Fridge, soffits and a great summer day

The weather today was perfect! I picked up Alex and we went straight to City Furniture and picked up our new Samsung fridge. We drove gingerly out to the new house and arrived around 10:30am. Carol had gone ahead and taken up food for lunch and dinner and a variety of snacky foods. We bought the Samsung for a variety of reasons. It was white, had a bottom freezer, was Energy Star rated, and was a great price for a relatively small efficient fridge. Oh, and the door could be mounted to open on either side. Of course, we needed it to open the other way to the way it was when it arrived. The instructions said it would be an easy changeover. Well, it may not have been rocket science, but it did take me almost 2 hours to do the trick. Of course the poorly translated instructions did not help. They had me remove both the fridge and freezer doors among other things, but at no time did they instruct me to reinstall them! Anyway, the result is wonderful. The fridge looks and works great!
Carol made us some sandwiches for lunch and then we started in on the soffits. Having never installed soffits before, I was justifiably concerned about how I was actually going to do it. I had read lots of articles in preparation, so didn't feel completely lost. Over the space of a few hours I did manage to get about 20 feet of it installed, but not without a good deal of cursing, measuring, and re-cutting and fitting. I hope that the rest goes more smoothly. At least I think I finally understand the how. Now it's just a matter of getting my hands to do what my head is telling them!

Carol continued to vacuum up all the wood chips and sawdust and almost has it beat - for this time anyway.

Solar power system is complete

I will apologize in advance - I have been lax with my photos recently and don't have any new ones to post. However, I have some news to report. The solar modules are all connected and our power system seem to be working as designed. This is great news! You design and plan this stuff but there's always a nagging doubt that it will do everything you hope it will do, so it IS wonderful when it does  :)
Today (Saturday) we are picking up our new fridge and taking it up to the house so we can keep stuff (i.e. the beer) cold. [Take note all potential volunteer/helpers!]
We have borrowed Patou's nifty little shop vac and have been cleaning up house after all the plumbing and electrical rough-in mess. Today's tasks include painting all the outside trim boards(white) making them ready for installation in the near future, and installing the soffits to make the house somewhat bug-free. I have not attempted soffits before so this could be interesting!
The weather is finally looking much better overall with a forecast of 30*C and sunny today. That will certainly help us out!
I want to close with a shout-out to Paul and the guys at Riverside Energy here in Kamloops. I had one MC4 cable that was too short for our setup. Paul had the cable in stock and I was able to pick it up on Friday morning, and his price was the best we could find anywhere. They have been a stellar supplier for the last-minute things we have needed and we will certainly be recommending them to anyone who asks.

Beam me up, Scotty

Wouldn't that be nice?! After another busy weekend, I would have loved to have someone to "beam me up" to the roof of the house, allowing me to finish wiring up the solar modules. First off, let me say this, "Kids, do not attempt this at home." This work is certainly not for the faint-of-heart. I am working on a 12/12 pitch roof. That means the roof is angled 45* off of vertical (or flat, for that matter). The roof sits above our large wrap around deck and that itself, sits almost 10 feet off the ground. If you slip and fall off, it's a long way down! Note to self: "Do NOT slip off the roof!"
In order to get enough angle on the ladder to make it safe, I positioned it on the ground next to the house. I dug shallow depressions for the ladder to sit in so it cannot slip, lashed the bottom of the ladder to one of the concrete deck footings, and finally, tied off the top of the ladder to one of the mounting bracket legs on the solar array .I was/am able to work safely, albeit a little slowly as I move the big ladder around.
Carol's daughter, Jessica, is visiting us so on Saturday we took the opportunity to go golfing with her and her brother, Alex. Tobiano Golf Club has a special deal for Kamloops residents so we decided to give that course a try. If I could use one word to describe our day there, it would have to be "spectacular!"
It is the nicest course I have ever played. The scenery (it sits on hills set beside and above Kamloops Lake) and the amazing natural terrain, along with the efforts of the course workers and management, make it a challenging and beautiful golf course. I won't go into the details of my score. Suffice it to say that Alex played the best of our threesome! It was a fantastic day and will live as a fond memory for many years.
So that took Saturday off the table as far as working at the house was concerned. Sunday morning however, saw us heading up to the new place. It was a stunner of a day, hitting 27*C at the house, and 34*C down in the valley. In the E-Panel, I put the final crimp connector on the cable from the solar modules and connected it up to the input breaker. I spent a couple of hours drilling and installing the grounding clips on each module in the array, and then ran the copper grounding wire through each clip and into the combiner box beside the array. The last thing to do was to actually connect the modules to the system. Two panels connect in series and then the four sets of two are wired into the combiner box. Each pair is wired to its own breaker and the negative busbar and then the load side of those breakers connect to the cable that feeds down through the conduit to the Midnite Solar E-Panel. You must be careful that you wire everything with the correct polarity, positive to positive, etc. as it is easy to damage the modules if wired incorrectly. This meant lots of volt meter work, checking and rechecking before switching on the appropriate breakers in the combiner box and the E-Panel. Anyway, I wired up two pairs of modules, flipped the breakers and ... it works! Yay! I still have two pairs to hook up later this week, but at least now the batteries are receiving a charge.
It might not be getting the "warp core" online but it is "one small step for man....". I will try and make Scotty proud.

