind-the-scenes look at how these systems actually get built — plus a bit of life on the fringe along the way. Originally posted on the River Daves Place forum; you can read the full thread here.
I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about our ground screw program, and also why the hell we are…
I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about our ground screw program, and also why the hell we are in cold country in December. 🙄 First, the ground screws. To start, here’s Denise carrying one of the shorter...Continue reading
Tuesday morning broke freezing and miserable outside.
The thermometer hit a low of 6 degrees overnight. 🥶 We weren’t too concerned because it was not terribly cold in the cabin-until we discovered that both the water and sewer plumbing was frozen. 🥶🥶 This was an even bigger...
Wednesday and Thursday were both hectic days trying to get this job back on track.
Somehow a bunch of seemingly insignificant issues all ganged up on us and multiplied causing serious delays, setbacks and just general frustration. When things don’t go well, we don’t have the option to quit, let someone else do it or...Continue reading
We got up early Friday morning after a few hours of sleep with what we thought was a pretty easy…
We got up early Friday morning after a few hours of sleep with what we thought was a pretty easy punch list of things to do before we could wrap up and head home. Originally, this job was only supposed...Continue reading
So it’s Friday morning, day five of a three day job, we’ve just passed our final inspection, and…
So it’s Friday morning, day five of a three day job, we’ve just passed our final inspection, and all we need to do is wrap up the battery connections, finish programming the inverter, test everything, and move out of the...Continue reading
Saturday morning, 4 am.
It was very cold-in the teens, dark, and we were tired and just wanted to get home. The first order of business was to get a bunch of cold engines started and warming up, and I knew that was going...Continue reading
Something I thought you all would find cool.
We are pretty serious about making sure what we do is as good as we can make it, and is good for our customers. One thing we do pretty regularly is randomly test our ground screws for uplift resistance to...Continue reading
Somewhere in the midst of all of our regular work, the @wash11 backhoe rebuild was somehow still inching forward.
Some welding needed done on one of the sticks, so I chugged my beer and donned my welder costume. Then we discovered some destroyed parts that interact with the extend a hoe ram. 🙄 We sorta reverse engineered what we...Continue reading
After getting the extend a hoe assembly put together, attaching it to the first stick went pretty smoothly.
All the brew hoses sure looked good on the clean backhoe. Get a good look-they will never be this clean again. 😄😄 While we were struggling to get off the mountain job gone long the following Saturday, Joel, Amy, and...Continue reading