Most important and exciting news from this week was the fact that we got our letter from the County Health Department saying we can have a septic system! That is a huge relief. So with that letter I can now start the subdivision process. That is the major permitting hurdle I need to jump through to eventually get a building permit. Hopefully I can get that started this week.

This weekend was my working Friday week so there wasn’t a lot of time to spend at the land.  It also rained on Friday, but that didn’t stop Sam, Andrew and I from heading up to the land after dinner to go camping!  I decided to take a small break from the excavation and spent a good chunk of my time trying to add solar panels to the camper (since I have 60 of them sitting in a box in my garage).  So throughout the week I bought some aluminum angle irons and each night after work I cut them to size and drilled a bunch of mounting holes. 

Late Friday and early Saturday I put them up on top of the camper! Luckily my mounting design worked. I wasn’t positive since the camper was up on the land and I couldn’t take new measurements.  I basically had the rail center to center spacing measurement to work off of and that was about it.  For the installation, I may not have done it the smart way.  I left the camper popped up.. and only had one ladder, so getting the panels up on the trailer was a bit of a shoulder workout! They were quite heavy. Maybe collapsing the trailer would have been a bit smarter.. but oh well…. 

The solar project was all going really well until I tried to hook up the charge controller. Apparently my trailer batteries were too dead to actually be charged, and it appears the controller I got can only handle 1 panel, not 4 ….

So in the end I never got it figured out. I will have to take the generator and a multimeter back next weekend to figure it all out.  It was a super fun project until I couldn’t get it to charge my batteries…….
I did get about 4 hours of excavator time in as well and I continued to move a TON of dirt.  I really can’t explain with words or pictures.. but it was a lot. We have filled in a lot of the ditch now! .. the driveway “bridge” over the culverts we made doesn’t feel like a bridge anymore. I haven’t compacted it much as I have filled in the ditch, so there will be lots of settling. Something we will have to keep in mind as we go forward.

That’s about it for this weeks adventures. Until next week!