We just put a new roof on the 30'x60' barn. One end is horse / goat stalls the other end will be the rabbitry. I presently have a 55 gallon drum about 8' off the floor for a gravity feed water system but I have to refill it every now and again. It pains me to cut a hole in the wall, so I was sitting here thinking of a way to get water inside from gutters to that water drum. So keep in mind our walls are 12' and that water drum is 8'

If I take the downspout and connect it to a PVC pipe thats about 10 or 11 feet high outside the barn and dig a hole under the wall, make a U bend in the pipe and bring the PVC up 8' on the inside. Water would fill the U shaped pipe and over flow inside into the 55 gallon drum. An overflow outside at 8' would allow the water to never get higher than my 55 gallon drum and would simply overflow onto the ground outside. If I put a valve or a 1/4" hole at the bottom of the U bend, I could drain the whole thing after a rain storm so it was dry and not getting algae growing inside. The ubend would take a couple minutes to fill up when rain storm started. Best of all, I don't have to cut the tin on the walls so if I change my mind later, no harm, no foul.

As a follow-up post to my explanation of the P.A.C.E. acronym, I will show how it is used in your prepping journey.

Let us take a system of survival, like power, and apply P.A.C.E to it.

Primary = the power grid. You currently use this and it can supply all your needs if everything goes as it has been.

Alternate = solar panels. These are a full replacement of the primary form of power (the grid) and with a few changes of lifestyle, can long-term provide for your needs.

Contingency = propane stove, lamps, heaters, etc. These will function while the solar panels are down for an unknown reason. It cannot work for more than a few days or weeks because you will quickly deplete the propane and it's expensive.

Emergency = your truck (or car) electrical plugins, or kerosene lamps/stove. You get the idea. This is not ideal and cannot be used but just for getting you back to the use of another form of power.


This was a short example of how PACE can be applied to your own situation.

Supply chain problems? What supply chain problems? Middle of South Carolina.

So SHTF and you head home from work. When you finally arrive, you find that your family isn't there. Good thing you and your family designated teh inside of the crawlspace door to write a message where they were going. Or the green transformer in the yard. Or the bottom side of the door mat. of course all you need in a single letter like "g" for grandma's house or "c" for cabin at the lake, etc....

Starting fresh in the barn with rabbits. We’ve run tyvek along the wall and around posts so the bucks won’t spray on the wood constantly. We’ll hang cages from overhead wires much like ceiling tile grid. Water will be gravity feed from a 55gallon drum in the corner that’s supplied from a gutter downspout.

Last week our LP "instant" gas hot water heater went out. Since everything in the house runs from solar electric or diesel, I was wanting rid of our last LP gas appliance anyway. So went to Lowes and got a heat pump hot water heater. Bear in mind that most water heaters use a 4400w element and that's nearly 40% of our inverter power. You can swap to 1500w heating elements which is what most people do. But this heat pump unit pulls 350watts. Yes... 1/3 of a kw. We got a hell of a deal on it because the min wage Lowes fork driver nailed it with the forks... we go it for half price. Kinda funny that "certified" min wage fork driver cost them $800.

When running your house off grid, you don't have the luxury of turning on everything at once. The grid is an infinite resource. But off grid most people can run an ordinary house from 12kw. But if you have appliances that pull lots of power you'll need something to keep all of them from coming on at the same time (load management) OR you need more efficient things. You don't have to do all of it at once, but you can make choices that lead you to a good place.

1)replace all light bulbs with LED. LED is 10x more efficient than incandescent and 2.5x more efficient than fluorescent.
2)replace your standard heat pump with a ducted mini-split. Our 5 ton heat pump went from running 6 minutes at a time pulling 3.5kw to running an hour at a time pulling 800w. And it doesn't pull 20kw to start the compressor which is hard on my inverters. In the end, the new unit is still 16 SEER like the old one but it is kinder and gentler to my inverters. Mitsubishi.
3a)replace the heating elements in your hot water heater with 1500w. Who cares if it takes 6 hours to get a tank of hot water as long as it's ready by bed time?? My wife and I are on different cycles.. she takes a shower in the morning and Im so dirty from work I take one in the evening.
3b)replace your hot water heater with a heat pump unit that draws 350w.