Electrical Update

We've had a busy time dealing with the electrical system. First, most of the rough-in wiring is done. We mounted all the boxes for light switches, outlets, fans, light fixtures, etc. over the weekend. With the help of an friend, we were able to obtain all the wire and hardware at wholesale prices - a great saving, and at a time when every dollar counts. Thanks, James! I have been working on getting the solar modules online and generating power. As part of that process, I have mounted the combiner box on the roof next to the array and run 1" conduit from there down into the utility room where all the batteries and charging equipment are located. Although that sounds like an easy task, it has taken me quite a number of hours to accomplish. I only have a few feet of conduit left to mount, but that is all in the utility room, out of the rain.
That brings up a sore point - the weather. OMG, I don't know what is happening with the weather! People in Ontario are melting in 40*C+ temperatures while here in BC we just can't seem to break out of this cold, soggy spring-like weather pattern. We are getting biblical amounts of rainfall in the form of everything from light showers to frightening thunderstorms that seem to roll through almost daily. Standing in the rain on a tall aluminum ladder, while making wiring connections and grounding solar modules with long runs of solid copper wire is NOT an enjoyable experience while all around you lightning flashes light up the sky. I have been trying to do that work between monsoons, but it is taking  some time.
Now that I have completed wiring the combiner box to the inverter system, the last job is the wiring on the modules themselves (grounding and wiring them to the combiner box). The job has to be done in that order because of the nature of solar modules. When exposed to sunlight (even on cloudy or rainy days) they produce power. If you work from the modules back to the inverter system, you would continually be making electrical connections with live wires (current is flowing), so you must make all the other connections before finally connecting the energized modules. Of course, this problem disappears if you do the installation entirely at night!
On another front, Robin from Groundwater Systems will be installing the feed piping, pump and accumulator tank this week. That means we will be able to fill the water cistern and pressurize the domestic water system - yay!
Jayson demo'd the gravity feed system from our well last week and it was very impressive! He had attached a length of 2" water pipe to the end of the run down to the cistern. He went up to the well and turned on the main valve allowing water to flow down the pipe, almost 500 feet, to that length of pipe. I had positioned it above the cistern, pointed away from the house. Nothing happened at my end for about 30 seconds. I could hear the air being forced out of the pipe by the water now pushing down the hill to where I was standing. A few gulping noises emanated from the end of the pipe and then...whoosh! A column of water 2" wide shot out of the opening, traveling in a 6 foot arc before splashing harmlessly onto the ground. I yelled and Jayson shut off the valve and walked back down to the house. Several minutes later when he arrived, the water was still pouring out of the pipe, albeit with a little less enthusiasm than before. It was an impressive demonstration!
I forgot my Blackberry at the house last night so I can't post any pictures today. I will put them up once I retrieve the phone.

Game of Thrones

Ok, so I'm not that sharp when it comes to plumbing. After exhaustive research online, it became obvious that the preferred method for removing the factory plug in the toilet flange was to hit it with a hammer. No really...you simply bust it outta there with a hammer. If that doesn't work, get a bigger hammer... Apparently, not a time for subtlety! So, the problem solved, we mounted the "throne" in all its glory and stood back to admire our work. We saw that it was good. Ok, lots to do.... moving on.

