Hi all! 

Me again. I didn’t get a chance to write my summary yesterday because I opted to take a nap yesterday instead. I wore myself out a bit working on the shed after traveling all week for work.

This weekend was my solar installation!  It was me and my builder buddy Andrew up there this weekend and we got after it.

For the most part the solar installation was pretty slick and actually really easy. For those that care, I used the Unirac racking system, and their fast lock foot is really cool. You don’t have to pull back any shingles to insert flashing. You mount them right on top of the shingles and squirt in some caulking that comes with the mounts. I did stay up Friday night till  1a.m. installing all the panels .. for some reason I couldn’t stop. It was nice not getting beat on by the sun working into the night (yes I have issues I know).

Once the inverter was hooked up I had power. Unfortunately I left my combiner/parallel cord for the panels at home. I have two strings of 9 panels each so for all 18 to work together I needed that combiner cord.  I was only able to test out one string of 9 panels. Without batteries the inverter was able to run our little microwave and fridge, but it could not handle the power tools. It could run my Sawzall at about a 1/4 trigger pull.. but any more than that and it would trip out.  I’m willing to bet with both strings going (all 18 panels) it could run power tools without the batteries. All that being said, I’ll be bringing up my first “homemade” 48V battery this next week. They are currently charging in my garage (thanks to a lot of help from Doug!)

This is showing my first 16 lithium ion 3.2 volt battery cells being balanced. For the shed I’ll have 2 banks of batteries and for the cottage I’ll end up with about 4 banks. Each bank should store about 15kWh or power. The average house uses 30kWh in a single day. With 4 banks and hopefully a more efficient home than average, I’ll have 60kWh which will hopefully provide the cottage with at least 3 days of power. But even still with a week straight of snow over thanksgiving when family is over and ovens running all day, we will need a generator for that scenario. If you size a solar system and batteries to cover even the worst case scenario it would come with an astronomical price tag. But by supplementing the system with a generator you can bring down the cost and size of the system significantly. This will be a good test run to see how they perform, especially over the winter.

After having all that fun I started sealing up the shed a little with a bunch of caulking and then I started installing a bunch of insulation.

I’m only about 1/3 done with that and I am not really looking forward to completing that job 🙂 .  Oh and because I was tired of doing all the insulation, I switched over and famed up the one interior wall (for mine and Karianne’s bedroom) and the permanent ladder/stairs up to the loft.

Last and most expensive, the excavator pump showed up to the shop today! Hopefully it will get installed this week and my excavator will be back up and running well so that I can start in on the some more excavation and septic work!

Until next week!

Mark