Month: March 2023

This Is Spring? A Sort Of Review. And Random Stuff

Well they tell me it’s spring out there. Yeah, right…

I was going to start building the frames to hold the solar panels but you can see how well that worked out. Also I’ve been having “issues” with Amazon of late, which is where I bought the panel clamps, so they aren’t here yet. More about that down below. If I remember. I probably won’t.

We got 8 – 10 inches of snow the other day. I just spent half an hour digging the solar panels out of the snow drift they were in. Yep. it’s spring in Wisconsin. Sigh… We’ve been very, very fortunate up here, to be honest. All of the storms raging across the country have been tracking well south of us before running up the east coast.

But it is looking like spring down in our basement. MrsGF has a small greenhouse with grow lights and a heating pad set up down there and has a lot of seedlings started already. And the stuff is growing like crazy. The way the weather is going I have no idea when we’ll be able to actually move plants outside. All we can do is wait and see what happens.

Now let’s talk about this -this thing…

This is something called a Click N Grow hydroponic growing system. Only none of those words are actually true, to be honest. What it looks like in real life is this-

Can you say ‘disappointing’ boys and girls?

I got this is a gift from someone who got it as a gift from someone else and didn’t want it so I set up and tried it. Sigh…

How it works is like this: The base is filled with water. Those little pots have a sort of wick in them that extends down into the water to draw it up into the pot. Inside pot you have put the company’s “plant pods” which, of course, they will gladly sell you for many, many $$$.

So let me tell you what you get for your $180. You get a small grow light. You get two plastic arms that hold the light in place above the tank. The tank itself is lightweight plastic with some holes in it. You put plain water in the tank. You then put small plastic cups with a wick on the bottom into the holes. The wick draws water up into the cups.

And that’s what you get for your two hundred bucks. A $30 grow light and about $5 worth of plastic. No electronics, no pumps, no heaters. Just a grow light and some plastic bits.

Into those plastic cups you put the company’s “plant pods” which, as far as I can tell, consist of a chunk of peat moss worth maybe $0.20, and a couple of seeds. The company will (start sarcasm font) generously (end sarcasm font) sell you their proprietary “plant pods” in a 9 pack for about $24.

I should point out that while that looks pretty good in the photo those plants are only about 4 inches tall and most of them died shortly after I took this photo.

Now it does work. Kinda. I have to admit that. I have actual tomato plants growing down in my office with actual tomatoes growing on them. Well, sort of. The plants don’t look very healthy any more and the “tomatoes”, if you can call then that, are the size of peas and they never seem to actually get ripe. I got one tiny, tiny salad out of the three lettuce pods. Well “tiny” is being generous.

Do I need to tell you to avoid this thing like the plague? It consists of a $20 grow light and a few bucks worth of plastic. And that literally is all it is. And they are selling it for $180. The plant pods are peat moss with probably some added fertilizer, and a seed or two. MrsGF has a 4 shelf mini greenhouse down in the basement that can hold 2 or 3 full sized flats on each shelf, with grow lights and heaters, and that entire setup cost about half of what this — this thing sells for.

I’ll keep it going because I’m curious to see if those so-called tomatoes will ever actually turn red. After that the plastic bits go in recycling and the grow light might be salvageable and used in MrsGF’s greenhouse.

Amazon Issues

I don’t know what’s going on with Amazon of late. Maybe it’s just a local issue? Let me explain. A couple of weeks ago I ordered a monitor stand. Amazon told me it would arrive in 2 days. Fine. On the 3rd day I got a message saying delivery had been delayed and would now take another two days. Okay. I’m in no big rush. Then on the day the stand was supposed to arrive I got a message telling me it was “undeliverable” and it was being returned to the warehouse and I would be issued a credit. There was no explanation of what “undeliverable” actually meant. By that time I kinda really wanted the stand so I ran all the way up to Appleton and bought one at Office Max.

