(Dec 22) Solar Panels

Finally got started installing our solar panels. We've only got until Dec 31 to get them installed and inspected to get our rebate from the electric company. It's going to be a race!

We got 6 panels, 260 Watts each for a total potential of 1560 Watts. Our hope is that these will offset the majority of our electric use, at least while we're only here part time. We may have to add additional panels as we stay out here more. Time will tell.

Couldn't really afford to purchase a $1,500 rack system so I headed to Home Depot to start improvising. Came up with a pretty workable system for about $200. :)

First, we built a support system out of treated 4x4s. There was a little slope in the the location so one of the pole is longer than the others. I'll cut them all off trim to the same height after all the smoke has cleared. Then we mounted a support pole across the top. After we mount the panels, we'll work on the bottom bracing that will hold them up at the right angle for the season. Then comes the charge controller and batteries. Good thing I'm off work 'til after New Year! :)

Cemented in the support posts

Got all of the posts square and plumb 

Got the top rail mounted to the posts

View of the hardware on the back of the panels

1st set of panels mounted to the support rail

Front view of bank of panels

Ready to crank out some electricity. I can't wait!

Panels mounted

Inverters and cut-off installed

Enphase inverter. One for each panel. 

Moved the cut-off and installed warning labels on everything

Electric co-op came out and put in a meter for the solar panels to measure output

Final configuration after we moved the cut-off and installed the meter. Good to finally be producing some juice! :)

(Dec 22) Power Systems

The power company finally finished with their part in getting us hooked up to the grid and we got started on getting power run to the house. They were kind enough to run us a trench so we headed to Home Depot and got all of the conduit and supplies. We decided to also run a water line from the meter area to the house for future projects. Might as well since we had the trench there already.

Trench from meter base to house

Kim attaching some conduit 

Power conduit running from meter to the house

Meter with water and power run to the house

Driveway after the rain

The good news is that we finally have power in the house. The bad news is that our driveway is unusable for quite some time. The power company backfilled best as they could but after we got 4"-5" of rain over the past week, the trench has compacted and caved in down most of the drive. The dirt that's on top now is also too soft to drive on. I got stuck a couple of times in the go-kart. I can't imagine bringing a 5000 lb truck down the road. :(  Maybe it will continue to fill in with additional rain and then harden as it dries. Either way, I'm sure glad we did the power first instead of laying road base which would have been a total waste of time and money. Hopefully, we can look at road base this summer when it has had a chance to harden up.

Jump to Solar Panel entry.

Power System Photos

Trench from meter to house

Meter base and breaker box

Meter base

Breaker Box

Meter base and breaker box wired

Meter in place and wired

Drive after trenching for underground power lines

Building stand for solar panels

Building stand for solar panels

Building stand for solar panels

Mounting bracket on back of panel

1st bank mounted on top rail

1st bank of panels mounted

Starting on 2nd bank

All 6 solar panels mounted

Power specs on Solar Panels

(Dec 6) Power Pole & Meter Base Set

What a pleasant surprise when we headed to town on Saturday morning to find out that the local electric company had come by and set a power pole at the corner of our property. Fitting that I finished the wiring on the meter base and the cut-off box.

 

Cut-off and breaker box. We'll run power from this to the various buildings - the house, the storage shed and the workshop (once built).







The meter base. I color coordinated the wires from one box to the next. Absolutely don't want anything crossed or wired incorrectly.

I ended up going with 2/0 copper for this. It was a little more than the aluminum 4/0 and I'm suspecting it was easier to work with though this stuff is extremely stiff. I grounded with #4 bare copper. Not sure which was harder, driving the grounding rod 8' with an undersized hammer or digging 3 holes for our our poles and conduit in the mud. Either way, glad it's done. Now, we're waiting for the electric company to bury the power lines to the meter base. Next week, we trench our own line from the cut-off to the house, about 100'. Not looking forward to that either. It will be VERY nice to finally get to enjoy the quiet that we moved to the country for. :)

Still no sign of our Solar Panels. "They're on a truck" and should be hitting the Metroplex any day now. I've got 3 weeks to get them hooked up and verified to qualify for our $1,000 rebate from our electric company. Good thing I'm only working 8 more days this month. Really looking forward to spending some extended time off out here between now and the end of the year. I guess that's a funny statement considering that I work a lot harder out at the property than I do at my desk job.

As if to protest, our generator had a minor meltdown on Sunday. I've got 5 parts to order today to get her back up and running. Hopefully, we get to move her to backup duty pretty soon.

Saw lots of fresh deer tracks on the back part of the property when we took a walk yesterday. We took some corn and hopefully the raccoons will leave the deer some.

I checked with the local weather bureau. There's a weather station close to our property so we get pretty accurate readings. They listed 23+" (of our 63" this year) of rainfall for the combined months of September and October. I'm still fascinated (and in Awe) at the magnitude of this. I've gone through this exercise before but here it is again with current numbers:

Our 12 acres = roughly 500,000 square feet
2 feet of rainfall over 2 months x 500,000 sf  = 1,000,000 cubic feet of water on our property alone
1 cubic foot of water  =  7.48 gallons
1 gallon of water  =  8.34 pounds
1,000,000 cubic feet of water  = 7,480,000 gallons
7,480,000 gallons  =  62,383,200 lbs!

