Upgrade to my Solar Electric System

    I am a big proponent of solar energy, not so much for wind. With things being the way they are in the world, it behooves everyone to build or buy a back-up energy system. Gas generators is the easiest but you need gas and that will be in short supply when emergencies occur. You can't store gas for more than six months so unless you have the means, and the discipline to constantly rotate out your gas, you won't have power long. Solar is the next easiest solution.

    I have a couple posts on this subject and my own experiments and set-ups so I won't go over all that again. This will be about my latest upgrades.

    In the early spring, ECOFLOW had a significant sale and I had some credits and coupons for even greater savings. I upgraded from the 11.8 kilowatt hour Delta Pro system to a 24 kilowatt hour Delta Pro Ultra system. I only had four 320 watt panels on the Delta Pro because of its voltage input limitations. The Ultra can take 450 volts on its high voltage input and another 150 volts via its low voltage input. I added four more 320 watt solar panels to my input array. Each panel generates 40 volts in full sun and altogether I will get about 2,560 watts of power on good sunny days.

 

 

 

    I bought more of the same panels and built the base in the same way, because that seemed to work well. This is two 6x6x8s cut to four foot lengths and four 2x6x12s. The metal frame is from a company called Signature Solar. It is very simple but a lot of parts so it takes a few hours to assemble.

 

 

      I moved location on the panel array away from the side on my house. The mountain to my front, and the orientation of my house, meant that my one set of panels were in shade until after ten O'clock. In the new location they get sun as soon as the sun rises above the top of the mountain, which is around seven O'clock this time of the year. This location is 92 feet away from my house and the wires had to be run underground.

 

     I dug the trench six inches wide and 12 to 14 inches deep. I'm not worried about the freeze line for this application. It took me about seven hours over two days and that was mostly because I'm an older guy and it was quite warm and I needed frequent breaks to hydrate and rest. I filled a wheelbarrow with larger rocks that I wasn't going to put back in the trench.

 

    To protect the power cables (I used 10 gauge cables to decrease power loss due to the distance), I decided to run them through 1" PVC water pipe. That was far easier than I thought it would be. 

 

  

    I bought the water pipe the day before I installed it, uncoiled it, and laid it out in the sun to get the kinks out of it so that it would lay flat in the trench. That worked great, I was very surprised. The next thing I needed to do was run a strong string through the water pipe to pull the cables through. I used an old trick.

 

     I tied a small piece of foam to a roll of 50 pound test string and stuck that into the water pipe at the panel end. Then I stuck the house side of the pipe into my strongest shop-vac and turned it on. It sucked that foam through 92 feet of pipe in seconds.

 

    

    Next up was to tie the power cable to the string and pull it through the water pipe. It was a tight fit and a hard pull but in a couple minutes I was done and could now hook up this side of the cables to the eight solar panels.

 

  

 

    Right now, I have to run my power cable into the basement through the casement window so I had to cut a hole in the metal to push the water pipe through. That will protect the cables better than running them over the top like I was doing before.

 

 

    To finish up I back-filled the trench and drove my tractor over it a number of times to pack it down. The soil is bone dry so it didn't pack down very well but we are expecting rain tonight so I'll do it again tomorrow if we get a decent rain. 

 

 

    The final step was to connect the cables to my Delta Pro Ultra and switch on the power. As you can see, I was getting 2,535 watts of power so everything is working as it should. 

 

    Total time for this upgrade, which was done over five different days, was about 14 hours. Well worth it for the additional power I can now generate and store for emergencies. I run my basement dehumidifier solely off of this solar system, keeping it off my electric bill. The dehumidifier uses 536 watts of power 24 hours a day so this is a very big savings for me. 

Repairing a Plastic Fuel Tank

     I inherited a 1980s Craftsman leaf blower that I used for a couple years but then it started to leak fuel. The fuel leak appeared, at first, to be a rotted fuel line (caused by ethanol in the gas), which I replaced. But it still leaked. Then I thought the replacement fuel line was too small in diameter and it was leaking around it. But that was not the case.  What was wrong now was that the fuel tank itself had split on the bottom seam, which you can clearly see in the image below.

    It might be possible to fix this with some sort of epoxy, but I have found in many instances that a surface coating of epoxy won't last long. Sometimes it peels off and sometimes the vibration of the engine just makes it crack in the same place. What needs to be done is to reinforce the strength of the seam and then seal it.

    Back in 2009 I found a tandem kayak in a wood line on government property that I had legal access to. I took the kayak home, cleaned it up, and found that some numbnut had hacked into the kayak with a hatchet for some reason. I looked up the kayak make and model on the Internet and a new one was $1,700 so I figured if I could repair it for cheap I would do it. Again searching on line for ways to repair kayaks, I came across a product called a KC Welder (possibly Kayak and Canoe welder?).

    This kit cost me about $40 I think. Inside the kit is a heating wand or paddle, some plastic strips (welding rods of a sort), and some aluminum screen material. With this I repaired the big kayak and have been using it for 15 years without any issues at all. This kit allows you to make very strong repairs.

    The wand works like a soldiering iron or wood-burning iron. The metal parts get VERY hot (yes, I have burned myself repeatedly) and you use the paddle-shaped tip to do the work. For this repair, I cut up two strips of screen to lay over the crack and then melted them in by pressing the paddle down on top of the screen. The heat of the wand transfers to the screen and the screen melts into the plastic part you are repairing, as shown below.

    I move the wand tip around until the entire piece of screen has been melted into the plastic. This reinforces the plastic along the split and prevents it from widening at the split and also  keeps the split from getting longer. Once that is all done, I apply filler plastic on top of the repair as shown below.

    Ideally, I try to scavenge plastic from somewhere on the piece I am repairing so that there is perfect compatibility on the repair, but there wasn't anyplace that I could remove plastic from this piece. So instead, I used the plastic sticks that came in the kit and melted them and mixed the two plastics together and hope that I get a "alloy" that works. In the many years that I have been using this kit, I have not yet had a plastic "organ rejection". But these plastic repair kits do come with rods that are specific to the type of plastic from which your kayak is made.

    So, now all I have to do is put it back together, fuel it, and see if it still runs.

Eat out for Cheap

     Eating out is often the most expensive option and I try to do it as rarely as possible. But sometimes you are out on the road and that is what you need to do. I have a couple preferred restaurants that I pick from, if they are available. One of them is Bob Evans.

    Bob Evans is an old fashioned restaurant with many economical choices. One of the best choices is their "Pick 2" item. Like at Panera Bread, you choose a half serving from a selection of sandwiches, soups, and salads. I chose a half Fire Cracker Salad with grilled chicken and a half of a Turkey Club sandwich. With this you choose between biscuits, corn bread, or banana bread (I chose banana bread for a dessert).

    The Pick 2 prices start at $5.99, my meal was $8.99 and I had water to drink. 

 

    It was a larger than expected salad with plenty of chicken and a tasty dressing. I had one slice of the banana bread for dessert then got a box to take the sandwich and the other slice home for supper. Two meals for $8.99 plus tax is hard to beat.