Three days later, guess what Amazon dropped off at my door? Yep, the monitor stand I’d ordered a week and a half earlier.

Earlier I’d ordered a heavy electrical cable to connect my backup generator to the transfer switch in the house. These things are expensive, around $200 for the one I needed. The cable arrived two days later. It was the wrong one. The day after that the right cable came. Amazon says they have no record of the wrong cable being sent and I should just keep it. Not sure what I’m going to do with it, but okay…

I ordered mounting brackets for my solar panels last week. They were supposed to arrive on Saturday. Sunday I got a message that they were delayed and they should come tomorrow, Tuesday. Okay…

I ordered a National Geographic science kit as a gift for a great nephew. They told me it would arrive in two days. Great. It arrived in 8 hours. Seriously. I ordered it around 10 AM and it arrived at 4 PM the same day.

Sigh…

I’m more grouchy than usual at the moment. I’m prepping for a colonoscopy tomorrow so I’ve had no solid food for 2 days and now I’m trying to gag down a half gallon of Gatorade mixed with laxatives that will keep me huddled near the bathroom for the rest of the evening. Great fun.

Weather, Transfer Switch, Misc. Stuff and The Great Solar System Build

This is what I woke up to the other morning. Sigh… It’s March. It should be getting warmer out. Instead we get this???

The weather here in Wisconsin can get interesting, to say the least. Mostly it’s fairly pleasant up here, but sometimes things get weird. Like blizzards in May. Or the Great Frog Storm of 1956. (That one was scary.) This winter has been remarkably mild with very little snow. Well very little snow until now. I think we got more snow in the first 2 weeks in March than we did during the rest of the winter combined. Now we’re under a storm warning for tomorrow and could get another 5 – 8 inches of snow. Sigh…

But let’s get on with this. I’m sure you have better things to do than listen to me rambling along. I know I do. (Looks at calendar… Well no, it seems I don’t have better things to do. Never mind.)

I thought I was done talking about solar and power systems and all of that for a while. I should have known better because here we go again. That transfer switch I was talking about last time is now installed and working. The kit had everything necessary and installing it is pretty simple. It took maybe an hour to install the whole thing. (Do I really need to include the disclaimer telling you not to go fiddling around with your house’s electrical service because you can get killed if you don’t know what you’re doing?)

Circuit tracers aren’t hugely expensive, this is the one I have and it sells for about $50. If you have kids they make great circuit tracers. “DAD! What did you do??? The Playstation shut down and I didn’t save my game!!!”

It took some time to track down what breakers powered what. A variety of electricians have been in that panel fiddling with things in the years we’ve lived here and not all of them were careful about labeling what they hooked to what, it seems. I was upset by that because these guys are supposed to be professionals. You don’t just shove a new breaker into a panel, hook it to something and leave it unlabeled. Or, even worse, change an existing circuit and then not note down what was changed. I ended up spending a good hour with a circuit tracer running around the house testing outlets and lights before I could even start installing the transfer switch. Fortunately only two or three were mislabeled but that was still concerning. I got out my little label making thingie to make nice, neat labels, only to find my label making thingie didn’t work. (Yeah, it’s been one of those weeks so far. The label maker, the mislabeled circuits, a crimping tool designed to crimp MP4 connectors doesn’t actually crimp things…)

With the transfer switch set up I can change between grid power and the Blutetti with just the flip of a switch. And the transfer switch doesn’t care where it gets power from so I can plug in either the Bluetti or our big Generac gas powered generator.

Planning and Research Problems

If you’ve been following this discussion that started with the Bluetti solar generator thing you know MrsGF and I have decided to put in a relatively large solar power system that can handle much of our electrical needs. We aren’t going “off grid” as they call it because with the weather we get here in Wisconsin it would be difficult, even impossible, to rely on solar for all of our electrical needs. But we could make a significant dent in our electric bill if we manage to pull this off.

But there are problems.

