I was sore. Everywhere. Why?! It took me a couple minutes to figure out why.
Tuesday I half fell, bounced, and slid down a half flight of stairs when one of my bootlace loops somehow snagged the other boot.
Apparently skidding down a bunch of stairs supported only by your stiff right arm sliding down a hand rail, and a stiff left leg bouncing down successive steps, while your other two limbs flail hopelessly in attempt to regain an upright orientation is hard on your body.
I think I would have been better off to have just let go and fall all the way. LOL.
Anyway, it was a rough start and I would remain stiff and sore all day.
My morning consisted of preparing and installing a couple of 1” conduits for the roof penetrations for the solar circuits.
At roof level. I installed some strut to hold the stub ups nice and secure, then we installed steel roof rubber roof jacks and sealed everything up good.
Meanwhile, while I was working hard on conduits, it turns out Denise had her mind in the gutter.
She bolted the two gutter pieces together, I cut the end down to length, and she drilled and installed the last end cap. 13’ of 12×12 gutter ready to mount.
Before we hang the gutter, which is pretty much the foundation that every other component mounts to, we put blue tape up on the wall and measure everything out one last time as a double check and a sorta guide for component placement. The adjustable Sumner jack stands hold the gutter at just the right height and allow us to get it perfectly level. Or at least as perfectly level as some of these bent up gutters have been lately.
Once the gutter is level and held by a few screws to the wall, it’s our last chance to make sure that the batteries are going to fit like we planned.
At this point, I turned over the task of locating and drilling all the holes for the three inverters to Denise. A task that requires precision and patience, because if you have even one hole off, nothing fits right and it’s about impossible to fix. Now, we do have a secret weapon or two for this task. More on those later.
Here’s Denise drilling the first holes.
While Denise had her mind fully in the gutter, I went to another part of the camp to finish up some mapping and planning for the power tie-in that we would be doing soon
Remember awhile back I mentioned generators? Well, for decades, this camp has basically run entirely off of diesel generator power. They have three different generators of various sizes and ages, and apparently it’s a given that at least one of them will break down every year, which is why they keep all three of them so they always have one to run camp. Currently, the newest and biggest one is out of action and torn down because a pressed on cooling fan departed the water pump and headed for another zip code.
Here’s a glimpse inside the generator shed with the generators and some of the electrical gear. We will be back in this room soon doing some additions and modifications.
I also had to go to another part of camp and figure out our tie-in to that location.
This is the stuff of a professional electricians nightmares.
After looking at that, uh, creative collection, I went back to help keep Denise’s mind in the gutter.
Here she is with the completed knockouts in the gutter for all three inverters and one of our secret weapons-a custom CNC plasma cut and engraved template I make that makes locating the inverters, their conduit knockouts, and the mounting hardware a snap and pretty fool proof.
Then we muscled the first inverter up into place. Like the first solar panel getting mounted, it’s always great to get the inverter mounted.
In short order, all three inverters were up and in place, and Denise went to work tightening all the conduit fittings.
The last thing we did for the day was get a couple of the battery racks roughed into place to mock up for the battery cables and 48 volt power distribution.
The week is disappearing way too quickly, and we have a lot of ground to cover in the next two days. Our original schedule was to have the solar power system up and running on it’s own by the end of week two, which is only two days away. With all the setbacks, plus some other disruptions going on in the background here that I hope to be able to share later, it’s looking doubtful that we will be able to power up in the next two days.
We shall see!