I couldn't put it off any longer. I had to figure out the wiring for the inverter and E-panel. When I had first looked at all the wires and bus bars, it totally freaked me out. I was already very familiar with all this technology from my time living on boats. At least, that's what I thought. Having said that, it actually didn't take me too long to figure it all out. I had to take it one section at a time, trace it all the way through and BAZINGA! I managed to get it all wired and had no left over parts (always my gauge as to how well the project went!).  I had emailed Hiltz at Energy Alternatives to discuss my grounding questions, and as usual, received an elegant easy-to-read instruction set. On his advice I have hired the guys at Riverside Energy Systems to come out and check my work and help me with the ground rod/plate installation. I have learned that sometimes it's just best to hire the experts! He comes on Friday morning.

Jayson has been busy with the water system. He recently completed the work at the actual well, and has trenched down to the house for the water pipes. Today he was excavating and installing the 1,500 gallon cistern that will hold the domestic water from the well. It has been designed so that the well will supply water by gravity feed to the cistern until it reaches a certain level, at which point it will close the valve and the water will stop. We have a pump that will supply water from the cistern and pressurize the plumbing fixtures in the house, just like the water in your taps in the City. That will save us from having to throw a bucket attached to a rope into the well and then manually "feeding" the toilet, so it will flush. Wow, all the modern conveniences!!

We've got a ton of batteries...literally!

After dropping in to see Mike and the guys at Battery Direct on Friday, we arranged to pick up our shipment of deep cycle batteries first thing on Saturday morning. Needing a little muscle and a young  back to augment our aging versions of the same, Alex had agreed to give us a hand loading and unloading them. We arrived at about 9am and found the batteries on skid, loaded on the forklift and ready to drop into the box of our pickup truck. We were ready to go in a matter of minutes, and our backs were none the worse for wear! At 113lbs (52kg) each, the load was close to a ton so we took our time getting up the hill to our house to keep from straining our poor old truck.
With Alex doing all the heavy lifting, we managed to unload the batteries within a few minutes. We put them straight into the basement so we don't have to move them too far later on.
If we assume that the XW4024 inverter will be the "brains" of our off-grid power system, then these L-16 lead/acid batteries will be the "muscle" for our off-grid power system. Sixteen of them will provide us with almost 40kW hours of stored electrical power. We are budgeting for an electrical consumption of 6kWH per day, so if we take 50% as the maximum allowable discharge of our batteries, we have a little over 3 days before we need to charge them up. At 1.8kW, our solar array can generate almost 9kWH per day, under ideal conditions (5 hours of beautiful, bright sunshine at 90* to the surface of the panel).  As we all know, life's just not like that. In winter, we can expect many dark, gloomy days with very little power being generated by the array, so we will have a diesel generator to supplement the modules. In the future, we would like to add a wind generator, but given our budget, it will have to wait. It will take the generator several hours to recharge the battery bank from a 50% discharge so having to run it only once, every few days will be a very good thing. 

Carol got us organized cleaning up the floors throughout the house. The plumbing rough-in was completed on Thursday and we had agreed to do the clean-up to save a bit of money. I would never have believed that all those wood chips and sawdust would have been created by running a few pipes! I left her with the upper floors to finish and sneaked off to the  basement to work on installing the inverter, e-panel and assorted other parts of the electrical system.  Needing a couple of special tools to attach the e-panel, most of that project is on hold until tomorrow. We turned our attention to one of Carol's "must-haves" - the toilet. Earlier in the week, we had picked up a dual flush toilet at Rona. We wanted a the 4l/6l water mizer flushing system to keep our water consumption and septic usage to a minimum. The drains were all hooked up properly to the septic system so, as long as we manually hauled water to fill the toilet each time, we could use it like normal. We were thwarted by the toilet flange being plugged for testing, and not wanting to damage anything. We decided to investigate our options online and then install the toilet tomorrow (Sunday). We'll see if that works out!

Solar modules are in!

July 4th was going to be hot. The high winds we had been experiencing were going to abate and the warm weather had finally arrived. It seemed like the perfect day to install the solar modules on our roof, and it was!