Now we could do something like look at some of the “plug ‘n play” systems from Bluetti, Ecoflow, Generac and others but all of those have serious issues. When it comes to the solar generator people like Bluetti and Ecoflow, the problem is that while they have some pretty nice systems that are fairly easy to install that can handle almost the whole house, you’re locked into those companies for the entire lifetime of the system. You can only use their batteries, their accessories, their adaptors, etc. If something goes wrong with the system the only thing you can do is pack the whole thing up and ship it back to the company which will, maybe, you hope, fix it and maybe, you hope, actually ship it back to you and that it will actually work when it arrives. And that will take weeks at least, maybe even months. And during that time your entire solar energy system is shut down. And let’s be honest, all of the systems from those companies are breathtakingly overpriced when you look at what you actually get for your money.

There are problems with the big brand names like Generac and Tesla as well. Once again you’re at the mercy of a single vendor for all of your equipment. You might be lucky and be in an area that is served by an installer/dealer who can help you when something goes wrong, and something will go wrong eventually, but even so you’re still tied to a single vendor for everything. And even worse, the systems from these companies are eye wateringly expensive for what you get.

And then there are the problems with almost all of the commercial “solar contractors” out there.

If your goal is to gain some independence from the grid you aren’t going to get it from most of the commercial solar contractors out there. What most of them are selling are systems intended to generate power that is sold directly back to the utility, not to make you independent from the grid. They have little, if any, battery backup capability. And with a system like that you are entirely at the mercy of the utility company. They could decide tomorrow to change the rates, add in bogus “connection fees”, even shut you down entirely.

So if you want a system that gives you some independence from the grid, that doesn’t lock you into a single vendor who could very well disappear tomorrow, want to do it as economically as possible, and want a system that is relatively easy to repair when things go wrong, you’re pretty much stuck with trying to build it yourself.

Which brings me to…

The Great Solar System Build

Oh, brother, talk about hyperbole. Sheesh…

Over the next few weeks (or months, because I’m not only lazy I am also a procrastinator of the first order) I’m going to document in excruciating and incredibly boring detail our efforts to build a reasonably large home solar power system from the ground up, complete with system specifications and why we chose those specifications, the search for equipment, dealing with various vendors, issues with wiring and building codes, etc, etc, etc.

For those of you who find this kind of thing eye wateringly boring, well, you have my sympathy. So posts about the solar system will be prominently labeled with a GSSB tag in the title so you can skip those parts and just drop in to look at photos or read the other nonsense I babble about here.

Questions. And Some Answers. Maybe

I was going to wrap up this whole Bluetti/solar generator discussion last time but some additional stuff came in email (theoldgrouch@grouchyfarmer.com) and other sources, so let’s get on with this.

Battery Safety

A couple of people have apparently been spending way too much time on YouTube watching people deliberately blowing up lithium battery packs and expressed the opinion that having a lithium battery in your home is the equivalent of having a rather large bomb waiting to go off at any moment. I won’t bother to point out that there are literally hundreds of millions of lithium batteries out here in the real world that somehow have managed to not blow up or suffer from “runaway thermal events” as they call it. Instead I’ll just mention that the batteries in the Bluetti and in many of these systems use LiFePo battery chemistry which is not only much safer, it also gives the batteries a much longer lifespan. I’ve seen LiFePo batteries being beaten with hammers and rocks, drilled through multiple times, stabbed with fishing spear, had nails driven through them, etc. and none of them exploded or turned into unquenchable blowtorches. They will get hot, they will vent gasses that I would very much want to avoid breathing, but none of them got explody or anything like that. If treated reasonably well LiFePo batteries could potentially continue to work well for years.