A neighbor just got "first light" with his SMA sunny islands this weekend. He made two homemade LFP (lithium) batteries for a total of 30kwh of power and 12kw of inverters. It's common to put a "precharge" resistor on the batteries to limit the inrush current when charging capacitors in the inverters. He used too high a value which limited the current too much and when turning on both inverters at the same time, the couldn't boot. We ended up powering them up one at a time and they booted fine. So he's replacing the resistors with 10ohm.

In the coming weeks he'll be building the racking up the hill from his house to mount the solar panels and be free of the grid.

Interesting note... although the sunny island inverter can be configured to sell power to the grid, he's not doing that. He will program it as "grid as a generator". If his batteries get down to 20% in the early hours of the morning, his inverter will connect to the grid and charge to 40% and disconnect. Then his solar will top off the batteries after the sun comes up.

In Georgia USA, the power company has a "super off peak" plan that charges 1.3c/kwh (normal is 12-15c/kwh). The gimmick is you can only get that rate from midnight to 6am. With a battery system like my friend and "grid as a generator" you can cut your power bill by 10 times.

In my system I have a diesel 5kw genset as a backup. I can get by with only 5kw generator because when I do draw more power than that it comes from the batteries. All I need to do is average out the power usage over a longer time. A 5kw generator can make 125kwh a day and we've never used that much power.

One more note today.... It is my belief that the problems we are seeing with supply chain are 100% created on purpose either for population reduction or more control. Folks the time is yesterday to get your ducks in a row. I have been preaching to my IRL friends about at least having a way to run a fridge and many just ignore me. One woke up a month or three ago and was shocked to find that what i'd been telling him to get was backordered. He evntually got what he needs, but he's now relaying to me that his preaching to his brother is falling on deaf ears... the same deaf ears he had not 6 months ago.

You've heard the saying "Act now supplies are limited". Nothing is more true now. In addition, the same things you can buy today will absolutely cost more in the future. Buy now while its cheap. If you think buying a spare well pump is expensive today, wait til they either don't have one on the shelf or the price has doubled.

Everyone can understand the idea that the stock market goes up and down. While it sucks when it goes down it recovers. But few understand what happens when the nation's currency fails. Most have an upside down view of money... when the federal reserve was started gold was $20/oz. Now it's $1800/oz. Did gold get more expesive? Nope.... the fed sucked the value out of our dollars. It's not that gold is more expensive, it's that our dollars are worth less to the point they are about to be worthless. Without getting into politics too much, the Fed screwed us between 1914 and 1933 and we've used our dollar diplomacy since WW2 to go around the world stucking money out of other places in order to pay our debt to the fed. Well, the game is up. We sucked money out of Europe by "helping" them rebuild under the Marshall plan, we have sucked money out of countries like Venezuela in the 1960s (you didn't think Chavez didn't like us because we parted our hair on the wrong side did ya??). Well our politicians have staved off the nasty painful end for as long as they can. It's coming. It's gunna hit us like a ton of bricks. Russia has stopped using dollars and is demanding Ruples. China soon to follow suit. Once no one wants to trade in dollars the value will plummet. I'm telling you its coming. I'm telling you our Red and Blue teams know it can't be fixed so they posture and talk smack talk but pass the spending bill anyway... each time we spend money we don't have we hasten the demise of our currency.

So long story short... in the coming 2-3 years, maybe as early as this winter things will get expensive and scarce. Plan accordingly. Buy hard goods. Got something that's gunna fail in the next year, replace it proactively today.

Solar Dehydrator

Solar shingles... I just saw this video and have not researched.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P6C5FjVK0A

I'm going to backpedal on these..... they have a coefficent of power loss per degree of temperature rise that is higher than conventional cells -0.39% vs -0.30% . So they'll make less power in the heat of the roof AND because they are flat on the roof, no airflow behind them to cool them.... Each module is 5" wide and 5' long... makes 45watts per shingle.

