I’d like to share with you now a cool little project that we wrapped up a few weeks ago.
This was for a completely off grid home where the customer is having a small single wide mobile home installed, but wants a large power system to allow for room for expansion and for potentially turning this vacation home into a full time home down the road. So we designed and installed a pretty clean, pretty robust system that stands by itself underneath the array and via conduit can power up the house as well as future devices. Though a well booster pump is also powered by our solar system, a separate stand alone solar deep well pump was added by another contractor prior to us arriving.
Before we could get to the install, we had to grub off some vegetation to make a spot for it.
Once that was done, we laid out the array structure and began setting ground screws. As expected by looking at the surrounding terrain, we hit hard caliche about 18″ down and had to break out the rock drill to pre drill for the screws.
Installation of the ground screws took two days with that hard rock, but once they were in, we gave a random couple an uplift test to make sure they were holding to specification. This is not yet required by the AHJs, but we do it for piece of mind, to make sure that the screws are holding properly, and incase anyone happens to ask for it after the fact.
Once all the screws were in place, it was time for underground trenching-and we had a lot of trenching to do here. Before another day would pass, we would turn this place into a virtual war zone with trenches, spoils, and terrible piles of big waste rock everywhere…