Hard to fathom that we had 62+ million pounds of water fall on just our 12 acres. Our neighborhood started as a 380 acre property. It got 236,000,000 gallons of water in that same period. The 100 square miles (10 miles x 10 miles) that's within a short drive of our place got almost 40 Billion gallons of water. It's no wonder that we've had almost 10 straight months of overflow at the lake just a mile from our house. It's something to see. Day after day, month after month, it just keep pouring over the dam. I guess this wipes out the "drought" of only 29" of rainfall we got last year.

(Nov 25) Happy Thanksgiving!

No pics today. Just a quick note to let you know we finally came to terms with the local electric company. They offered about 1/2 off on installation of new service so we jumped on it. We got our meter pole set this past weekend and got a cut-off/breaker box installed as well as the meter base. Driving the 8' grounding rod was the hardest part. My 2 lb hammer was barely up to the task and my arm took a beating for it. That will leave us with 92' of line to run to the house. Should be able to get that done with one day rental on a trencher. We also ordered solar panels this past week. We got (6) 260 watt panels. These will be grid tied to offset our electricity usage. All we should be left with is the service account fee. That should run about $240/yr. Not bad for having access to reliable and quiet power. I love our generator but I will be very excited to retire it to the roll of backup power. It cost $40-$50 per weekend to run and it was very loud. It will be so nice to sit in the quiet and enjoy the sounds of nature! It will also be nice to leave the fridge stocked and running as well as enough heat to keep the place from freezing through the winter. I absolutely can't wait 'til we get to move out here full time. One step at a time, right?

I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving holiday!    - Jay

(Oct 18) Furniture Additions

I must admit, the weather's been really nice the last couple of weeks and it's been hard to get motivated to do lots of physical work outside. So, we've been puttering around the house and getting some little stuff taken care of. I re-plumbed the pumps for the sink and the shower. We also hauled off a lot of the construction trash just to clean up a bit.

Last week, we spent Saturday at IKEA and got some small furniture needs taken care of. We got a TV stand ($59) as we had brought a TV out a couple of weeks ago. We also found some little ottomans (14" cubed at $14 ea) that were hollow with padded lids that can be used for storage. They'll have multiple uses as foot rests while we're kicking back, storage for little stuff in the living area and they'll provide seating for guests as they are padded on top. They also fit nicely under the TV stand when not in use. Another piece we got was a medicine cabinet for the bathroom. We mounted it to the side wall to cover the breaker box and set the hinges so that the mirror opens out into the room when you need it or need to access the breakers. We may end up repositioning it directly behind the toilet but we'll have to see.

We found a nice wooden bench that will be the storage for our composting toilet aggregate, currently peat moss. Both it and the medicine cabinet are made out of cedar and match the walls in the bathroom. I would love to find a larger matching piece to house the actual toilet bucket but it looks like we will end up making that one ourselves. The one we got for the peat moss is just not quite large enough to have a bucket and a diverter which we've decided is a must. Our last purchase was a small bench to use as a chair at our computer desk. We agreed that the full sized chair that we tried at the desk was just too deep and congested the flow into the kitchen area. We needed something that was sturdy and wide but shallow (I'm not getting any skinnier as I get older!) and would tuck up under the desk farther. The bench we got was actually very comfortable and will get even more so with the custom cushion Kim plans to sew for it. (She's sew talented! lol) Here are some pics of our additions. :)

Medicine cabinet mounted over breaker box in bathroom. 

Bench for computer area. Also found a nice trash can to match our metal mesh drawers. 

Sofa table that we will use as a TV Stand

55" Plasma TV on the stand. 

3 ottomans to be used as seating for guests

Pull them out as you need.

They leave lots of floor space when tucked away and look great with the other pieces in the room. :)

Just a note about the TV. DO NOT GET A PLASMA TV if you have any concerns about power consumption in your Tiny House! This was an extra that we had at our house in Arlington. It rarely got used so we thought that we would bring it out here and enjoy it. I figured I could run our small generator (1,400 watts) at night for just the TV and fridge (150 watts). NOT! When the TV kicks in, it drags the generator down so far that the voltage drops below the TV's tolerance and the TV shuts off. We only measured it at 600 watts but it all hits at once when you have a white screen or something bright on your show. In comparison, our 65" LED only draws about 125 watts. Running the larger generator is not a problem, it just eats more fuel. At 3,500 watts, it's plenty of horse power to run the house with the TV, fridge and microwave or vacuum (not both at the same time). Needless to say, at some point we'll be swapping the TVs and bringing the LED out here. For now, we'll just have to deal with the extra power draw. The other concern (not so much in the winter) is that the Plasma TV puts off a lot of heat. That's where most of the 600 watts goes. Just don't want to be running this during the summer. It's like having a space heater on low any time it's on.