Just asking…. Does anyone know where I can find detailed daily rainfall from the weather service? They estimate rainfall based on Doppler radar and I know the data exists I just don’t know where to find it.

Found the answer... https://mesowest.utah.edu/cgi-bin/droman/download_api2.cgi?stn=KMMT

So I'm now with electric heatpump hot water. Replaced 4400w elements with 1500w today so the inverters has less load on them but for a longer time. Power usage is 300w on heat pump, 1500 on resistive element, 1800 running both. Figured out today that the heatpump water tank has the evaporator coil around the outisde of the bottom of the tank, if watch out if your forklift driver dents it down low.

So where we are from a year ago is my two biggest energy draws... hot water was instant gas a year ago, would have been 4400 watts but now 300w. My heat/HVAC was 5 ton heatpump that drew 3.5kw to 5kw (stage 1 and stage 2)... now drawing 800 watts.

So with my two biggest loads running my inverters would have been sourcing 9kw worst case but now 1100watts. This is exactly how you run a house off less inverters.

We just built a metal shop... 30x56 with 17' ceiling.... this guy made a very similar building and made exactly the same mistakes and solutions as we did. So just watch his video... good info. https://youtu.be/iVfymMd4EzM

The plan to collect water for the critters is an elevated 55 gallon drum inside our barn. I'm going to 3d print this down spout adapter with a 3/4" hose thread on it. I'll have the garden hose run to a first flush diverter and when that is full water will continue it journey to the rabbit 55gall drum. When the drum is full, water will back up in the hose all the way to the gutter downspout and simply overflow into the gutter. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1495583

A little battery info for ya... you can charge a lead acid battery to ~13.8v and if you leave it there it will cook it. So a good three stage charger will charge the battery to 13.8 and upon completion will lower the float voltage to match the "resting" voltage of the battery 13.2v. These rules do not apply to lithium batteries. For them you charge to their full voltage and either stop or hold that same voltage.

My sunny island inverters have many voltage settings for charge stages and I had to tinker with the absorption voltage vs float voltage quite a bit. You see when it flipped to float mode and the inverter saw my battery above the float setting, it would use that excess energy to sell power back to the grid. The trick was to tweak that float voltage to exactly match the battery's behavior so the inverter didn't run it down if the float voltage was set too low. But if float was set too high, it would cook my battery... so it took some testing.

Once I got lithium batteries I simply set all the voltages for all the charging stages to the same thing. I'm running lithium batteries but my inverter is set to lead acid. You see, lithium batteries expects communications from a BMS and I don't have that. No comms means the inverter shuts down in lithium mode. So a neighbor who also has sunny islands is working on a small controller to adjust the permitted charging current out of the inverter via serial port. In this way, if the small processor dies, my inverters will keep running because they are in lead acid mode. This also allows us to use BMS's that don't speak the SMA sunny island protocol.

I was very put off / intimidated by lithium batteries at first because they used special chargers.... meh.... these chargers simply don't allow them to go too high in voltage. If you over charge LFP cells they swell and leak, if you over charge Lithium Cobalt cells they catch fire. Just don't over charge. All it takes is a voltage regulated charger.

One guy I know didn't use a charge controller at all... he just hooked a solar panel that makes 40v to his 24v lithium battery (six 4.2v cells in series). He uses a voltage sensor to turn off a relay when the batteries get to 25.2v. So simple. Please don't do it this way, but I hope you see how simple charging them is. The catch is you can't just shut off charging when the battery gets to 25.2v, you have to monitor each cell and shut off charging when any cell gets to 4.2v (lithium cobalt). This is what BMS systems do.

How to put a bulkhead connector in a rain barrel. Drill hole in bottom. Use stiff wire to connect the top and bottom holes. Drop bulkhead connector down wire as a guide. Screw retaining nut on.