Wiring

I got questions from a couple of people who have a power station or are thinking of getting one and don’t want to have to run extension cords all over the house in order to keep things running during a blackout. Why can’t you just use your house’s existing wiring system? Well you can, sort of. If you look at that photo of the AC200Max over there you’ll see a very large 3 prong socket on the far right. That’s a TT-30 plug, a high amperage connector. Well, sort of high amperage. If I remember right it’s only good for about 20 Amps because of the limitations of the AC200Max’s inverter. It’s intended to feed power to the electrical system of an RV but there’s no reason you can’t use that to supply larger amounts of power to a transfer switch system to feed selected circuits in your home without having to run extension cords everywhere.

So that takes care of… Uh? What’s a transfer switch? Ah I suppose I’m going to have to explain that now.

Okay, here’s the deal. You can’t just pump power from an external generator into your house’s electrical system. If you try most of your power is going to backfeed into the grid, overloading your generator and quite possibly killing some poor lineman working on a pole somewhere trying to restore power during a blackout. And you are not permitted to just shut off the main breaker on your electrical panel, either. In a lot of jurisdictions it is flat out illegal to hook any kind of alternative power source to your house’s wiring without the installation of some kind of transfer switch system.

And here’s an example of one.

This kit may seem expensive at $300 but it includes pretty much everything necessary to install one of these things. No, I don’t get paid by Reliance. I bought this thing with my own money. I don’t get kickbacks or free stuff or cash or anything like that. And I am seriously disappointed by this. Other bloggers get companies throwing stuff at them all the time: hugely expensive batteries, inverters, charging systems, solar panels, hardware, tools… Me? Zilch. Nada. I mean if, oh, Power Queen wanted to send me four of their 48V server rack batteries I’d be more than happy to test them out for five, six years. Or GroWatt. What’s up with you guys? Why haven’t you sent me one of your 8KW inverters, or that neat split phase unit? Hmm? I’m not above a bit of bribery now and then….
The Big Ass Plug (BAP). Well that’s what I call it. Oh, the orange thing in the bottom right isn’t part of the kit, that’s my Klein circuit tracer thingie.

That is a Reliance transfer switch kit that I picked up at a local home improvement store for about $300. These things are designed to allow you to take up to 6 individual circuits in your home and let you switch them to work with an external power supply like a generator or something like the Bluetti. A BAC (Big Ass Cable) plugs into the big socket on your generator, and the other end plugs into a BAP (Big Ass Plug) wired into the transfer switch. When you flip the switches on the box up there, you switch that circuit from the LINE, which is your connection to the grid, to the GEN input, which is fed by your generator.

And no, I’m not going to give you instructions on how to install one because I don’t want to be responsible for you electrocuting yourself or starting your house on fire or something like that. These things aren’t hard to put in. There are numerous videos out there showing you exactly how to do it. But I am going to put in the usual disclaimer that you shouldn’t go fiddling around in your circuit breaker box because you can kill yourself or someone else, burn down your house or damage equipment if you don’t know what you’re doing. In a lot of jurisdictions it’s technically illegal for you to do so. Legally you may need to get a permit, hire an actual real electrician to do the work, have it inspected, etc. before you can use one of these. So I’ll leave it at that.

Money Stuff

grouchyfarmer.com luxurious headquarters

During the weekly staff meeting here at the palatial offices of grouchyfarmer.com someone brought up the topic of maybe looking into some tax credits or something if we did a solar power system, so we’re looking into that to help offset the cost of putting in a 10 – 15 KWh battery system with something like a 8 KW or larger inverter fed with 48V batteries. We’re currently in the planning phase of that. With our electric bill running $300/month here, a decent tax credit and other factors it’s beginning to look as if it might make sense economically to install such a system to take at least part of the house’s needs off the grid.

Gardening Stuff

We already have most of our garden planning done, all the seeds bought already, and are just waiting for the weather to get better so we can get out there and start puttering around in the dirt again. We have a lot of plans, but whether or not any of it will actually get done is something else again. Some of the plans are on the expensive side and if we go ahead with the solar project that might eat up a lot of our discretionary budget for the year. So we’ll see.

And that’s about it for now.