These shingles were not covered by panels.

These shingles were covered by panels. Frankly they look worse than the ones exposed to sun light.

I ordered a new SMA sunny boy inverter for my barn last week and connected it to 13 275w panels today. It made power from the barn. So with that, we decided to remove the last of the panels from the house roof. Tomorrow I’ll finish installing 275w panels on the barn.

Last week I put a transfer switch in the basement that will allow me to select if the barn system is direct export to the grid or in winter or extremely cloudy days I can move that barn inverter to the house system.

It. Would. Work.

Real men of genius

Based
#EndTheFed

any government

Just my thought for the day.... I have a friend from Germany's son visiting this week and took him to the air force museum in Dayton Ohio. It should have been a very patriotic thing... rah rah rah 'Mericuh! In the past couple of years I've been able to educate myself about things like "all wars are banker wars" and the real causes of ww2. Lets just say it contradicts what I was taught in high school history. Regardless of which side we should have fought on in ww2, we can say that it was at least a fair fight. A bunch of countries with similar technical prowess fought each other.

That said, as I moved through the museum to the Korea/Vietnam building, I became quite upset. The asian people we waged war on were primitive. It was extremely lop sided. But never fear, MacNamara made sure the rules of engagement meant we could never win. The government just kept sending checks to Lockheed and fighting age men to the meat grinder. The US lost 58,220 men... but how many Vietnamese were killed? And for WHAT? to save them from communism? Hell that might have been a step up for them. I've got to do some digging to find out what role the banks played in the outcome of both wars.... South Korea certainly got a booming economy, but did they get a central bank to go along with it? I gotta research.

Afghanistan was another lop sided fight. and Iraq. My takeaway from Vietnam, AF and Iraq is that it's one thing to occupy a country and march your tanks to the capital. It is quite another to hold that country. Desperate people resort to guerrilla warfare. Rules of Engagement and the Geneva Convention are for the remote controllers of a war. When you are fighting for your family, survival and freedom, the gloves are off. Here in the USA we have more guns that people. If it should come to blows, take inspiration from the underdogs that were able to antagonize a technically superior force into retreat. It will not come without loss of life however.

Borrowed a solar power meter from another off gridder today. Connected to a few of my 275w 8 year old panels and got 230-240w. Washed off one of the panels and got a lot of just black dirt on a rag. Power went to 248w. This means that my 40 panels on the barn don’t make 11kw, they will make 9.9kw. But it’s ok because I’m pairing them with a 6kw inverter anyway.



Checked against some other panels I had laying around. 330w panel made 320. 370w panel made 360.

Also cool to see… the older panels are full wafer and blocking one wafer kills the panel by half. On the newer half cell panels blocking one wafer knocks production down 1/3. Much better for partial shade applications.

https://a.co/d/hdGtKUA

Germany is suggesting citizens stock up on sausage and cheese

They are expecting a wurst käse scenario.

Fire tonight.

Daily Reminder that the 16th Amendment is constitutionally Illegal

Whelp…. I’m awake because a looter came down the driveway.

The panels on the barn roof are active. Just buttoned them up. There's 40 panels on the roof for ascetics but only 39 are active (3x 13 panels). It's a total of 11kw of panels connected to a 6kw inverter. These panels were displaced from my house roof and no one on facebook wanted them, so I'm putting them to good use. So this is an additional 13700kwh a year. At the price of electric here, that's $154/month of electric.

It's very cloudy today, but the sun popped out for a hot minute and I was making just over 22kw from the barn and ground mount panels.

When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. Many people use what they know is available instead of something that might be a smidge better. Example: my ground mount array uses unistrut. It's $3.40 a foot in 10' sticks. I can get iron ridge rails for $3.42 a foot in a 14' length. Why is iron ridge sold in such an odd length? because panels are 40inches wide and 4 of them side by side are nearly 14'. So instantly you don't need to splice unistrut. Also the iron ridge connectors are cheaper than strut nuts.

I'm not going to run thru all the math here, but just in rough terms, I saved 2c a foot on strut and spent literally a couple hundred more on clamps and grounding lugs.

https://base.ironridge.com/distributors . I found a distributor within 1 hour of my house and drove over with the trailer to get all the parts.