I decided to redesign the little brick rocket stove we had built last month. It wasn't getting enough air flow to get the heat it needed to become self-feeding. I played with some layouts and this is what I came up without having to buy more bricks. It works very well and within minutes we had a 4"-6" flame shooting up out of the stack. As I said before, this will be a brute force stove. Just something to heat some water as it doesn't have any draft control and want to run full out all of the time.

Prepping to burn some scrap trim wood from when we were building the interior walls. 

Just a couple of pieces and we had a roaring fire to heat some water.

The other note about rocket stoves is that although they don't require large pieces of wood, they burn through their supply pretty quickly and have to be fed constantly to maintain a blast furnace effect. The large landscaping stone (18" square) that I used over the supply area actually stayed cool to the touch (due to the volume of air flowing in) through the entire burn. Easily can use this as a staging platform or food prep area. I did split one brick to cap off the pattern (middle row on open end) on both sides. I used a screw driver as a chisel and a hammer to lightly score the brick all the way around. Then, one tap directly on the brick with the hammer and it broke very nicely in two.

We are constantly finding new wildlife out here. Birds that are migrating through. New lizards and snakes. Reptiles like turtles. This week, we got a visit from what appears to be a Blue Garter Snake. Very pretty and non-venomous. They just run around eating bugs and small frogs. This one appeared to have recently finished a meal as you can still see the lump in his stomach. Happy hunting!

Glad to have the help in controlling the local wildlife populations. 

(Sep 26) Builders are people too! :)

Good Morning!  Jay is out of town visiting his Dad on his 82 birthday.  Wow!  I hope I'm still up and going at that age.  We also have a brother-in-law who is very ill with cancer.  Your thoughts and prayers are appreciated.

I rarely post anything on the blog.  It's really Jay's domain, but he encourages me to write.  Today I'm on a mission to support builders of Tiny Homes. 

I was browsing Facebook posts this morning as usual and felt compelled to speak out in support of builders of Tiny Houses.   The specific post (or rather the comments about the post) that got me going is the TinyHouseBlog sharing Tiny House Listings photo featuring Tiny House Chattanooga.com.   This is a beautiful home showing many great features and amenities available thru Tiny House Chattanooga.

I know, there have been many naysayers for years regarding the cost of Tiny Homes, but for some reason this morning I felt the need to speak up.  People who blurt out negative comments about the price of a Tiny Home leave me assuming they don't understand what it takes to build a home, or what it takes to financially support and run a business.

We are two years into the process of building our Tiny House ourselves, with no real experience in home building.  We knew how to use basic tools like tape measures, hammers, and saws etc. from previous home improvement projects.  The rest we learned by reading, researching, asking questions, listening to speakers, networking with other Tiny House Enthusiasts like the DFW Tiny House Enthusiasts and their DFW-Tiny-House-Enthusiasts Meetup Group then doing all of those things over again, and again, and again.  It's been a wonderful and educational journey that will continue for years to come.  I highly recommend it.

While we are certainly saving money vs. buying a home built by a professional, it is not an inexpensive project mainly because we chose to upgrade from a box with no doors, windows (we have nine large windows in 240 sq ft), a/c, and so on.  There are several things to keep in mind regarding cost.  The property taxes, utility, and insurance savings alone is a no brainer.  This will make it possible for us to retire earlier and enjoy life while we are still able to do so.  What would you save per year if you could reduce your property taxes, utility, and insurance expenses down to $100 or even $200 a month total?  Even if you have a mortgage on your Tiny House, you can save significant dollars on the other expenses to own and maintain it.  How would that affect your budget and what you could do with the extra money?  Seriously.  Calculate the savings and see if it doesn’t make sense. 

At first glance the price tag seems high, but there are so many ways to cut back on the cost.  Use standard windows, doors, counter tops, shower/no tub, and window a/c unit.  Use a standard refrigerator instead of propane, tie into the grid or use a generator for power and use a composting bucket.  FYI…I think Natures Head has one of the best units and value for the dollar out there if you are going to get a commercial composting toilet – and I don’t own one – yet (ssshhh - don't tell Jay).  Our Tiny has a bucket for now.  The list is long on how to reduce the cost to fit your budget including buying used, salvaged, or discounted appliances and materials.   

Builders are a business that must be profitable to pay their overhead and provide for their own families.  This is their livelihood.  I don't think it's right to criticize the price of the homes they build.  Want to use a builder?  Great, work with them on a budget and customize your home to fit.  You could even have them do the shell and you do the finish work.

A beautifully done CUSTOM home with all these wonderful upgrades and amenities will be expensive per square foot, just like any home would be.  At $83K and 240 sq ft this home costs about $346 per sq ft.   Take that same $346 and multiply it by the size of your current home.  Let’s say you live in a 1500 sq ft home x $346 and it was built as custom and high end as this house is.  Do you live in a 1500 sq ft $519,000 home?  Maybe, but probably not.  Clearly you would not have to have all the high-end bells and whistles this wonderful home has.

Living Tiny is not for everyone, for a lot of reasons.  It is, however, certainly worth looking into, or even trying.  If nothing else, you will meet a diverse, talented, and great group of people.

~Kim