Carefully handed the panels down the ladder, then unbolted the racks. One came down carefully, the other…did the other thing. It’s likely firewood but the first one is still fairly stiff. To my surprise, painted something besides bright red and with some retrofitted racks, this one might actually be suitable for my yard. Those four panels that are still on the tower will (almost) certainly go up in my yard on one sort of rack or the other. I’ve no objection to keeping it simple.
The four good panels we brought down from the powershed roof went right back up on the new rack, along with their six brand-new brothers. There’s a juniper just to the south of that rack. I think it’s going to cast a winter shadow and S thinks it won’t. Doesn’t matter which of us is right; that juniper is nobody’s friend and I’m the one with the chainsaw.
2″ conduit is in the trench between the new rack and the powershed, and the trench is mostly filled in.
Right now Landlady’s place has no power at all, but we’ll hit it again Thursday morning when S comes back from the city. We’ll take down the tower racking and pull a whole bunch of wire, then I’ll probably leave him to his alchemy. At the end of it, Landlady will have a whole new power generation system except for batteries.
Meanwhile I’m going to the big town about 50 miles away to refill my glaucoma meds, and while there I’ll bring back Sonotube and clamps to make the foundation for my new rack. It’s been a pretty lazy summer so far – to tell the truth I haven’t had a lot of energy or ambition. But a major electrical improvement before winter would not be a bad thing to do. My little free sample of an electrical system gets me through, but last winter I did a lot of fiddling around its limitations. My panels are no longer brand new – they still work fine, but they’re no longer awesome and just barely got me through last winter’s weather near the solstice. More than doubling my power generation will help me with short, cloudy days. So both Landlady and I are getting big upgrades.
This project is very interesting Joel. Landlady’s new rack system is elegant in it’s simplicity. It will be interesting to see the results there. And I imagine all of us will be especially interested to see what happens at the Lair.