After Carol returned to KPA after her volunteering stint at the Kamloops Therapeutic Riding Association, I jumped in the car and headed up to the new house. Arriving at 12:30pm, I unpacked and organized the 8 Sharp 224W solar modules, ready for installation on the roof. So much of the planning for this house was dependent on ensuring the best possible environment for these modules to live in. South facing, 45* angle roofline, minimum shadow-casting obstructions - it was all about the modules! We had to make sure that we were going to get the power we needed to recharge our batteries when the sun was shining, and apart from a "tracking mount", this was the best we could do (or afford, for that matter!).

The framing crew had agreed to "help me out" with this installation. That meant that they were going to do all the hard stuff allowing me to take most of the credit for my high level of skill and expertise...hmmmmm. Anyway, they had all the good safety gear so I wouldn't be able to hurt myself too badly if I ignored their warnings and managed to fall off the roof. They rigged me up and off we went. We needed to drill a grid of holes through the roof into the rafters, and it had to be directly into the rafters or it wouldn't be strong enough to support the loads involved. Between the crew and I, we managed to locate every hole very accurately and mounted the horizontal rails to the 6" standoffs, and finally bolt all 8, 3' x 5' modules to the rails. We spent a lot of time marking, drilling, and waterproofing the holes for the standoffs. It was like a giant mecanno construction, just much bigger and 25 feet off the ground. The first rack of 4 modules on 2 rails took us over 2 1/2 hours to install. Thankfully, the second rack took us just over an hour. They look wonderful! I am thrilled with the result. I have been dreaming, scheming and worrying about this installation for several months now. As many of these things go, it wasn't as difficult as I had thought it might be.
Oh, and the french doors were re-framed and installed. They look great, too!

Water, septic, solar, & framing

Our shipment from Hiltz at Energy Alternatives arrived on Wednesday morning. With the help of Craig Palmer, one of our neighbours up into Knutsford, we got it all loaded into our pickup so I could deliver them up to our place ready for installation. Carl, the framing supervisor, was going to help me put the 224W solar modules up onto the roof to form our 1.8kW array. The weather was not the best for working on our steep roof - it was very windy so we agreed to try again the next day (Thursday). It wasn't a wasted trip though. Jason, our well and septic guy had just moved his crew up to do our well and install the septic system. After doing his initial excavation, he was having concerns about the viability of the spring to provide our domestic water! Yikes, that's NOT what we wanted to hear. He had pumped the hole dry and was going to leave it overnight and then pump it out and measure the quantity the next morning. We decided not to panic until after the results were in.
I went up again on Thursday morning, hopeful that we could do the roof work and trying to remain optimistic about the water situation. Before going to open all the boxes containing the power equipment, I walked up to the spring to talk to Jason and get the verdict. He met me with a big grin on his face. The had pumped the water out of the well and measured over 1,000 gallons! This was only 18 hours worth as they had pumped it dry before leaving the night before. He was excited, but wanted to test again the next morning after a full 24 hours. Obviously, 1,000 gallons per day would be plenty for Carol and I, but might be a bit sketchy if we had lots of guests and a large contingent of farm animals to deal with in the future. We could always take advantage of the original settlers' well about 1/2 km below the house, to provide the extra water we needed so we were ecstatic with the 1,000 gallons per day.

[As I write this post, it is Sunday, July 3rd and the results of the second well test were again, positive. They measured almost 2,000 gallons in the full 24 hour period!.]
After opening all the boxes containing the solar stuff, it became apparent that we were short about half the bolts needed to bolt the modules to the racks. I had to return to town to pick some up, so we deferred installation until Monday. Since Carl was going to have to be back anyway (he thought they would be done last week but a variety of small challenges has left them needing a few more days on site) it would be the smart move. They were able to install the back door (I neglected to take a picture) but the two sets of french doors are larger than specified on the plan (74" wide instead of the spec'd 72") so their framing will have to be adjusted before they can be put in on Monday.
Alex, Carol and I went up on Saturday to do some clean up in the house and work on filling some of the holes in the driveway. Jason had obviously come up on Friday as the septic system looked pretty much complete. The access cover and the vent for the tank were evident and you could see the six trenches containing the drain tile had all been backfilled. One more item off the list!